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The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism
Ever since its publication in 1651, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan has unsettled and challenged how we understand the world. Condemned and vilified by each new generation, Hobbes' cold political vision continues to see through any number of political and ethical vanities.
In his wonderfully stimulating book The New Leviathans , John Gray allows us to understand the world of the 2020s with all its contradictions, moral horrors and disappointments through a new reading of Hobbes' classic work. The collapse of the USSR ushered in an era of near-apoplectic triumphalism in the a genuine belief that a rational, liberal, well-managed future now awaited humankind and that tyranny, nationalism and unreason lay in the past. Since then, so many terrible events have occurred and so many poisonous ideas flourished, and yet still our liberal certainties treat them as aberrations which will somehow dissolve away. Hobbes would not be so confident.
Filled with fascinating and challenging perceptions, The New Leviathans is a powerful meditation on historical and current folly. As a species we always seem to be struggling to face the reality of base and delusive human instincts. Might a more self-aware, realistic and disabused ethics help us all?
In his wonderfully stimulating book The New Leviathans , John Gray allows us to understand the world of the 2020s with all its contradictions, moral horrors and disappointments through a new reading of Hobbes' classic work. The collapse of the USSR ushered in an era of near-apoplectic triumphalism in the a genuine belief that a rational, liberal, well-managed future now awaited humankind and that tyranny, nationalism and unreason lay in the past. Since then, so many terrible events have occurred and so many poisonous ideas flourished, and yet still our liberal certainties treat them as aberrations which will somehow dissolve away. Hobbes would not be so confident.
Filled with fascinating and challenging perceptions, The New Leviathans is a powerful meditation on historical and current folly. As a species we always seem to be struggling to face the reality of base and delusive human instincts. Might a more self-aware, realistic and disabused ethics help us all?
178 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 7, 2023
239 people are currently reading
1797 people want to read
About the author
John Gray
51 books906 followersJohn Nicholas Gray is a English political philosopher with interests in analytic philosophy and the history of ideas. He retired in 2008 as School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Gray contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman, where he is the lead book reviewer.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 135 reviews
December 29, 2023
There should be an edict among publishers: The older and more esteemed an author, the greater the scrutiny and questioning that should be applied before allowing publication.
This is a rambling, contradictory and pointless book. Gray does not know who he is arguing with, or care what they stand for, but he Does.Not.Like.IT. Instead of argument or analysis, you have an aging European writer memorializing earlier European writers as a way of decrying the present.
The closest the book comes to an argument is that having set up the straw man that liberalism had a totalizing global influence in 1989, Gray delights in highlighting the presence of alternate actors (mainly Russia and China) as somehow obvious proof that all liberalism has failed. Along the way he takes many a sideswipe at woke modern-day liberals, though he never pauses to examine anything they say.
Any editor undaunted by the famous name would have surely questioned the whiplash transitions that occur in Gray's 'argument'. In one case, he spends 2 pages describing the torture of a black US WW2 veteran in the 1950s, and then concludes by declaring modern liberals are evidence of racism rather than its cure. At another point he describes medieval Tibetan monks who could tolerate divergent views within their midst, and uses that to decry the inhumanity of modern western university campuses where no dissent is allowed (We here must take the word of the good Professor from Oxford with visiting positions at Yale and Harvard as evidence alone).
What really stands out however is just how tired the attack is. The modern state is too big! atheists are trying to create their own religion! Christianity is the foundation of all modern ideas! The west's decadent decline is right around the corner! Yawn.
We've heard it all a thousand times before on the op-ed pages, and sprinkling in some large
paragraphs of Hobbes amongst this pamplet of a book does not make it any more coherent. Indeed, Gray amusingly offers a quote of a piece he wrote in 1989 where he claimed the US was on the verge of collapse among economic decline and an uncontrollable crime wave. That the reverse was evidently true in the 1990s is not something he has evidently recognised, nor offset his evident glee in his pessimistic predictions of collapse in 2023.
Having seen others describe and praise this book I had genuinely looked forward to it. But The New Leviathans is a superficial and lazy book. Go find a young writer to engage with. At least then you'll know they've been edited properly.
This is a rambling, contradictory and pointless book. Gray does not know who he is arguing with, or care what they stand for, but he Does.Not.Like.IT. Instead of argument or analysis, you have an aging European writer memorializing earlier European writers as a way of decrying the present.
The closest the book comes to an argument is that having set up the straw man that liberalism had a totalizing global influence in 1989, Gray delights in highlighting the presence of alternate actors (mainly Russia and China) as somehow obvious proof that all liberalism has failed. Along the way he takes many a sideswipe at woke modern-day liberals, though he never pauses to examine anything they say.
Any editor undaunted by the famous name would have surely questioned the whiplash transitions that occur in Gray's 'argument'. In one case, he spends 2 pages describing the torture of a black US WW2 veteran in the 1950s, and then concludes by declaring modern liberals are evidence of racism rather than its cure. At another point he describes medieval Tibetan monks who could tolerate divergent views within their midst, and uses that to decry the inhumanity of modern western university campuses where no dissent is allowed (We here must take the word of the good Professor from Oxford with visiting positions at Yale and Harvard as evidence alone).
What really stands out however is just how tired the attack is. The modern state is too big! atheists are trying to create their own religion! Christianity is the foundation of all modern ideas! The west's decadent decline is right around the corner! Yawn.
We've heard it all a thousand times before on the op-ed pages, and sprinkling in some large
paragraphs of Hobbes amongst this pamplet of a book does not make it any more coherent. Indeed, Gray amusingly offers a quote of a piece he wrote in 1989 where he claimed the US was on the verge of collapse among economic decline and an uncontrollable crime wave. That the reverse was evidently true in the 1990s is not something he has evidently recognised, nor offset his evident glee in his pessimistic predictions of collapse in 2023.
Having seen others describe and praise this book I had genuinely looked forward to it. But The New Leviathans is a superficial and lazy book. Go find a young writer to engage with. At least then you'll know they've been edited properly.
November 22, 2023
This was my first introduction to John Gray and not a flattering one at that.
Part history lesson, part realist victory lap, and part milquetoast prognostication; the text comes off less as a singular coherent work but instead as a sprawling collection of essays loosely bound to the topic of "the state". Mr. Gray fails to advance any notion of liberal States becoming illiberal new leviathans and instead focuses on the failures and lives of specific persons from the early soviet union.
A lazy text to boot, many sections are nothing but load-bearing block quotes with nothing but a drive-by commentary offered from Mr. Gray.
Being able to check this book out from my local library salvaged a star, as it was only my time wasted and not also my money.
Part history lesson, part realist victory lap, and part milquetoast prognostication; the text comes off less as a singular coherent work but instead as a sprawling collection of essays loosely bound to the topic of "the state". Mr. Gray fails to advance any notion of liberal States becoming illiberal new leviathans and instead focuses on the failures and lives of specific persons from the early soviet union.
A lazy text to boot, many sections are nothing but load-bearing block quotes with nothing but a drive-by commentary offered from Mr. Gray.
Being able to check this book out from my local library salvaged a star, as it was only my time wasted and not also my money.
December 28, 2023
As an undergraduate interested in political theory, I was, of course, introduced to Thomas Hobbes, the man best known for his observation that life in a state of anarchy is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” And thus I came to think of Hobbes as a dour downer, a cynical pessimist, and not so interesting.
I was wrong.
Of course, Hobbes is no Pollyanna, and his take on the world is in many ways simplistic (his very reductionist materialism), yet he stands at the root of modern politics, on par with—perhaps even more important than—Machiavelli. For good or ill (and, like most thinkers, a mixture of both), Hobbes is a thinker with whom we must reckon. R.G. Collingwood entitled his great 1942 treatise The New Leviathan: Man, Society, Civilization & Barbarism in recognition of the influence of Hobbes’s masterwork. Like Hobbes, Collingwood built his politics from the ground up; but unlike Hobbes, Collingwood emphasized the constructive possibilities of politics as well as its downsides. William Ophuls, in his Requiem for Modern Politics, places Hobbes at the center of the modern political project even as Ophuls critiques that project and heralds the coming of a new political order. And although I haven’t read them, I know that Michael Oakshott and Leo Strauss have written about the importance of Hobbes. And now, John Gray.
For those of you not familiar with Gray, he’s a British political thinker and former academic, who, among other traits, is critical of liberalism and utopianism. In this brief but instructive work, organized in chapters and sections by quotes from Hobbes’s Leviathan, Gray argues that the era of liberalism has run its course and that we can expect—indeed, are experiencing—new leviathans that will come to dominate the political landscape. Not that any of this is especially new: the 20th century experienced the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, Communist China, and a variety of other no less horrible regimes. And even the liberal democracies with their civil liberties have mammoth bureaucracies and militaries that intimidate and threaten individuals and communities that don’t conform to the desire of those in control of the government.
Gray retired from academia in 2008 to devote all his energies to writing. His last post was at LSE was as School Professor of European Thought, and his background shows in this book. The bones of the book are taken from Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil (1651) , but the flesh of Gray’s argument comes from the European (and to some extent) American intellectual traditions of the last couple of centuries. After introducing Hobbes and his work, Gray looks at the contemporary world to see examples of new leviathans, such as Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China. Gray examines these regimes and other similar regimes with sketch-work economy; he outlines the characteristics of these regimes from the perspectives of their particular histories and within the greater historical forces and ideas that gave rise to their existence.
Indeed, much of Gray’s book discusses thinkers of the last couple of centuries who considered the upheavals of life in this period. Many of the names are familiar, such as Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Freud, Carl Schmitt, Berdayev, Arthur Koestler, John Stuart Mill, Tocqueville, Samuel Beckett, and so on. Others, like Sabina Spielrein and some of the Russians he discusses, are new to me. All of these heavy hitters are brought into Gray’s purview by their critiques—sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit—of the dominant liberal tradition of modernity. And, to my surprise, Gray makes a compelling argument that Hobbes, in addition to being the first (or among the first) of the social contract theorists, was perhaps the first liberal. To wit, Hobbes argued that humankind’s propensity toward conflict in general and war in particular would lead to the creation of a state (Leviathan). By way of rationality, the Leviathan would be created (by the social contract) to wield power to ensure domestic tranquility and provide for the common defense. Gray and those whose work he discusses and draws upon doubt the rationality of humankind and see the limits of liberal and rational projects for the improvement of humankind through better government.
I should note that Gray is especially critical of some American political thinkers, in particular, John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Francis Fukuyama. But, to give Gray credit, at least he’s read Fukuyama’s book (The End of History and the Last Man). He acknowledges that Fukuyama didn’t argue that history (change)—and thus conflict— would end with liberal, democratic capitalism and that we’d all live in peace and harmony ever after. Some sloppy readers came to this conclusion, but not Gray, whose criticism is more carefully constructed.
I find Gray’s arguments and perspective intriguing because of the split within me: in my heart, I want to be a liberal, an optimist, one promoting change for the better by deploying persuasive arguments based on reason and evidence; but my head—from book learning and seven decades of life that includes a career in law and involvement in and observation of politics—makes me skeptical about the success of the liberal project. At best, I now see liberalism as a Promethean project; one never achieves abiding success, and most of our time in the project is spent near the base of the mountain. I don’t mind the idea of a heroic project, but neither do I want to engage in a futile project.
I was wrong.
Of course, Hobbes is no Pollyanna, and his take on the world is in many ways simplistic (his very reductionist materialism), yet he stands at the root of modern politics, on par with—perhaps even more important than—Machiavelli. For good or ill (and, like most thinkers, a mixture of both), Hobbes is a thinker with whom we must reckon. R.G. Collingwood entitled his great 1942 treatise The New Leviathan: Man, Society, Civilization & Barbarism in recognition of the influence of Hobbes’s masterwork. Like Hobbes, Collingwood built his politics from the ground up; but unlike Hobbes, Collingwood emphasized the constructive possibilities of politics as well as its downsides. William Ophuls, in his Requiem for Modern Politics, places Hobbes at the center of the modern political project even as Ophuls critiques that project and heralds the coming of a new political order. And although I haven’t read them, I know that Michael Oakshott and Leo Strauss have written about the importance of Hobbes. And now, John Gray.
For those of you not familiar with Gray, he’s a British political thinker and former academic, who, among other traits, is critical of liberalism and utopianism. In this brief but instructive work, organized in chapters and sections by quotes from Hobbes’s Leviathan, Gray argues that the era of liberalism has run its course and that we can expect—indeed, are experiencing—new leviathans that will come to dominate the political landscape. Not that any of this is especially new: the 20th century experienced the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, Communist China, and a variety of other no less horrible regimes. And even the liberal democracies with their civil liberties have mammoth bureaucracies and militaries that intimidate and threaten individuals and communities that don’t conform to the desire of those in control of the government.
Gray retired from academia in 2008 to devote all his energies to writing. His last post was at LSE was as School Professor of European Thought, and his background shows in this book. The bones of the book are taken from Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil (1651) , but the flesh of Gray’s argument comes from the European (and to some extent) American intellectual traditions of the last couple of centuries. After introducing Hobbes and his work, Gray looks at the contemporary world to see examples of new leviathans, such as Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China. Gray examines these regimes and other similar regimes with sketch-work economy; he outlines the characteristics of these regimes from the perspectives of their particular histories and within the greater historical forces and ideas that gave rise to their existence.
Indeed, much of Gray’s book discusses thinkers of the last couple of centuries who considered the upheavals of life in this period. Many of the names are familiar, such as Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Freud, Carl Schmitt, Berdayev, Arthur Koestler, John Stuart Mill, Tocqueville, Samuel Beckett, and so on. Others, like Sabina Spielrein and some of the Russians he discusses, are new to me. All of these heavy hitters are brought into Gray’s purview by their critiques—sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit—of the dominant liberal tradition of modernity. And, to my surprise, Gray makes a compelling argument that Hobbes, in addition to being the first (or among the first) of the social contract theorists, was perhaps the first liberal. To wit, Hobbes argued that humankind’s propensity toward conflict in general and war in particular would lead to the creation of a state (Leviathan). By way of rationality, the Leviathan would be created (by the social contract) to wield power to ensure domestic tranquility and provide for the common defense. Gray and those whose work he discusses and draws upon doubt the rationality of humankind and see the limits of liberal and rational projects for the improvement of humankind through better government.
I should note that Gray is especially critical of some American political thinkers, in particular, John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Francis Fukuyama. But, to give Gray credit, at least he’s read Fukuyama’s book (The End of History and the Last Man). He acknowledges that Fukuyama didn’t argue that history (change)—and thus conflict— would end with liberal, democratic capitalism and that we’d all live in peace and harmony ever after. Some sloppy readers came to this conclusion, but not Gray, whose criticism is more carefully constructed.
I find Gray’s arguments and perspective intriguing because of the split within me: in my heart, I want to be a liberal, an optimist, one promoting change for the better by deploying persuasive arguments based on reason and evidence; but my head—from book learning and seven decades of life that includes a career in law and involvement in and observation of politics—makes me skeptical about the success of the liberal project. At best, I now see liberalism as a Promethean project; one never achieves abiding success, and most of our time in the project is spent near the base of the mountain. I don’t mind the idea of a heroic project, but neither do I want to engage in a futile project.
November 23, 2023
This was quite a frustrating book, mainly because Gray has some interesting ideas about utopia and the dangers of thinking that history has an end point and that humans are perfectible. The trouble is that he spends half the book attacking a 'liberalism' that I'm not sure exists. He says that "today's liberals dream of unfettered human autonomy." Do they? Leaving aside that 'liberal' is a word that means different things in different contexts anyway. And he really lets himself down when he starts boring on about 'woke'.
September 23, 2023
Very good as always, though definitely not Gray's best. It may give you much more if you are less familiar with his other work though, and I could see it as a good entrance point.
I went into detail here:
https://geotrickster.com/2023/09/23/r...
I went into detail here:
https://geotrickster.com/2023/09/23/r...
June 11, 2024
Very, very timely read "The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism" by former LSE professor and bestselling author (and the Guardian and New Statesman contributor John Gray (Penguin, 2023).
I am not sure what exactly this is and how it came onto my Kindle (podcast recommendation order from a cold sleepless night a few months ago ❄️ ?) but it was an interesting, slightly strange, read. I guess it's a kind of a very heartfelt rant re-the current liberal shit show covered in political philosophy. Just to my liking:
"Liberals never tire of denouncing the West as the most destructive force in history – racist, imperialist and sexist. Education must be ‘de-colonized’ in order to expose the West’s unique crimes. Western civilization has been a curse for humankind. Yet these same liberals insist that Western values – human rights, personal autonomy and the like – must be projected to the last corners of the Earth" 😂
It's a very eclectic mix of philosophical reflections, I am not sure I fully got the core argument other than the end of the cold war wasn't the end of history (duh) but the "short post-Cold War era of globalization, a ‘rules-based’ global liberal order seemed to be in place, which some believed would endure indefinitely. This supposed liberal order is now history. If there was ever such a system, it exists no longer. Its passing has exposed the realities it concealed."
Leviathans are back:
"Bolshevik Revolutionaries and early twenty-first-century Western hyper-liberals have much in common. In each case, a swollen lumpen-intelligentsia has become a powerful political force. Both hold to the faith that human beings possess powers that used to be ascribed to the Deity. Both – Russian radicals knowingly, twenty-first-century hyper-liberals unthinkingly – are engaged in a project of God-building"
Re China: Instead of China becoming more like the west, the west has become more like China. In America, wealth buys power, while in China power creates and destroys wealth". In china, market forces serve the objectives of the government, while western states have ceded power to corporations that obey imperatives to profit - both variants of state capitalism, but the relations between capital and the state are reversed.
The pandemic, the Ukraine war and the rise of Brics have cast into doubt the inevitability of Western-led globalisation. Meanwhile, in Western heartlands, ruling classes increasingly resort to illiberal and censorious means to uphold social consensus; the liberals themselves are no longer all that liberal. Where democracy continues to function, the state intervenes in society to an extent unknown since the Second World War.
Bottomline (and this is the very painful lesson we are about to learn from Ukraine):
Liberals need to learn to live with a world dominated by multiple regional governmental orders with ungoverned or less-governed formations taking up the in-between spaces. It's bleak for sure but if it means fewer catastrophic wars for democracy, we should accept it.
We must. But I am afraid, we'll rather tear down the whole world, before accepting this.
I am not sure what exactly this is and how it came onto my Kindle (podcast recommendation order from a cold sleepless night a few months ago ❄️ ?) but it was an interesting, slightly strange, read. I guess it's a kind of a very heartfelt rant re-the current liberal shit show covered in political philosophy. Just to my liking:
"Liberals never tire of denouncing the West as the most destructive force in history – racist, imperialist and sexist. Education must be ‘de-colonized’ in order to expose the West’s unique crimes. Western civilization has been a curse for humankind. Yet these same liberals insist that Western values – human rights, personal autonomy and the like – must be projected to the last corners of the Earth" 😂
It's a very eclectic mix of philosophical reflections, I am not sure I fully got the core argument other than the end of the cold war wasn't the end of history (duh) but the "short post-Cold War era of globalization, a ‘rules-based’ global liberal order seemed to be in place, which some believed would endure indefinitely. This supposed liberal order is now history. If there was ever such a system, it exists no longer. Its passing has exposed the realities it concealed."
Leviathans are back:
"Bolshevik Revolutionaries and early twenty-first-century Western hyper-liberals have much in common. In each case, a swollen lumpen-intelligentsia has become a powerful political force. Both hold to the faith that human beings possess powers that used to be ascribed to the Deity. Both – Russian radicals knowingly, twenty-first-century hyper-liberals unthinkingly – are engaged in a project of God-building"
Re China: Instead of China becoming more like the west, the west has become more like China. In America, wealth buys power, while in China power creates and destroys wealth". In china, market forces serve the objectives of the government, while western states have ceded power to corporations that obey imperatives to profit - both variants of state capitalism, but the relations between capital and the state are reversed.
The pandemic, the Ukraine war and the rise of Brics have cast into doubt the inevitability of Western-led globalisation. Meanwhile, in Western heartlands, ruling classes increasingly resort to illiberal and censorious means to uphold social consensus; the liberals themselves are no longer all that liberal. Where democracy continues to function, the state intervenes in society to an extent unknown since the Second World War.
Bottomline (and this is the very painful lesson we are about to learn from Ukraine):
Liberals need to learn to live with a world dominated by multiple regional governmental orders with ungoverned or less-governed formations taking up the in-between spaces. It's bleak for sure but if it means fewer catastrophic wars for democracy, we should accept it.
We must. But I am afraid, we'll rather tear down the whole world, before accepting this.
January 7, 2024
Leest als een wedstrijdje verplassen "wie kent de meeste obscure Russische schrijvers" zonder een goed punt ermee te maken
December 2, 2023
If Leviathan is a human artifice, politics is a necessary art. The task of the age is not to bind the new Leviathans, as was attempted in the late liberal era, but to bring them closer to what Hobbes believed Leviathan could be - a vessel of peaceful co-existence. In recognizing that peace can be achieved in many kinds of regime, Hobbes was a truer liberal than those that came after him. The belief that a single form of rule is best for everyone is itself a kind of tyranny.
- John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism
At some point in his career, John Gray stopped writing dark, contrarian, pessimistic deconstructions of liberal humanism and just started scribbling out disjointed book reports of all the other, more interesting, writers he's flicked through since his last publication. It has now reached the point where he includes his own previous work in these directionless surveys, a move that might have been disarmingly cheeky if it wasn't delivered with such pious smugness.
"I told you Liberalism was going to collapse! I told you I told you I told you!"
It's okay, Grandpa. The Trans Catgirl Red Army isn't real. It can't hurt you.
This book does not have an argument. It is far too disjointed for that. At most it has a vague connecting theme, in which John Gray cherry-picks some random Thomas Hobbes quotes and awkwardly crowbars them onto some random topic ranging from the genuinely interesting (Putinism's engagement with Orthodox church theology; Thomas Hobbes overlooking a negative Death Drive in human behaviour which complicates his model of the state Leviathan; a criticism of progressive rights-based liberalism's effectiveness as a strategy for resolving intra-cultural conflicts; a genuinely pluralistic tolerance for the varied modes of human life that recognises the stultifying horrors of contemporary capitalism as just one episode among many across the infinite, turbulent storm of human history), to his usual screeds about the horrors of the Russian Revolution (complete with a claim that the Tsarist secret police weren't that bad!), to his frankly tiresome fetishism of human ideas as an absurd force motivating people to become monsters in the pursuit of meaning.
Emil M. Cioran argued that last point much better than Gray ever does, a fact probably explicable from the dubious qualification of Cioran having at least once believed in something that wasn't just his own contrarianism. Maybe that's why Gray chooses not to ever mention him in this volume. In fact, to hear Gray discuss the human animal in this particular book, you'd think us oddly spiritual beings. He only occasionally alludes to what material factors are required to make people care about eschatological ideologies in the first place, and when he does it is rarely followed up on, as if he just stuck a mollifying sentence into his text at the advice of an editor without changing the substance of his original argument. Do people get lost in the revolutionary fervour of apocalyptic social upheavals because they are frightened, cold, grieving, shot at, starved, broken, bleeding, and then, somehow, invigorated by a hope for a better future that is (perhaps) partially born from their psychological vulnerability to the vicissitudes of temporal contingency?
Nah, Gray says, it's just the last one. Just stop being afraid of death, he sombrely intones, accept that people are going to suffer, and submit to the Leviathan.
At this point it's probably worth observing that Gray's books often gesture very insincerely towards this kind of political quietism that he never follows through on in his own practice. For such a regular old-school liberal columnist and exhaustingly repetitive author, his occasional moments of pensive humility carry a quite frankly hilarious ostentation. Obviously a charge of hypocrisy isn't actually a counter-argument, but it is part of what makes the man quite infuriating to read when he slips into those moods. He is much more invigorating as a contrarian critic than he ever is as a positive expounder of his own vision of the Good Life (partly, I suppose, because he never actually has his own visions, just paraphrases of what other philosophers before him have said which he stitches together through a coercively pessimistic tone).
This probably all begs the question of why I bothered. To tell the truth, the sad fact is that Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (which I read simultaneously with Schopenhauer's Essays and Aphorisms to the point that the two somewhat blur together for me) was partly responsible for what basically amounted to a nervous breakdown in my undergrad years, so forcefully did it unseam my most treasured insights and salt the ground from which the vast majority of my Humanist beliefs had grown. I've followed Gray's work since then mostly out of a sense of morbid loyalty, but increasingly I suspect that either he's one of those writers who only has one book in them, or else a reread of that dark masterpiece would reveal it to be significantly less impressive to my current self's more jaded eyes.
In short, though nowhere near as abysmal as the heroically lazy The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom, this is a hackwork potboiler, and it is a shame that such a powerful title, and such an evocative book cover, was wasted on what amounts to a modern-day commonplace book; fragmented, hyper-textual, and cherry-picked, with all its beauties simply stolen from the pens of better writers.
April 3, 2025
Shambolic book. When, after 80 pages,you still don't get what point the author is trying to make, it's time to put it aside. As Schopenhauer wrote, one of the most important decisions in life is what NOT to read.
February 23, 2025
This essay is a mess :
The first part argues the victory of liberalism - "The end of history" by Fukuyama - was an illusion. Which is a cheap shot as generations of writers have already deconstructed his statement (including himself).
But the real crime is Gray trying to do so by mobilizing a crowd of thinkers and theories he hardly masters.
The second part is a weird collection of biographies dominated by obscure and cursed Russian writers. Clearly, this is done to inflict a sense of dread on the reader, but the trick is - again - cheap.
The third part begins with a rant against "woke", universities and a crowd of "liberals" without taking the time to explain who or what he's precisely talking about, before "rediscovering" the ideas of Christianity influenced modern western philosophies (what is this ? XIXth century Germany ?!). It ends with a conclusion on the illusion of civilizational progress he never actually argued for.
Overall :
The academic imitation of cheap conservative podcasting. Definitly a discovery.
The first part argues the victory of liberalism - "The end of history" by Fukuyama - was an illusion. Which is a cheap shot as generations of writers have already deconstructed his statement (including himself).
But the real crime is Gray trying to do so by mobilizing a crowd of thinkers and theories he hardly masters.
The second part is a weird collection of biographies dominated by obscure and cursed Russian writers. Clearly, this is done to inflict a sense of dread on the reader, but the trick is - again - cheap.
The third part begins with a rant against "woke", universities and a crowd of "liberals" without taking the time to explain who or what he's precisely talking about, before "rediscovering" the ideas of Christianity influenced modern western philosophies (what is this ? XIXth century Germany ?!). It ends with a conclusion on the illusion of civilizational progress he never actually argued for.
Overall :
The academic imitation of cheap conservative podcasting. Definitly a discovery.
January 1, 2024
Epocha baigėsi, o niekas negeba suformuluoti kas bus toliau. Ir su kapitalizmu ir su liberalizmu. Ši knyga ne išimtis- atsakymų joje nerasite.
November 15, 2024
Some interesting insights and a diagnosis - but ultimately takes you to a place of philosophical resignation.
October 4, 2025
On the one hand, John Gray writes well (particularly for a philosopher) and yet he does not, in this book, write much of a coherent argument. These 'thoughts after liberalism' have their share of interesting authors that Gray can help a reader discover (which is probably the best part of the book) and he does do a decent job a pointing to the short-comings of Liberalism, which he views as having taken a position as its own religion. However, because this book is poorly formated, its hard to recommend it as a serious attempt at recognizing what is wrong with liberalism in today's world, which is certainly possible to do in a book of this length (which could have easily, with better formatting and editing, been a long essay. Some of the thoughts here are interesting and timely, but it could have been communicated better; he instead spends much of the short book indulging the reader in his knowledge of the philosophical ideas of various authors, both well-known and obscure, which is in a way, delightful to read, but does make this a more confusing read.
November 2, 2024
What in the fever dream was this. I should read it again when I’ve had some years op mijnen teller and hopefully have finally caught up on what happened with the Russians between 1800 and 2010’s.
Hope the guy re-publishes this in a slam poetry book collecting the best disses.
5 stars whereof 2 for keeping me engaged though I didn’t understand half of it as I have never and will never not be disinterested in Hobbes and his HP spell fanfic.
—
As I read the comments… people take this book way too serious. As in it’s useless to look for a nice well defined point he’s making it’s not that kind of book. This reading demands a peculiar type of wit, irony and cynicism, when transcending their -wrongly defined- destructive nature, use them as a tool to read this book and fail to understand what is beyond one persons comprehension anyway (which is the whole point, )
Hope the guy re-publishes this in a slam poetry book collecting the best disses.
5 stars whereof 2 for keeping me engaged though I didn’t understand half of it as I have never and will never not be disinterested in Hobbes and his HP spell fanfic.
—
As I read the comments… people take this book way too serious. As in it’s useless to look for a nice well defined point he’s making it’s not that kind of book. This reading demands a peculiar type of wit, irony and cynicism, when transcending their -wrongly defined- destructive nature, use them as a tool to read this book and fail to understand what is beyond one persons comprehension anyway (which is the whole point, )
July 11, 2024
I wanted to like this.
Some interesting questions peppered throughout, with some questionable things also presented.
In the end this is a scattershot of ideas that says a lot without really saying anything much at all in the end.
Shame really, when it’s great it really is, but I don’t really want to be panning for gold.
Some interesting questions peppered throughout, with some questionable things also presented.
In the end this is a scattershot of ideas that says a lot without really saying anything much at all in the end.
Shame really, when it’s great it really is, but I don’t really want to be panning for gold.
September 8, 2025
This is a really interesting book with many learned opinions provided by the author and yet there's no index. Therefore, this book doesn't get 5 stars from me, even though it should do given how informative the book is.
Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, commonly referred to as Leviathan, is a book by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, published in 1651. Its name derives from the biblical sea-monster in the Book of Job.
By Leviathan, Hobbes pictured a sovereign power that could bring peace to humankind. Only by submitting to unlimited government could people escape the situation where anarchy ruled and they weren't safe from their fellow citizens. The type of sovereign didn't matter.
The New Leviathans aim to secure meaning in life for their subjects. The new Leviathans such as Russia and China promise safety but foster insecurity. The author allows readers to understand the world of 2020s with all its contradictions, terrible events, and poisonous ideas and yet liberal commentators believe it's just a phase the world is going through.
Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, commonly referred to as Leviathan, is a book by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, published in 1651. Its name derives from the biblical sea-monster in the Book of Job.
By Leviathan, Hobbes pictured a sovereign power that could bring peace to humankind. Only by submitting to unlimited government could people escape the situation where anarchy ruled and they weren't safe from their fellow citizens. The type of sovereign didn't matter.
The New Leviathans aim to secure meaning in life for their subjects. The new Leviathans such as Russia and China promise safety but foster insecurity. The author allows readers to understand the world of 2020s with all its contradictions, terrible events, and poisonous ideas and yet liberal commentators believe it's just a phase the world is going through.
February 3, 2025
Afhængig af temperament kan en klar, kynisk og lettere pessimistisk analyse sommetider være ganske tiltrængt. Det kan måske virke lidt bagvendt, for hvorfor kan pessimisme og kynisme være decideret befriende? Jamen det kan det af dén årsag, at optimistiske analyser, der notorisk skal slutte i en eller anden håbefuld profeti, har det med at virke "håbløst" naive og uden blik for de gruopvækkende realiteter, som menneskeheden igen og igen moser sig selv ind i. Derfor har det været spændende, og ja forfriskende, at læse Englands både førende politiske filosof og pessimist, John Gray, udlægge liberalismens endeligt og den nye globale verdensorden i "The New Leviathans".
Gray tager udgangspunkt i den ikoniske "Leviathan" af Thomas Hobbes, som jo er prototypen på en klassisk realisme og kynisk magtanalyse. Ud fra dette viser han, at liberalismens fortælling om fremgang, fred og "historiens afslutning" er latterlig, da det, vi rent faktisk ser efter Den Kolde Krig, er, at det internationale samfund igen er et stort anarki af små og store "Leviathans". Denne analyse forekommer mig overbevisende, men jeg vurderer dog også, at man ikke som sådan kan se bort fra den øgede institutionelle integration i f.eks. FN, EU og forskellige globale organisationer, som, uagtet deres korruption og manglende relevans, har vist sig at levere en vis grad af global fred.
Han skriver forrygende og intenst. Han er kyniker helt ind til benet, hvilket træder meget tydeligt frem i hans skrivestil. Det er faktisk, tro det eller lad vær, ret lækkert at læse. Mon det er sådan Houellebecq er blevet så voldsomt populær?
Grunden til at bogen ikke får fuld smadder med stjerner er, at Gray simpelthen skriver for determinitisk og ustruktureret. Hans determinisme kommer til udtryk i hans meget bombastiske udsagn om fremtidens globale system, hvilket jeg ikke abonnerer på. Verdenshistorien er kontingent. Hans manglende struktur viser sig særligt i del 2, som han ikke forklarer, hvad han vil bruge til. Det man får leveret er en masse personlige skildringer af sovjetiske kunstnere, som på den ene eller anden måde fik smadret deres liv under den sovjetiske statsterror.
Alt i alt er "The New Leviathans" en spændende, oplysende og pessimistisk analyse af den menneskelige tilstand og dermed også den internationale orden.
Gray tager udgangspunkt i den ikoniske "Leviathan" af Thomas Hobbes, som jo er prototypen på en klassisk realisme og kynisk magtanalyse. Ud fra dette viser han, at liberalismens fortælling om fremgang, fred og "historiens afslutning" er latterlig, da det, vi rent faktisk ser efter Den Kolde Krig, er, at det internationale samfund igen er et stort anarki af små og store "Leviathans". Denne analyse forekommer mig overbevisende, men jeg vurderer dog også, at man ikke som sådan kan se bort fra den øgede institutionelle integration i f.eks. FN, EU og forskellige globale organisationer, som, uagtet deres korruption og manglende relevans, har vist sig at levere en vis grad af global fred.
Han skriver forrygende og intenst. Han er kyniker helt ind til benet, hvilket træder meget tydeligt frem i hans skrivestil. Det er faktisk, tro det eller lad vær, ret lækkert at læse. Mon det er sådan Houellebecq er blevet så voldsomt populær?
Grunden til at bogen ikke får fuld smadder med stjerner er, at Gray simpelthen skriver for determinitisk og ustruktureret. Hans determinisme kommer til udtryk i hans meget bombastiske udsagn om fremtidens globale system, hvilket jeg ikke abonnerer på. Verdenshistorien er kontingent. Hans manglende struktur viser sig særligt i del 2, som han ikke forklarer, hvad han vil bruge til. Det man får leveret er en masse personlige skildringer af sovjetiske kunstnere, som på den ene eller anden måde fik smadret deres liv under den sovjetiske statsterror.
Alt i alt er "The New Leviathans" en spændende, oplysende og pessimistisk analyse af den menneskelige tilstand og dermed også den internationale orden.
January 3, 2025
This was interesting, if hard to follow in places. It argues that the era of liberal democracy is over. Western intellectuals and activists are intent on attacking and taking apart our history / culture and anything we might consider valuable or good. In its place identity politics exhausts us by pitting one group against another, while doing nothing to improve the economic reality of the poor. Its primary function being to secure resources and status for a bloated class of the over-educated with time on their hands Added to that we are surrounded by assorted autocracies in Russia, China, Iran etc. Gray's overarching point is that Hobbes was right - life is nasty ,short and brutish As I said, interesting, but short on laughs and even shorter on optimism.
October 29, 2025
if I could give this 3.5 stars I would. The main problem with it is that it's too short and I don't mean that as a backhanded compliment to the author or myself, the worst passages of the book read like rapid fire summary bullet points that the author obviously feels follow clearly from one another without feeling the need to fill in the gaps. I think I get what he's driving at but it's too hazy.
The second problem is that these are definitely more "thoughts after liberalism" than "clear single argument after liberalism". The sharp turns between ideas and different historical vignettes can add to the feeling of incompleteness while sometimes losing the thread implied by the use of quotes from Hobbes' Leviathan at the beginning of most sections.
All that being said, Gray is one of the more interesting commentators working in Britain today and this represents a useful and stark critique of the current state of liberalism in an increasingly post-liberal world. The sections on psychoanalysis and Russia (both Soviet and post-Soviet) are particularly well-written and enlightening.
The second problem is that these are definitely more "thoughts after liberalism" than "clear single argument after liberalism". The sharp turns between ideas and different historical vignettes can add to the feeling of incompleteness while sometimes losing the thread implied by the use of quotes from Hobbes' Leviathan at the beginning of most sections.
All that being said, Gray is one of the more interesting commentators working in Britain today and this represents a useful and stark critique of the current state of liberalism in an increasingly post-liberal world. The sections on psychoanalysis and Russia (both Soviet and post-Soviet) are particularly well-written and enlightening.
December 2, 2024
Great book, one that you buy because you think it will induce reflexions, but it ends up inducing feelings too.
Sold as a political essay, it is more chaotic than that. It is true that it is hard to follow a red thread there.
The author takes us through its, somewhat pessimistic, reflexions about states and the role they play in our lives. But really it is about human psychology and how it shaped/shapes the said states and political systems: Hope, fear, greed and illusions.
Delightful to read !!
Sold as a political essay, it is more chaotic than that. It is true that it is hard to follow a red thread there.
The author takes us through its, somewhat pessimistic, reflexions about states and the role they play in our lives. But really it is about human psychology and how it shaped/shapes the said states and political systems: Hope, fear, greed and illusions.
Delightful to read !!
December 27, 2024
“Liberalism has once again become a creature eating its own tail. The current generation of liberals never tires of denouncing the West as the most destructive force in history - racist, imperialist, and sexist. <…> Western civilization has been a curse for the humankind. Yet these same liberals insist that Western values - human rights, personal autonomy and the like - must be projected to the last corners of the earth.”
Lots of interesting ideas, was not sold on the flow of the book.
Lots of interesting ideas, was not sold on the flow of the book.
February 4, 2024
Impulsaankoop. De ondertiteling, nieuwe visies na het liberalisme, is me een raadsel. Een voor mij wat eclectische verzameling gedachten, citaten en levensverhalen die duidelijk maken hoe zwart de geschiedenis vannde vorige eeuw was. Maar nieuwe visies?
April 2, 2024
Clear thoughts. Solid beginning. Less strong ending.
October 30, 2023
Only a Leviathan can protect us from the state of nature: a “war of all against all” in which the life of man is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
So said Thomas Hobbes in his 1651 book of that name.
The Leviathan Hobbes had in mind was a sovereign with unfettered power ceded by individuals in exchange for protection. This ruler would create conditions in which industry, the arts and science could flourish.
It sounds like something from the middle ages. Surely we’ve evolved beyond it thanks to liberal democracy?
John Gray doesn’t think so. He opens his new book with the claim that “Twenty-first century states are becoming Leviathans”.
But unlike the sovereign envisioned by Hobbes, they don’t just want to protect us from external enemies. “As in the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century,” he writes, “the new Leviathans have become engineers of souls” that “aim to secure meaning in life for their subjects.”
It’s a return to a state of nature where a set of new Leviathans promise their citizens safety but foster insecurity. And so Russia uses food and energy as weapons of war, and China’s surveillance state exports technology laden with spyware to gullible global consumers.
But this totalizing vision isn’t just confined to the bleaker corners of the planet. It’s also making the West increasingly illiberal.
In an earlier book, Two Faces of Liberalism, Gray made the case that liberalism contains two contradictory philosophies.
One is framed in terms of peaceful coexistence between communities with different interests, convictions and lifestyles. In this version — a project of modus vivendi — consensus is sought through structures that help us ‘live and let live’ together as values and norms evolve and change.
The other version posits a universal rational consensus that tolerates diversity — but based on the faith that everyone will eventually evolve towards that same inevitable liberalism. This face takes a legalistic, rights-based approach in pursuing its aims. It believes there’s one "best" way of life for all humankind.
Here in the West, we have abandoned modus vivendi. Contentious issues which used to be adjudicated in the political arena are increasingly framed as fundamental ‘rights’ to be decided by the courts. But a bill of rights only works if the values it expresses are widely shared by that society.
When such battles are fought in the judiciary rather than in parliamentary halls of compromise, the way to win is to appoint the judges who will enshrine your preferred outcome as unchangeable law.
And so we find ourselves in a situation where “rival groups seek to capture the power of the state in a new war of all against all between self-defined collective identities”, politicizing the courts to subvert the democratic will, inculcating conformity through the schools and universities, and banishing dissidents who speak out against it to career and social oblivion.
It’s a recipe for ‘culture war’, and eventually, civil conflict.
But it’s worse than that.
Governments aren’t seeking to impose this bleak new order on us from above, as they did in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Maoist China. If they were, then getting rid of it would involve voting ideologically-possessed rulers out of office.
No, in today’s West, this self-contradictory set of illiberal demands is being formulated from the bottom-up, enforced by civil society and illiberal institutions:
“In schools and universities, education inculcates conformity with the ruling progressive ideology. The arts are judged by whether they serve approved political goals. Dissidents from orthodoxies on race, gender and empire find their careers terminated and their public lives erased. This repression is not the work of governments. The ruling catechisms are formulated and enforced by civil society. Libraries, galleries and museums exclude viewpoints that are condemned as reactionary. Powers of censorship are exercised by big hi-tech corporations. Illiberal institutions are policing society and themselves.”
The absurd claim that ‘words’ are actual violence holds a clue to how we got here, and it may have been anticipated by Thomas Hobbes in the mid-1600s.
Gray sees Hobbes’s account of language as the most overlooked aspect of his thought. Hobbes scorned Plato and Aristotle because they treated words as if they were things. “Imagining that abstractions conjured up by language were independently existing realities,” Gray writes, “they led the human mind into millennia of feeble self-deception.”
I can see how this delusion that words are things — and that changing words therefore changes things, morphing actual reality — has combined with what I see as the fatal flaw at the heart of liberalism: the pursuit of freedom from every constraint.
We all want freedom to “be ourselves”, freedom to follow the religion of our choice (or not to follow one), freedom to marry or sleep with who we want, to read what we want, to consume what we want, and to start a business or to starve.
Those freedoms helped the West to flourish. The thing is, it’s never enough. When that freedom from drive is taken to its ultimate end, every constraint imposed on us becomes an affront to our freedom — our liberty. Even those constraints which limit us simply by being part of the natural world.
The result of the pursuit of unfettered human autonomy is the absurd society we’re living in today.
Gray writes: “In its current and final phase, the liberal West is possessed by an idea of freedom. Any curb on human will is condemned as a mode of repression. If human beings inflict harm on others it is because society has injured them. When these injustices have been corrected everyone can live as they please, creating the world in which they wish to live.”
Unfortunately, it isn’t enough to believe oneself to have transcended biology. For the illusion to hold, others must be forced to go through intellectual contortions to play along with individual fantasies that assert someone’s freedom from genetics, physical death and other fundamental constraints
“By a droll necessity,” Gray says, “this freedom requires that every aspect of life be monitored and controlled. Language must be purified of any traces of thought-crime. The mind must cease to be a private realm and come under scrutiny for its hidden biases and errors. As Dostoevsky anticipated in Demons, the logic of limitless freedom is unlimited despotism.”
“As Western societies have dismantled liberal freedoms,” Gray writes, “the destination towards which the world was supposedly evolving has disappeared in the societies where it originated.”
That’s the danger of letting an ideology determine our course. All answers have to conform to it — and if they don’t, they’ll have to anyway.
You’d think we’d learn our lesson by now. But we’ is another illusion where words are mistaken for things. There is no ‘we’. The idea confuses a living creature — “a multitudinous human animal” — with a general thing without agency. Just try getting ‘humanity’ to do something and you’ll see how quickly the illusion crumbles.
As Gray points out in all of his books, we cannot overcome our own nature. Our knowledge and technological prowess grows, but the human animal stays the same.
History is not a tale of linear progress towards a better world — that idea of salvation originated with Christianity. No, history is a series of unending cycles where changing knowledge interacts with unchanging human drives. Genocide is just as much a product of science as antibiotics.
We can’t overcome our nature. But we can destroy the life we have and be left with nothing.
And that’s where I think we find ourselves now. The uneasy peace of the Cold War and its euphoric aftermath were the anomaly. Those of us who grew up in those years didn’t know how good we had it.
We’ve entered a cycle of dissolution, and Gray gives some clues as to what sort of world he thinks we’re moving into.
Locked on its present course of klepto-theocracy, Russia could become “a steampunk Byzantium with nukes”. America may fracture into “a florid hybrid of fundamentalist sects, woke cults and techno-futurist oligarchs”. China is already “a high-tech Panopticon”. And the European Union will likely become an "avatar of the Holy Roman Empire, a faded kaleidoscope of shifting principalities and powers”.
I can’t speak to the accuracy of this prediction, or say how much of it is tongue-in-cheek.
But I think we can expect resource wars, enthno-nationalist and religious conflicts, a breakdown in the supply chains and infrastructure that made our lives so comfortable, and more ungoverned zones of anarchy like we see today in Libya and much of Syria. It has already begun.
As Gray writes, “Enclaves of freedom persist, but a liberal civilization based on the practice of tolerance has passed into history.”
The world we knew —and the world I grew up in during the 1970s and 1980s — is gone and it isn’t coming back. Something else will replace it. Something that hasn’t yet fully taken shape.
So what can the individual do in such a world?
We can’t do much of anything to stop the tide of illiberalism. But Gray does offer one idea that’s worth considering.
In a recent interview for the UnHerd podcast, he said that perhaps the answer is to create enclaves of free thought, inquiry and tolerance, and make them difficult to attack. “Don’t calculate whether you’re going to win or lose,” he said. “Just live like this as long as you can.”
The New Leviathans is a fascinating and highly recommended read. I haven’t even scratched the surface of the stories, historical characters, dystopian fiction and forgotten thinkers Gray draws on to explore the work of England’s first political philosopher.
I’ll leave the last word to the author, who tells us Hobbes’s hidden message is that there is no deliverance from the state of nature:
“Hobbes’s account of absurdity is more than the recognition that human life is tragic. Tragedy occurs when human beings encounter situations in which every option involves irreparable loss. Hobbes acknowledges these situations, but his idea of absurdity teaches a harder truth. Where it can be achieved, peace is a truce, partial and temporary, between humankind and itself. The war of all against all begins in every human being, and it never ends.”
So said Thomas Hobbes in his 1651 book of that name.
The Leviathan Hobbes had in mind was a sovereign with unfettered power ceded by individuals in exchange for protection. This ruler would create conditions in which industry, the arts and science could flourish.
It sounds like something from the middle ages. Surely we’ve evolved beyond it thanks to liberal democracy?
John Gray doesn’t think so. He opens his new book with the claim that “Twenty-first century states are becoming Leviathans”.
But unlike the sovereign envisioned by Hobbes, they don’t just want to protect us from external enemies. “As in the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century,” he writes, “the new Leviathans have become engineers of souls” that “aim to secure meaning in life for their subjects.”
It’s a return to a state of nature where a set of new Leviathans promise their citizens safety but foster insecurity. And so Russia uses food and energy as weapons of war, and China’s surveillance state exports technology laden with spyware to gullible global consumers.
But this totalizing vision isn’t just confined to the bleaker corners of the planet. It’s also making the West increasingly illiberal.
In an earlier book, Two Faces of Liberalism, Gray made the case that liberalism contains two contradictory philosophies.
One is framed in terms of peaceful coexistence between communities with different interests, convictions and lifestyles. In this version — a project of modus vivendi — consensus is sought through structures that help us ‘live and let live’ together as values and norms evolve and change.
The other version posits a universal rational consensus that tolerates diversity — but based on the faith that everyone will eventually evolve towards that same inevitable liberalism. This face takes a legalistic, rights-based approach in pursuing its aims. It believes there’s one "best" way of life for all humankind.
Here in the West, we have abandoned modus vivendi. Contentious issues which used to be adjudicated in the political arena are increasingly framed as fundamental ‘rights’ to be decided by the courts. But a bill of rights only works if the values it expresses are widely shared by that society.
When such battles are fought in the judiciary rather than in parliamentary halls of compromise, the way to win is to appoint the judges who will enshrine your preferred outcome as unchangeable law.
And so we find ourselves in a situation where “rival groups seek to capture the power of the state in a new war of all against all between self-defined collective identities”, politicizing the courts to subvert the democratic will, inculcating conformity through the schools and universities, and banishing dissidents who speak out against it to career and social oblivion.
It’s a recipe for ‘culture war’, and eventually, civil conflict.
But it’s worse than that.
Governments aren’t seeking to impose this bleak new order on us from above, as they did in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Maoist China. If they were, then getting rid of it would involve voting ideologically-possessed rulers out of office.
No, in today’s West, this self-contradictory set of illiberal demands is being formulated from the bottom-up, enforced by civil society and illiberal institutions:
“In schools and universities, education inculcates conformity with the ruling progressive ideology. The arts are judged by whether they serve approved political goals. Dissidents from orthodoxies on race, gender and empire find their careers terminated and their public lives erased. This repression is not the work of governments. The ruling catechisms are formulated and enforced by civil society. Libraries, galleries and museums exclude viewpoints that are condemned as reactionary. Powers of censorship are exercised by big hi-tech corporations. Illiberal institutions are policing society and themselves.”
The absurd claim that ‘words’ are actual violence holds a clue to how we got here, and it may have been anticipated by Thomas Hobbes in the mid-1600s.
Gray sees Hobbes’s account of language as the most overlooked aspect of his thought. Hobbes scorned Plato and Aristotle because they treated words as if they were things. “Imagining that abstractions conjured up by language were independently existing realities,” Gray writes, “they led the human mind into millennia of feeble self-deception.”
I can see how this delusion that words are things — and that changing words therefore changes things, morphing actual reality — has combined with what I see as the fatal flaw at the heart of liberalism: the pursuit of freedom from every constraint.
We all want freedom to “be ourselves”, freedom to follow the religion of our choice (or not to follow one), freedom to marry or sleep with who we want, to read what we want, to consume what we want, and to start a business or to starve.
Those freedoms helped the West to flourish. The thing is, it’s never enough. When that freedom from drive is taken to its ultimate end, every constraint imposed on us becomes an affront to our freedom — our liberty. Even those constraints which limit us simply by being part of the natural world.
The result of the pursuit of unfettered human autonomy is the absurd society we’re living in today.
Gray writes: “In its current and final phase, the liberal West is possessed by an idea of freedom. Any curb on human will is condemned as a mode of repression. If human beings inflict harm on others it is because society has injured them. When these injustices have been corrected everyone can live as they please, creating the world in which they wish to live.”
Unfortunately, it isn’t enough to believe oneself to have transcended biology. For the illusion to hold, others must be forced to go through intellectual contortions to play along with individual fantasies that assert someone’s freedom from genetics, physical death and other fundamental constraints
“By a droll necessity,” Gray says, “this freedom requires that every aspect of life be monitored and controlled. Language must be purified of any traces of thought-crime. The mind must cease to be a private realm and come under scrutiny for its hidden biases and errors. As Dostoevsky anticipated in Demons, the logic of limitless freedom is unlimited despotism.”
“As Western societies have dismantled liberal freedoms,” Gray writes, “the destination towards which the world was supposedly evolving has disappeared in the societies where it originated.”
That’s the danger of letting an ideology determine our course. All answers have to conform to it — and if they don’t, they’ll have to anyway.
You’d think we’d learn our lesson by now. But we’ is another illusion where words are mistaken for things. There is no ‘we’. The idea confuses a living creature — “a multitudinous human animal” — with a general thing without agency. Just try getting ‘humanity’ to do something and you’ll see how quickly the illusion crumbles.
As Gray points out in all of his books, we cannot overcome our own nature. Our knowledge and technological prowess grows, but the human animal stays the same.
History is not a tale of linear progress towards a better world — that idea of salvation originated with Christianity. No, history is a series of unending cycles where changing knowledge interacts with unchanging human drives. Genocide is just as much a product of science as antibiotics.
We can’t overcome our nature. But we can destroy the life we have and be left with nothing.
And that’s where I think we find ourselves now. The uneasy peace of the Cold War and its euphoric aftermath were the anomaly. Those of us who grew up in those years didn’t know how good we had it.
We’ve entered a cycle of dissolution, and Gray gives some clues as to what sort of world he thinks we’re moving into.
Locked on its present course of klepto-theocracy, Russia could become “a steampunk Byzantium with nukes”. America may fracture into “a florid hybrid of fundamentalist sects, woke cults and techno-futurist oligarchs”. China is already “a high-tech Panopticon”. And the European Union will likely become an "avatar of the Holy Roman Empire, a faded kaleidoscope of shifting principalities and powers”.
I can’t speak to the accuracy of this prediction, or say how much of it is tongue-in-cheek.
But I think we can expect resource wars, enthno-nationalist and religious conflicts, a breakdown in the supply chains and infrastructure that made our lives so comfortable, and more ungoverned zones of anarchy like we see today in Libya and much of Syria. It has already begun.
As Gray writes, “Enclaves of freedom persist, but a liberal civilization based on the practice of tolerance has passed into history.”
The world we knew —and the world I grew up in during the 1970s and 1980s — is gone and it isn’t coming back. Something else will replace it. Something that hasn’t yet fully taken shape.
So what can the individual do in such a world?
We can’t do much of anything to stop the tide of illiberalism. But Gray does offer one idea that’s worth considering.
In a recent interview for the UnHerd podcast, he said that perhaps the answer is to create enclaves of free thought, inquiry and tolerance, and make them difficult to attack. “Don’t calculate whether you’re going to win or lose,” he said. “Just live like this as long as you can.”
The New Leviathans is a fascinating and highly recommended read. I haven’t even scratched the surface of the stories, historical characters, dystopian fiction and forgotten thinkers Gray draws on to explore the work of England’s first political philosopher.
I’ll leave the last word to the author, who tells us Hobbes’s hidden message is that there is no deliverance from the state of nature:
“Hobbes’s account of absurdity is more than the recognition that human life is tragic. Tragedy occurs when human beings encounter situations in which every option involves irreparable loss. Hobbes acknowledges these situations, but his idea of absurdity teaches a harder truth. Where it can be achieved, peace is a truce, partial and temporary, between humankind and itself. The war of all against all begins in every human being, and it never ends.”
February 24, 2025
Although the theory is okay, the reality is that the Right poses a far greater threat to democracy today. It's unclear whether Gray's misstep lies in his understanding of liberalism or his misguided attempt to cast Hobbes as a hero.
August 27, 2025
What was the thesis of / point to this book? I just finished it and I don’t know. It might be, bad things happen so liberalism is bad? It makes a few statements and then goes on long history summaries. Not supporting examples, just long historical accounts of various people. They were interesting enough but didn’t seem to be there for any reason. Skip this.
March 29, 2025
“Thoughts” an apposite subtitle.
December 17, 2023
The New Leviathans by John Gray – the future is bleak. An obscure, random and dense examination of liberalism.
I chose to read this new book as I had read articles by John Gray, a professor and author, in the New Statesman that show real insight into politics. However, it came across as an obscure, random and dense examination of liberalism. It is a long rambling book that in the first half fails to crystallise its points instead becoming too dense in its detail, with an over-narrow focus on the Russian revolution.
Central to the book is the leviathan theme – the myth of the leviathan used to contextualise modern issues in society: The Leviathan is an embodiment of chaos and threatening to eat the damned after their life. In the end, it is annihilated. Gray links the leviathan to liberalism. He uses Russian history to explore his argument of how hyper-liberalism has enabled totalitarianism, but it didn’t click with me.
After a long introduction to Leviathans Gray then walks through Russian history, and I mean nineteenth and twentieth century. Interesting as they may be I never found the structure of the book taking me to any understandable conclusion.
Gray uses the seventeenth century philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, to explain the relevance of the return of the leviathans., through the latter’s book, Leviathan. His issue is with states behaving as leviathans. Gray talks about leviathan states “securing its subjects against one another and external enemies.” But modern states he argues have a greater purpose.
Having set out this thesis he then appears to go in another obscure direction by providing biographies of obscure figures in Russian history. First off there is the anit-liberal Leontiv. Leontiv is noted for arguing that socialism would replace Christianity with government and economics, but as a means of oppression, but actually China and Russia opted for an autocratic type of socialism.
Next up is Rozanov, a contradictory thinker with books full of random thoughts. Maybe Gray has included him in his book for his fondness of liberalism. Gray’s problem with this is how latter-day liberalism is eating its own tail.
Then there is Boldyrev and poets including Kharms, with the blockade of Leningrad. Followed by the painter Czapski., who spent time in the Gulag; and author Samyatin. Samyatin interests Gray for his masterpiece “We” – a reflection of early twentieth century Russia but also a foresight into the future – “the first fully developed dystopia.” Moving on, there is author, Bukharin, who was imprisoned, like many for alleged crimes against Russia.
Gray tries to knit all these figures with latter-day “New Leviathans,” who want to go much further, to “become engineers of souls.” The jump from early twentieth century to the early twenty first century is glaring in what it excludes.
What all this teaches us about modern liberalism is unclear to me, as Gray then moves on to discuss “hyper-liberal ideology “ as a vehicle for surplus elites to secure power in society” with universities inculcating their students conformity with this ideology – the woke movement. He argues that the woke ideology is a career for over production of elites, with the consequence of the loss of liberal freedoms, before moving on to woke’s troubled relationship with religion. However, these are never really proven, just given.
Gray concludes by proffering that “much of the world may consist of Leviathans surrounded by ungoverned zones.” He argues that the “US may drift on, a florid hybrid of fundamentalist sects, woke cults, and techno-futurist oligarchs.” As much as he wants to fight “into the storm” it is altogether a gloomy outlook, seeing any peace as a temporary truce.
I chose to read this new book as I had read articles by John Gray, a professor and author, in the New Statesman that show real insight into politics. However, it came across as an obscure, random and dense examination of liberalism. It is a long rambling book that in the first half fails to crystallise its points instead becoming too dense in its detail, with an over-narrow focus on the Russian revolution.
Central to the book is the leviathan theme – the myth of the leviathan used to contextualise modern issues in society: The Leviathan is an embodiment of chaos and threatening to eat the damned after their life. In the end, it is annihilated. Gray links the leviathan to liberalism. He uses Russian history to explore his argument of how hyper-liberalism has enabled totalitarianism, but it didn’t click with me.
After a long introduction to Leviathans Gray then walks through Russian history, and I mean nineteenth and twentieth century. Interesting as they may be I never found the structure of the book taking me to any understandable conclusion.
Gray uses the seventeenth century philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, to explain the relevance of the return of the leviathans., through the latter’s book, Leviathan. His issue is with states behaving as leviathans. Gray talks about leviathan states “securing its subjects against one another and external enemies.” But modern states he argues have a greater purpose.
Having set out this thesis he then appears to go in another obscure direction by providing biographies of obscure figures in Russian history. First off there is the anit-liberal Leontiv. Leontiv is noted for arguing that socialism would replace Christianity with government and economics, but as a means of oppression, but actually China and Russia opted for an autocratic type of socialism.
Next up is Rozanov, a contradictory thinker with books full of random thoughts. Maybe Gray has included him in his book for his fondness of liberalism. Gray’s problem with this is how latter-day liberalism is eating its own tail.
Then there is Boldyrev and poets including Kharms, with the blockade of Leningrad. Followed by the painter Czapski., who spent time in the Gulag; and author Samyatin. Samyatin interests Gray for his masterpiece “We” – a reflection of early twentieth century Russia but also a foresight into the future – “the first fully developed dystopia.” Moving on, there is author, Bukharin, who was imprisoned, like many for alleged crimes against Russia.
Gray tries to knit all these figures with latter-day “New Leviathans,” who want to go much further, to “become engineers of souls.” The jump from early twentieth century to the early twenty first century is glaring in what it excludes.
What all this teaches us about modern liberalism is unclear to me, as Gray then moves on to discuss “hyper-liberal ideology “ as a vehicle for surplus elites to secure power in society” with universities inculcating their students conformity with this ideology – the woke movement. He argues that the woke ideology is a career for over production of elites, with the consequence of the loss of liberal freedoms, before moving on to woke’s troubled relationship with religion. However, these are never really proven, just given.
Gray concludes by proffering that “much of the world may consist of Leviathans surrounded by ungoverned zones.” He argues that the “US may drift on, a florid hybrid of fundamentalist sects, woke cults, and techno-futurist oligarchs.” As much as he wants to fight “into the storm” it is altogether a gloomy outlook, seeing any peace as a temporary truce.
January 16, 2024
I wanted to like this book. Yes, there are some incredibly astute observations that Gray makes here., yet this book was an absolute slog to get through, with some gems scattered through the first and third sections.
About the sections: This book is a triptych of essays, the first about how the failure of liberalism (the so-called "end of history") has led to the development of "new Leviathans" (after Thomas Hobbes' book Leviathan, which Gray quotes a short passage from before each mini-section), giant security states that keeping expanding and limiting freedom. Russia and China are the two biggest examples, but as Gray points out, even liberal democracies are greatly expanding their governments. This is a very strong thesis, yet Gray fails to go all the way in showing how various governments today crack further down on freedoms.
The second essay is about Russia... not in the future, but in the past. So much for a book subtitled "thoughts after liberalism" when he devotes an entire chapter to thoughts BEFORE liberalism (in Russia, at least). The entire second essay is a jumbled mess of vignettes about various people under Soviet rule. There's no real connection to the "new Leviathans" here and is entirely skippable. There are so many block quotes that it feels like a third of the book is lifted from other peoples' work.
The final essay is an examination of the roots of liberalism. Gray correctly points out that liberalism is rooted in Christianity, especially Protestantism. He also talks about today's social justice movements and how they are inseparable from a Christian or liberal point of view. This is probably the strongest part of the book, and could itself be stretched to make its own book. Once again, the section suffers from an overuse of block quotes. Considering that Gray has been writing about this for decades, one would think that he would have his own ideas instead of having to quote large chunks of other people. The part about Geulincx was particularily fascinating.
Some great ideas in here, but his execution is worse than some of the actual prisoner executions detailed in the second essay.
About the sections: This book is a triptych of essays, the first about how the failure of liberalism (the so-called "end of history") has led to the development of "new Leviathans" (after Thomas Hobbes' book Leviathan, which Gray quotes a short passage from before each mini-section), giant security states that keeping expanding and limiting freedom. Russia and China are the two biggest examples, but as Gray points out, even liberal democracies are greatly expanding their governments. This is a very strong thesis, yet Gray fails to go all the way in showing how various governments today crack further down on freedoms.
The second essay is about Russia... not in the future, but in the past. So much for a book subtitled "thoughts after liberalism" when he devotes an entire chapter to thoughts BEFORE liberalism (in Russia, at least). The entire second essay is a jumbled mess of vignettes about various people under Soviet rule. There's no real connection to the "new Leviathans" here and is entirely skippable. There are so many block quotes that it feels like a third of the book is lifted from other peoples' work.
The final essay is an examination of the roots of liberalism. Gray correctly points out that liberalism is rooted in Christianity, especially Protestantism. He also talks about today's social justice movements and how they are inseparable from a Christian or liberal point of view. This is probably the strongest part of the book, and could itself be stretched to make its own book. Once again, the section suffers from an overuse of block quotes. Considering that Gray has been writing about this for decades, one would think that he would have his own ideas instead of having to quote large chunks of other people. The part about Geulincx was particularily fascinating.
Some great ideas in here, but his execution is worse than some of the actual prisoner executions detailed in the second essay.
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