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The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism
A bold, provocative reckoning with our current political delusions and dysfunctions.
Ever since its publication in 1651, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan has unsettled and challenged how we understand the world. Condemned and vilified by each new generation, his cold political vision continues to see through any number of human 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. 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 have flourished, and yet our liberal certainties treat them as aberrations that will somehow dissolve. Hobbes would not be so confident.
Filled with fascinating and challenging observations, 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?
Ever since its publication in 1651, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan has unsettled and challenged how we understand the world. Condemned and vilified by each new generation, his cold political vision continues to see through any number of human 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. 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 have flourished, and yet our liberal certainties treat them as aberrations that will somehow dissolve. Hobbes would not be so confident.
Filled with fascinating and challenging observations, 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?
181 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 7, 2023
About the author
John Gray
53 books950 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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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 12, 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'.
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.
August 18, 2026
Technically this isn't false advertisement. The book indeed does analyse "new leviathans". On entire 40 pages (at the very most) scattered through it. The rest is boring talk about old Leviathan, Hobbes and his followers but mostly stories from Stalinist and Leninist Russia that can be read in many other books and have nearly nothing in common with the "main" topic of this book besides lack of freedom in those regimes.
And even when Gray talks about "new" leviathans he talks about Soviet Russia and Maoist China. There is very little devoted to contemporary affairs. The whole book was a waste of time perhaps with exception of those ten pages about Putin.
"Thoughts after liberalism." Where?!
Been a while since I was this disappointed in a book.
And even when Gray talks about "new" leviathans he talks about Soviet Russia and Maoist China. There is very little devoted to contemporary affairs. The whole book was a waste of time perhaps with exception of those ten pages about Putin.
"Thoughts after liberalism." Where?!
Been a while since I was this disappointed in a book.
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.
September 5, 2024
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.
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.
January 7, 2024
Leest als een wedstrijdje verplassen "wie kent de meeste obscure Russische schrijvers" zonder een goed punt ermee te maken
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, )
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.
April 15, 2024
First chapters are very informative for the general public. The last ones are the philosophical roots of the first, but if you don't enjoy reading the philosophy of morals, you can skip them.
November 15, 2024
Some interesting insights and a diagnosis - but ultimately takes you to a place of philosophical resignation.
May 3, 2026
Groch z kapustą. Książka, to strumień świadomości autora, który rzuca sobie różne twierdzenia. Często takie, że w sumie nie wiadomo o co mu chodzi i czemu tak, a nie inaczej. Na plus to, że jest trochę ciekawych historii interesujących ludzi, co mieli pecha żyć w ZSRR i przekonać się, że zmiana tego co się nie lubi na nowe nie zawsze jest dobrym pomysłem.
August 31, 2026
I guess anyone can win an argument if they get to choose who’s on the other side.
This book is extremely interesting. I understand the things he’s saying. In some parts it’s very interesting and I liked the references to fictional examples from famous novels, as well as real life examples. And I liked that he uses examples from all over the world at different points in history. It was a very intelligent idea and I love it when authors do this.
Gray thinks liberalism has failed partly because it misunderstood human beings. Liberal societies often assumed that people could gradually become more rational, autonomous, tolerant, universalist, and peaceful. And, once liberalism loses its authority, people don’t simply become liberated individuals. They look for new “Leviathans”: powerful states, ideologies, identities, technologies, movements, religions, nationalism, etc., that promise security and meaning.
That’s basically the thread connecting the book.
That is why he jumps between Putin’s Russia, revolutionary movements, religion, totalitarianism, literature, Hobbes, Freud, technology, historical empires, and various other things. He’s trying to demonstrate a recurring pattern in human political behaviour rather than tell one historical story.
Gray is much better at demolishing other people’s grand theories than supplying an alternative.
His explanatory framework privileges psychology, ideology, myth and the human desire for order so heavily that material political economy can start disappearing from view.
That matters, because “humans keep creating Leviathans because we crave belonging, authority and protection” is a very different explanation of violence from “institutions systematically reward particular actors for extracting land, labour, resources and wealth.” Those mechanisms can coexist, of course, but Gray tends to illuminate the first and leave the second surprisingly underdeveloped.
An example that came to my mind when reading this was Robert Putnam’s idea of social capital, which foregrounds networks, trust, reciprocity and civic association- social connectedness as something that can facilitate collective action and healthy democracy.
In contrast, Pierre Bourdieu’s conception is considerably less innocent. He explores the idea that a ocial capital is a resource generated through membership in networks, and those networks are themselves implicated in the reproduction of inequality; alongside economic and cultural capital, it helps explain how advantage becomes durable.
That creates an interesting problem for Gray. He often talks as though the desire for collective identity or belonging is primarily a fact about human psychology. A Bourdieusian response, which came to my mind, would be: yes, but who gets access to which groups, what material advantages does membership confer, and who benefits from maintaining their boundaries?
Nationalism, elite institutions, racial categories, citizenship, class identities and so forth aren’t merely sources of existential meaning. They distribute resources. And once you make that move, “people need collective myths” becomes only part of the explanation.
There is now a more uncomfortable question:
Who has an interest in producing, preserving or weaponising those myths?
That is where Marxist political economy would substantially complicate Gray.
For example, a war can simultaneously involve genuine nationalism, fear, historical grievance, desire for security, elite prestige, military-industrial interests, access to land, energy resources and opportunities for accumulation. Reducing that to either “capitalism causes wars” or “human tribalism causes wars” is too simple. But Gray seems much more interested in showing that abolishing capitalism wouldn’t abolish war than in examining how particular economic systems organise incentives for war.
And that isn’t actually a rebuttal to Marx, and this is where I found his limited engagement with Marx particularly noticeable. I do not think the Soviet Union is a simple counterexample to Marxist accounts of violence or exploitation. Removing private capitalist ownership did not remove accumulation, extraction, hierarchy, geopolitical competition or material incentives. Soviet collectivisation, for example, involved enormous coercion and state extraction even though private ownership of productive capital had been radically restricted. So the existence of Soviet wars, repression and famine certainly shows that capitalism is not a necessary condition for violence, but it does not show that capitalist relations are irrelevant to violence in capitalist societies.
I had a similar problem with Gray’s discussion of Malthus. Gray suggests that mechanisation, fertilisers and modern agricultural production appeared to prove Malthus wrong for a long time, but that climate change may now be bringing us closer to a genuinely Malthusian situation as food production becomes more precarious. I found this strange because Amartya Sen’s Poverty and Famines (famously) seems to complicate that argument immediately.
Sen’s argument was that famine cannot usually be explained by aggregate food availability alone. People starve because their entitlement to food collapses. Wages, employment, prices, access to land, legal rights, exchange relations and political institutions determine whether people can actually obtain food, even if they are the ones farming and working to grow and collect such food. Food can physically exist while particular groups are unable to command it.
That distinction matters enormously when talking about climate change too. It is perfectly plausible to say that climate change may reduce agricultural output in particular regions, destabilise harvests, increase prices and create genuine scarcity. I agree. But that is not the same as saying that Malthus has simply turned out to be right. Even under severe climate stress, the more important political question is still: who goes hungry?
Climate change does not affect everyone’s access to food equally. Wealthy food-importing states may be able to continue buying food at higher prices. Poorer agricultural regions may still export food while local people cannot afford enough to eat. Governments may prioritise export revenue, livestock feed or biofuels. Land may be highly concentrated. Agricultural workers may lose their livelihoods long before a country literally runs out of food. Financial speculation and unequal purchasing power can also determine who is protected and who is exposed.
So climate change can be understood as a shock to food production while still recognising that political economy determines how that shock is converted into hunger.
There is also an international version of this. Some countries have contributed relatively little to historical emissions while being highly dependent on climate-sensitive agriculture and having far fewer resources for adaptation. Wealthier countries can insulate themselves through imports, infrastructure, insurance, technology and purchasing power. That is not simply “nature imposing limits on humanity.” The distribution of vulnerability is politically and economically produced.
This is where I think Gray’s broader political prescription starts to feel insufficient. His implied answer often seems to be something like: accept that humans are permanently conflictual, abandon utopian dreams, and build institutions capable of keeping different groups from destroying one another. If domination arises mainly because humans are quarrelsome, tribal and attracted to collective myths, that kind of modest Hobbesian politics makes sense.
But if domination is also reproduced through ownership, accumulation, unequal exchange, class power, inherited advantage and unequal access to resources, then “learn to coexist despite incompatible values” is nowhere near enough.
Political pluralism can become strangely complacent if it treats those relationships mainly as differences that need to be accommodated.
This is probably my main criticism of the book overall. Gray is very persuasive when he argues that changing institutions will not perfect human beings, and that political projects should be wary of utopian assumptions. But he sometimes seems to slide from “institutions cannot abolish human conflict” towards “institutions are not the main explanation for conflict anyway.”
And this is where his choice of interlocutors began to bother me. Obviously no book can respond to every political philosopher or social theorist ever written. But Marx, Sen and Bourdieu are not obscure figures, and the subjects Gray is discussing overlap very directly with their work. His critiques often feel strongest when directed at relatively simple versions of progress, utopianism or liberal rationalism. The stronger structural alternatives are much less present.
That makes the argument feel selective, and the intended audience ambiguous. It’s like publishing half of what would otherwise be a very good book. It is not necessarily a straw man in the strict sense, but there are moments when it feels as though Gray has chosen opponents particularly well suited to the argument he wants to make.
If domination primarily arises because human beings are permanently quarrelsome, then modest Hobbesian institutions make quite a lot of sense: don’t try to perfect humanity; prevent people killing each other.
But if domination is also reproduced through ownership, accumulation, unequal exchange, class power, inherited capital and institutionalised access to resources, “learn to coexist despite incompatible values” is nowhere near enough.
This book is extremely interesting. I understand the things he’s saying. In some parts it’s very interesting and I liked the references to fictional examples from famous novels, as well as real life examples. And I liked that he uses examples from all over the world at different points in history. It was a very intelligent idea and I love it when authors do this.
Gray thinks liberalism has failed partly because it misunderstood human beings. Liberal societies often assumed that people could gradually become more rational, autonomous, tolerant, universalist, and peaceful. And, once liberalism loses its authority, people don’t simply become liberated individuals. They look for new “Leviathans”: powerful states, ideologies, identities, technologies, movements, religions, nationalism, etc., that promise security and meaning.
That’s basically the thread connecting the book.
That is why he jumps between Putin’s Russia, revolutionary movements, religion, totalitarianism, literature, Hobbes, Freud, technology, historical empires, and various other things. He’s trying to demonstrate a recurring pattern in human political behaviour rather than tell one historical story.
Gray is much better at demolishing other people’s grand theories than supplying an alternative.
His explanatory framework privileges psychology, ideology, myth and the human desire for order so heavily that material political economy can start disappearing from view.
That matters, because “humans keep creating Leviathans because we crave belonging, authority and protection” is a very different explanation of violence from “institutions systematically reward particular actors for extracting land, labour, resources and wealth.” Those mechanisms can coexist, of course, but Gray tends to illuminate the first and leave the second surprisingly underdeveloped.
An example that came to my mind when reading this was Robert Putnam’s idea of social capital, which foregrounds networks, trust, reciprocity and civic association- social connectedness as something that can facilitate collective action and healthy democracy.
In contrast, Pierre Bourdieu’s conception is considerably less innocent. He explores the idea that a ocial capital is a resource generated through membership in networks, and those networks are themselves implicated in the reproduction of inequality; alongside economic and cultural capital, it helps explain how advantage becomes durable.
That creates an interesting problem for Gray. He often talks as though the desire for collective identity or belonging is primarily a fact about human psychology. A Bourdieusian response, which came to my mind, would be: yes, but who gets access to which groups, what material advantages does membership confer, and who benefits from maintaining their boundaries?
Nationalism, elite institutions, racial categories, citizenship, class identities and so forth aren’t merely sources of existential meaning. They distribute resources. And once you make that move, “people need collective myths” becomes only part of the explanation.
There is now a more uncomfortable question:
Who has an interest in producing, preserving or weaponising those myths?
That is where Marxist political economy would substantially complicate Gray.
For example, a war can simultaneously involve genuine nationalism, fear, historical grievance, desire for security, elite prestige, military-industrial interests, access to land, energy resources and opportunities for accumulation. Reducing that to either “capitalism causes wars” or “human tribalism causes wars” is too simple. But Gray seems much more interested in showing that abolishing capitalism wouldn’t abolish war than in examining how particular economic systems organise incentives for war.
And that isn’t actually a rebuttal to Marx, and this is where I found his limited engagement with Marx particularly noticeable. I do not think the Soviet Union is a simple counterexample to Marxist accounts of violence or exploitation. Removing private capitalist ownership did not remove accumulation, extraction, hierarchy, geopolitical competition or material incentives. Soviet collectivisation, for example, involved enormous coercion and state extraction even though private ownership of productive capital had been radically restricted. So the existence of Soviet wars, repression and famine certainly shows that capitalism is not a necessary condition for violence, but it does not show that capitalist relations are irrelevant to violence in capitalist societies.
I had a similar problem with Gray’s discussion of Malthus. Gray suggests that mechanisation, fertilisers and modern agricultural production appeared to prove Malthus wrong for a long time, but that climate change may now be bringing us closer to a genuinely Malthusian situation as food production becomes more precarious. I found this strange because Amartya Sen’s Poverty and Famines (famously) seems to complicate that argument immediately.
Sen’s argument was that famine cannot usually be explained by aggregate food availability alone. People starve because their entitlement to food collapses. Wages, employment, prices, access to land, legal rights, exchange relations and political institutions determine whether people can actually obtain food, even if they are the ones farming and working to grow and collect such food. Food can physically exist while particular groups are unable to command it.
That distinction matters enormously when talking about climate change too. It is perfectly plausible to say that climate change may reduce agricultural output in particular regions, destabilise harvests, increase prices and create genuine scarcity. I agree. But that is not the same as saying that Malthus has simply turned out to be right. Even under severe climate stress, the more important political question is still: who goes hungry?
Climate change does not affect everyone’s access to food equally. Wealthy food-importing states may be able to continue buying food at higher prices. Poorer agricultural regions may still export food while local people cannot afford enough to eat. Governments may prioritise export revenue, livestock feed or biofuels. Land may be highly concentrated. Agricultural workers may lose their livelihoods long before a country literally runs out of food. Financial speculation and unequal purchasing power can also determine who is protected and who is exposed.
So climate change can be understood as a shock to food production while still recognising that political economy determines how that shock is converted into hunger.
There is also an international version of this. Some countries have contributed relatively little to historical emissions while being highly dependent on climate-sensitive agriculture and having far fewer resources for adaptation. Wealthier countries can insulate themselves through imports, infrastructure, insurance, technology and purchasing power. That is not simply “nature imposing limits on humanity.” The distribution of vulnerability is politically and economically produced.
This is where I think Gray’s broader political prescription starts to feel insufficient. His implied answer often seems to be something like: accept that humans are permanently conflictual, abandon utopian dreams, and build institutions capable of keeping different groups from destroying one another. If domination arises mainly because humans are quarrelsome, tribal and attracted to collective myths, that kind of modest Hobbesian politics makes sense.
But if domination is also reproduced through ownership, accumulation, unequal exchange, class power, inherited advantage and unequal access to resources, then “learn to coexist despite incompatible values” is nowhere near enough.
Political pluralism can become strangely complacent if it treats those relationships mainly as differences that need to be accommodated.
This is probably my main criticism of the book overall. Gray is very persuasive when he argues that changing institutions will not perfect human beings, and that political projects should be wary of utopian assumptions. But he sometimes seems to slide from “institutions cannot abolish human conflict” towards “institutions are not the main explanation for conflict anyway.”
And this is where his choice of interlocutors began to bother me. Obviously no book can respond to every political philosopher or social theorist ever written. But Marx, Sen and Bourdieu are not obscure figures, and the subjects Gray is discussing overlap very directly with their work. His critiques often feel strongest when directed at relatively simple versions of progress, utopianism or liberal rationalism. The stronger structural alternatives are much less present.
That makes the argument feel selective, and the intended audience ambiguous. It’s like publishing half of what would otherwise be a very good book. It is not necessarily a straw man in the strict sense, but there are moments when it feels as though Gray has chosen opponents particularly well suited to the argument he wants to make.
If domination primarily arises because human beings are permanently quarrelsome, then modest Hobbesian institutions make quite a lot of sense: don’t try to perfect humanity; prevent people killing each other.
But if domination is also reproduced through ownership, accumulation, unequal exchange, class power, inherited capital and institutionalised access to resources, “learn to coexist despite incompatible values” is nowhere near enough.
August 27, 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.
March 10, 2025
Old White man is of the opinion that humanity is a “dangerous fiction”, which leads to the doctrine that some humans are “less human” than others, from which it is “a small step to eliminating them” but claims to be against mass murder in a later chapter. Basically saying “There will be monarchies and republics, nations and empires, tyrannies and theocracies." and liberals should accept it.
Don't bother reading, just give up, just like the author expects us to do.
Don't bother reading, just give up, just like the author expects us to do.
March 7, 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 26, 2023
There is a lot going on in this book.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Read
April 27, 2026Leviathan was accepting unfreedom to avoid war of all against all.
Elites in Europe and NA for a while thought the "liberal order" had won after fall of Berlin Wall, but no. "Instead of China becoming more like the West, the West has become more like China. In both, the ruling economic system is a version of state capitalism. In each, wealth is heavily concentrated in small groups with powerful political leverage." Billionaires on Central Committee of Chinese Communist government, "in America, wealth buys power, while in China power creates and destroys wealth" (23).
Reviews all the death and uprooting of the revolutions in 1905, 1917, the Holodomor, the terror of the thirties that got rid of all the early leaders in Soviet Union, "The destruction of historic forms of common life was integral to the Soviet project. Forced-march industrialization dissolved communities more thoroughly than did the most extreme forms of capitalism in the West" (36). But even Russia did not suffer the most under Communism, by 1932 about a third of Mongolians had died, lamas killed, etc. (what Chinese repeated in Tibet). "Nothing on this scale happened in Soviet Russia or in Mao's China. Only the death toll of the Cambodian regime of Pol Pot - variously estimated as being between 13 and 30 percent of the population - comes close" (37).
"The genius of totalitarianismis that it makes its victims complicit in its crimes" (I'd say this is the genius of all government; or all society). (37) "soviet totalitarianism destroyed society and trapped the population in networks of mutual suspicion" (37).
"[Novelist Alexander] Zinoviev believed there was no way out from the Soviet sytstem, but in 1989-1991 a state that seemed everlasting evaporated almost overnight." (38). But then West imposed "shock therapy"/austerity, quality of life dropped to developing country; Putin came to power and there was some freedom and prosperity, yanked away again with 2022 invasion of Ukraine. "Unmaking one world to make another no less short-lived, apocalyptic events are normal in Russian history. Despite two world wars and many economic crises, wealth and freedom have increased in Western countries of the past hundred years. Against this background, the belief that history is a story of progress is a natural illusion." (38).
"If Russia's history does not show the gradual progress achieved in more fortunate Western states, neither does the model invoked by comparisons with fascism in interwar Europe. Once dictatorship was removed in these countries civil life reemerged. The Russian state oversees a society immemorially habituated to tyranny. if despotic rule ends, it will probably be followed by a lengthy period of chaos and bloodshed" (38).
Possible alternatives: "If the reforming Tsar Alexander II had not been assassinated in 1881 and the conservative modernizer Pyotr Stolypin in 1911; if the last tsar had not been so foolish, and the Menshevik leader, Alexander Kerensky, so weak; if Germany had not used Lenin to subvert the Russian war effort, tr the Western Allies had not induced Russia to continue it; if post-communist Russia had not been pressured by the West to adopt a socially disruptive programme of economic shock therapy - if any of these contingencies had been otherwise, Russia might not have been ruled by despots for so long. As it is, there is little prospect of the country breaking with its tyrannical past." (39).
In its corruption and terrible quality of life, moreso than the West: "family breakdown, drug addiction, suicide and anomie" (it never occurs to him that "family breakdown" (40) may point to ability of women to get away from their abusers).
"The invasion of Ukraine could be the trigger for a greater collapse;: the final implosion of the Russian empire. Western liberals may cheer, but the process would not be peaceful. Almost inevitably it would involved bloodshed similar to that in former Yugoslavia, but on a much larger scale. With much of the country's natural wealth located in regions without Russian majorities, savage ethnic resource wars would be waged in which an authoritarian Muscovite regime struggled to suppress insurgent and conflicting nationalities. At the heart of these struggles would be one of the largest nuclear weapons arsenals in the world. A breakdown of Russian despotism comes with its own possibilities of apocalypse" (40)
Islamist and Hindutval ideologies draw on "Western ideas in which religion designates an exclusive identity [and] . . . also indebted to Western ideologies, notably Bolshevism and fascism, for some of their central themes" (42) (See Gray's _al Quaeda and what it means to be modern_
Xi has studied Carl Schmitt, a Nazi. While "for Hobbes [the purpose of the state] was the protection of individuals from violence and insecurity - an essentially liberal view - Schmitt tasked the state with the protection of a unified people." This is the part China likes - allows oppression of obliteration of Tibetans and Uighurs "in the name of public safety" (44). Chinese leaders cited Schmitt over Hong Kong.
China = panopticon: facial recognition technology, databases, social credit score, can be banned from trains and planes, or get priority health care and access to housing. (46)
"Xi imposed these technologies of control on a society that was already semi-demolished." a hundred million people were directly involved in violence of the Cultural Revolution as active participants or victims, most unpunished, so those who were victims of looting, torture, murder, now work alongside those who committed the crimes. (47). "As in Stalin's Russia, the supreme achievement of Mao's regime was to implicate the people in its crimes"
He can be quite didactic, even after admitting that no one thought Berlin Wall could fall and the total Russian state could collapse, it did - still he knows that transition to renewables will inevitably cause an apocalypse: "renewable energy is a fossil fuel derivative. The transition to renewable energy in which so much has been invested in the West is a chimera" (50) [just as much or more has been invested in solar panels in China].
"Bankrupted by falling prices' [after a transition away from oil], Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia would implode" into ethnic/sectarian violence for control of resources. (50).
Leontiev complex Russian thinker who foresaw a neo-feudalism and welcomed it.
62, 66, 68, 71, 100 (DD), 109, 110, 113 (DD), 114, 116, 118, 133, 135, 138, 148, 149, 153, 157, 159, 160,
Elites in Europe and NA for a while thought the "liberal order" had won after fall of Berlin Wall, but no. "Instead of China becoming more like the West, the West has become more like China. In both, the ruling economic system is a version of state capitalism. In each, wealth is heavily concentrated in small groups with powerful political leverage." Billionaires on Central Committee of Chinese Communist government, "in America, wealth buys power, while in China power creates and destroys wealth" (23).
Reviews all the death and uprooting of the revolutions in 1905, 1917, the Holodomor, the terror of the thirties that got rid of all the early leaders in Soviet Union, "The destruction of historic forms of common life was integral to the Soviet project. Forced-march industrialization dissolved communities more thoroughly than did the most extreme forms of capitalism in the West" (36). But even Russia did not suffer the most under Communism, by 1932 about a third of Mongolians had died, lamas killed, etc. (what Chinese repeated in Tibet). "Nothing on this scale happened in Soviet Russia or in Mao's China. Only the death toll of the Cambodian regime of Pol Pot - variously estimated as being between 13 and 30 percent of the population - comes close" (37).
"The genius of totalitarianismis that it makes its victims complicit in its crimes" (I'd say this is the genius of all government; or all society). (37) "soviet totalitarianism destroyed society and trapped the population in networks of mutual suspicion" (37).
"[Novelist Alexander] Zinoviev believed there was no way out from the Soviet sytstem, but in 1989-1991 a state that seemed everlasting evaporated almost overnight." (38). But then West imposed "shock therapy"/austerity, quality of life dropped to developing country; Putin came to power and there was some freedom and prosperity, yanked away again with 2022 invasion of Ukraine. "Unmaking one world to make another no less short-lived, apocalyptic events are normal in Russian history. Despite two world wars and many economic crises, wealth and freedom have increased in Western countries of the past hundred years. Against this background, the belief that history is a story of progress is a natural illusion." (38).
"If Russia's history does not show the gradual progress achieved in more fortunate Western states, neither does the model invoked by comparisons with fascism in interwar Europe. Once dictatorship was removed in these countries civil life reemerged. The Russian state oversees a society immemorially habituated to tyranny. if despotic rule ends, it will probably be followed by a lengthy period of chaos and bloodshed" (38).
Possible alternatives: "If the reforming Tsar Alexander II had not been assassinated in 1881 and the conservative modernizer Pyotr Stolypin in 1911; if the last tsar had not been so foolish, and the Menshevik leader, Alexander Kerensky, so weak; if Germany had not used Lenin to subvert the Russian war effort, tr the Western Allies had not induced Russia to continue it; if post-communist Russia had not been pressured by the West to adopt a socially disruptive programme of economic shock therapy - if any of these contingencies had been otherwise, Russia might not have been ruled by despots for so long. As it is, there is little prospect of the country breaking with its tyrannical past." (39).
In its corruption and terrible quality of life, moreso than the West: "family breakdown, drug addiction, suicide and anomie" (it never occurs to him that "family breakdown" (40) may point to ability of women to get away from their abusers).
"The invasion of Ukraine could be the trigger for a greater collapse;: the final implosion of the Russian empire. Western liberals may cheer, but the process would not be peaceful. Almost inevitably it would involved bloodshed similar to that in former Yugoslavia, but on a much larger scale. With much of the country's natural wealth located in regions without Russian majorities, savage ethnic resource wars would be waged in which an authoritarian Muscovite regime struggled to suppress insurgent and conflicting nationalities. At the heart of these struggles would be one of the largest nuclear weapons arsenals in the world. A breakdown of Russian despotism comes with its own possibilities of apocalypse" (40)
Islamist and Hindutval ideologies draw on "Western ideas in which religion designates an exclusive identity [and] . . . also indebted to Western ideologies, notably Bolshevism and fascism, for some of their central themes" (42) (See Gray's _al Quaeda and what it means to be modern_
Xi has studied Carl Schmitt, a Nazi. While "for Hobbes [the purpose of the state] was the protection of individuals from violence and insecurity - an essentially liberal view - Schmitt tasked the state with the protection of a unified people." This is the part China likes - allows oppression of obliteration of Tibetans and Uighurs "in the name of public safety" (44). Chinese leaders cited Schmitt over Hong Kong.
China = panopticon: facial recognition technology, databases, social credit score, can be banned from trains and planes, or get priority health care and access to housing. (46)
"Xi imposed these technologies of control on a society that was already semi-demolished." a hundred million people were directly involved in violence of the Cultural Revolution as active participants or victims, most unpunished, so those who were victims of looting, torture, murder, now work alongside those who committed the crimes. (47). "As in Stalin's Russia, the supreme achievement of Mao's regime was to implicate the people in its crimes"
He can be quite didactic, even after admitting that no one thought Berlin Wall could fall and the total Russian state could collapse, it did - still he knows that transition to renewables will inevitably cause an apocalypse: "renewable energy is a fossil fuel derivative. The transition to renewable energy in which so much has been invested in the West is a chimera" (50) [just as much or more has been invested in solar panels in China].
"Bankrupted by falling prices' [after a transition away from oil], Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia would implode" into ethnic/sectarian violence for control of resources. (50).
Leontiev complex Russian thinker who foresaw a neo-feudalism and welcomed it.
62, 66, 68, 71, 100 (DD), 109, 110, 113 (DD), 114, 116, 118, 133, 135, 138, 148, 149, 153, 157, 159, 160,
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?
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