The New Leviathans

Hardcover, 192 pages

English language

Published Dec. 8, 2023 by Penguin Books, Limited.

ISBN:: 978-0-241-55495-1

(2 reviews)

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 West: 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 …

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 West: 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?

3 editions

Matthew reviewed The New Leviathans by John Gray

Gloomy times

4 stars

John Gray's diagnosis of the slow decay of the liberal world order rings true. His reflections on the Russian war on Ukraine, as well as the history of the totalitarian Soviet Communist state, help to illustrate the mindset of the Russian people(s). His excoriating critique of so-called 'woke' ideology justifies a read by itself, as are his brief but illuminating relitigation of the ideas explored in Tom Holland's Dominion and Peter Turchin's End Times.

"Hyper-liberal ideology plays a number of roles. It operates as a rationale for a failing variety of capitalism, and a vehicle through which surplus elites struggle to secure a position of power in society. Insofar as it expresses a coherent set of ideas, it is the anti-Western creed of an antinomian intelligentsia that is ineffably Western. Psychologically, it provides an ersatz faith for those who cannot live without the hope of universal salvation inculcated by Christianity." …

John Gray's diagnosis of the slow decay of the liberal world order rings true. His reflections on the Russian war on Ukraine, as well as the history of the totalitarian Soviet Communist state, help to illustrate the mindset of the Russian people(s). His excoriating critique of so-called 'woke' ideology justifies a read by itself, as are his brief but illuminating relitigation of the ideas explored in Tom Holland's Dominion and Peter Turchin's End Times.

"Hyper-liberal ideology plays a number of roles. It operates as a rationale for a failing variety of capitalism, and a vehicle through which surplus elites struggle to secure a position of power in society. Insofar as it expresses a coherent set of ideas, it is the anti-Western creed of an antinomian intelligentsia that is ineffably Western. Psychologically, it provides an ersatz faith for those who cannot live without the hope of universal salvation inculcated by Christianity." (p. 110)

Matthew

rated it

Jan 27

Subjects

philosophy
politics
history

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