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.

Key Themes Explored:

• The collapse of the USSR ushered in an era of near apoplectic triumphalism in the West, marked by a genuine belief in a rational, liberal, well-managed future for humankind.
• This optimism assumed that tyranny, nationalism, and unreason were relics of the past.
• However, the decades since have been filled with terrible events and the flourishing of poisonous ideas, challenging these liberal certainties.

Hobbes, Gray suggests, would not share the confidence that these issues are mere aberrations that will dissolve away.

Why Read The New Leviathans?

Filled with fascinating and challenging perceptions, The New Leviathans is a powerful meditation on historical and current folly. As a species, we seem to continually struggle to confront the reality of base and delusive human instincts.

Might a more self-aware, realistic, and disabused ethics help us all? This is the thought-provoking question Gray leaves us to ponder.