The New Leviathans

Thoughts After Liberalism

John Gray

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Hardback

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English

Allen Lane
01 December 2023

Philosophy; Ethics & moral philosophy; Social & political philosophy; History of ideas

A philosophical meeting of minds, as John Gray reads Thomas Hobbes to understand our current predicament

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?

By: John Gray
Imprint: Allen Lane
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 222mm, Width: 144mm, Spine: 22mm
Weight: 316g
ISBN: 9780241554951
ISBN 10: 0241554950
Pages: 192
Publication Date: 01 December 2023
Audience: General/trade , Professional and scholarly , College/higher education , ELT Advanced , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

John Gray is a political philosopher, whose books include Seven Types of Atheism, Straw Dogs, Black Mass, The Soul of the Marionette, The Silence of Animals and Feline Philosophy. He now principally writes for the New Statesman.

Reviews for The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

Gray is conscientiously illusionless, scrupulously refusing to believe in any of the ideals and comforting dreams that humans use to protect themselves against reality. This, perhaps, explains his popularity with my own much-disillusioned generation ... Gray’s philosophy is the thread that joins my friends of disparate political inclinations. -- James Marriott * The Times * An elegy for western liberalism ... a bracing thinker. -- Stuart Jeffries * Daily Telegraph *