John Gray on ‘The New Leviathans – Thoughts after Liberalism’
Published 2024-04-24
In 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 Soviet Union ushered in an era of near-apocalyptic 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.
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All Comments (15)
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Perhaps the most erudite and wordly political philosopher. I wish you would write more, or write a truly expansive ‘academic’ book about modernity, John!
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Someone should have asked him about the role of Islam in the West in the next 50 years.
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So how many were in the room? Put me in the tombola for… 29, amazing talk tho, will watch again, been a big fan for many years
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1:01/49 h melville. What about the Thomas Armstrong novel of Liverpool "King cotton " ? My Dad swore by it.
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2024 People worried about about the future should ask themselves why they think this time is any different to being in any other time..I wouldn’t want tobe in 1940s
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I noticed recently as an avid searcher for new philosophy books that John Grays books that used to be a staple have all disappeared ? Has he been cancelled?
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And the Rennes professor Jaques Guys "a journey across the channell" He taught here on exchange. "
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53:12 'I think the next [what?] is probably going to be universities....'
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👏👏👏
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Zeihan and Gray should get together for a discussion in the same room.
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John gray is a dove, a propaganda mouthpiece for the establishment.
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London is nice & safe & pieceful
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I found it disturbing that Grey adopted Collingwood’s title but never distanced himself from Collingwood – you should know what I mean - if you have read Collingwood’s advice on bullying and lying in politics. To me Grey maybe understood Russian and China but did not understand England. I would start the clock with Bacon not Hobbes, and see a slow crawl towards scientific enlightenment and democracy which really reached a peak with universal suffrage in 1928, pushed by Mill, Russell etc. Keynes, like Collingwood, was terrified of democracy and was actively working to undermine it before it even started. That is undeniable, but Grey seemed completely blind to it. From this outing he seemed to have (correctly) rejected the frying pan of complacency in Fukuyama, but only in order to (disastrously) jump into the fire of arbitrary denial of scientific and social progress served up by Kuhn. The both of them rather deliberate corollaries to Keynes
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Such a pessimist. Then admits to writing for the guardian 😂
