The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

Political philosopher Gray (Feline Philosophy) proffers an idiosyncratic excoriation of liberalism, authoritarianism, and dogmatism in this wild and wide-ranging treatise. Gray’s departure point is 17th-century Englishman Thomas Hobbes, who argued that only Leviathan—the state, a single entity more powerful than any individual—could provide the stability and safety necessary to extinguish the individualistic free-for-all of every man for himself. Gray contends that today, the liberal Leviathan of Western democracy is little more than a hollow husk riven by internal division, and that illiberal worldviews proposed by Russia and China pose a serious threat as appealing alternatives. “The new Leviathans offer meaning in material progress, the security of belonging in imaginary communities and the pleasures of persecution,” he writes, citing as examples the “intelligent despotism” of Xi Jinping’s China and charismatic oligarchy of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Both of these illiberal orders seem, to Gray, to function better and have more promising futures than the woke “antinomian intelligentsia” of Western societies, “which professes to instruct society by deconstructing its institutions and values.” Drawing on thinkers from H.P. Lovecraft to Nietzsche to Russian mystics and 20th-century psychoanalysts, this florid romp, while entertaining, fails to convince. Gray aims to outrage, but for those who do not already agree with him, his impassioned posturing falls flat. (Nov.)