‘The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism‘ is the philosopher John Gray’s latest book-length work. As long time readers may be aware, I am a huge fan of his. This was one book I could not wait for the official U.S. release of, and ordered a U.K. copy early so as not to have to wait until November to read it. It helps that it will be used, along with some other of his works, as part of a longer term research project I am just beginning to embark on.

Those who are unfamiliar with much of Gray’s work will find this book bracing, unique, and a welcome antidote to the normal neoliberal consensus/culture war echo chamber of our decaying order where nations pretend to be fighting for the angels of light against the forces of darkness, and mediocre politicians such as Gavin Newsom and Ron DeSantis square up to have debates over who can be the better Not-President.

Those who are familiar with Gray’s work, however, will find little new here. The Ukraine War has given Gray an extreme fascination with historical writers and thinkers in Russian history, which colors most of the central portion of the book. His (correct) disgust at early Soviet attempts to create ‘a new man’ becomes a tad overdone in his list of aphoristic anecdotes, to the expense of the first and closing sections of the book, which, in my opinion, are superior. If you have read Black Mass, Soul of a Marionette, Two Faces of Liberalism, and The Immortalization Commission, however, you will not find wholly new material here. Only new combinations centered loosely around the framing of Thomas Hobbes.

The overall argument is one I have made before myself, while citing Gray and his prior work no less, Hobbes -along with Spinoza- was the true and original liberal (before it began to mutate into a messianic religion starting with Kant and Rousseau and reaching full apotheosis in the present day neoliberal). His Leviathan, for all its flaws, was a useful and practical attempt to escape the delusions of endless sectarian warfare and the social engineering of Puritans by creating a society that could arbitrate between different groups, allowing diversity to exist below the state while retaining outward facing unity.

As society has changed, however, so too has this Hobbesian state edifice-the Leviathan. I myself have written before about its becoming an out of control beast that is no longer restrained by human-tier comprehension. (Considering Gray has a subsection on Lovecraft in this new book, I cannot help but wonder if he has read this blog). Gray wants to focus on how the Chinese social credit Panopticon and the Russian theocratic-mafia edifice are also now rival leviathans to the neoliberal-woke hybrid in the North Atlantic. Not just to let his readers know that the world is currently multipolar and the liberal internationalist experiment has failed, but also to lament the passing of the old secular Leviathan. A Hobbes brought forward in time might recognize Singapore or some of the Latin American states, but would not recognize these three creatures.

For in place of the old has come the Leviathan taken over by the very forces it was meant to control and dissipate. The Leviathan of the missionaries which seeks total control over the private as well as public sphere. The old and perpetually failed project of directed human betterment to bring about the great teleology which is always claimed to be around the corner, yet never arrives. There is no diversity and keeping the peace, no navigating the necessity of a balance of power, only eternal war of The Elect against all who are not Elect. The very thing the Leviathan was meant to prevent is the thing it is becoming. It is mandatory inclusiveness in sectarian war.

Gray once had a bunch of reactionaries who gravitated to his thought. Such people suddenly stopped writing about him favorably once Seven Types of Atheism was released and it became obvious that his true target in attacking humanist pathos was the religion that inspired it. In New Leviathans he reminds us of why this was with his bracing honesty at the intellectual lineage of the dire process he speaks about:

All four of the defining ideas of liberal thought are continuations of Christian monotheism. The primary of the individual is a secular translation of the belief that each human being is created by the deity, which has an authority over them that transcends worldly power. The egalitarian belief that human beings have the same moral status reproduces the that all human beings are equal in the sight of God. Liberal universalism- the belief that generically human attributes are more important than particular cultural identities- reflects the idea that humankind is created in God’s image. The belief that human institutions are indefinitely improvable replicates the theistic faith that history is a moral narrative of sin followed by redemption.
The ancient pre-Christian world accepted that the evils of human life recur in unending cycles. The secular humanist faith in progress is a pseudo-solution to the so-called problem of evil, which arises only with the belief in a benevolent and omnipotent creator-god. […] This Christian message inflamed the millenarian movements of medieval times and the secular revolutionaries of the twentieth century. It underpinned classical liberalism, and inspires hyper-liberals today. In woke movements, victimhood confers moral authority, as it does in Christianity.

This book is a warning. It may not be one needed by those already familiar with Gray, but it is one that more people should heed. Though perhaps I might be more likely to recommend Black Mass or Two Faces of Liberalism above it. Nevertheless, the central thesis holds up. To quote from the conclusion:

The deification of the human animal was alien to Hobbes’ way of thinking as the divination of power. Leviathan was mortal just as every human being was mortal. There is no final deliverance from the state of nature. This is Hobbes’s hidden message, which he never fully accepted himself.
If Leviathan is human artifice, politics is a necessary art. The task of the age is not to bind to the new Leviathans, as was attempted in the late liberal era, but to bring them close to what Hobbes believed they could be- a vessel of peaceful coexistence. In recognizing that peace can be achieved in many types of regime, Hobbes was a truer liberal than those that came after him. The belief that a single form of rule is best for everyone is itself a kind of tyranny.