The New Leviathans by John Gray: An unflinching journey into the bowels of the human condition

The Leviathan takes different forms in different parts of the world and throughout history, but no single Leviathan is inevitable, or so John Gray would have us believe. The Leviathan is both a biblical sea monster from the Book of Job and the defining metaphor of English philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 book Leviathan, where it embodied a sovereign power shielding society from its collapse into anarchy or the “state of nature”.

To Gray, who rejects the notion of steering history toward a purposeful “end”, both communism and democratic capitalism are “political experiments”, rather than preordained outcomes. These Leviathans or forms of human government have had – in the case of Soviet Russia – and continue to have – in the case of Western “hyperliberal woke” societies – enormous costs.

How can we reconcile such real-life costs with the millenarian fantasies of the revolutionaries who set these “political experiments” in motion? This is where Gray challenges his reader to great effect, drawing on a refreshingly deep blend of historical fact, political knowledge and philosophy.

The enactment of political fantasies into their antithesis is a central theme of the book, which focuses, with a general aura of tragicomedy, on the myths that propel human actions forward. The collapse of the Soviet Union did not, as the West augured, mark the spread of liberal values, but rather “the beginning of the end for liberalism as it had previously been understood”.

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This central paradox has a rather disorienting effect, shifting the reader’s ethnocentric frame of reference beyond the Anglosphere to China, the Middle East, Africa. From this new vantage point, the Western liberal’s “universal movement of human emancipation” looks more like “a symptom of Western decline”.

Gray’s skill lies in unmasking widely accepted contradictions. Take, for example, our hyperliberal romance with unlimited freedom, which, the author asserts, is itself a brand of tyranny. Rather than protecting society from the “state of nature”, Gray suggests that this new Leviathan – whose remit extends far beyond that envisioned by Hobbes – is generating its own “artificial states of nature” in the form of never-ending wars between self-created identities.

With a heady mix of confidence and perspicuity, Gray sheds light on the West’s complicated relationship with itself and its own evolution: our self-contradictory attempts to deconstruct Western power structures, values and institutions while remaining irrevocably defined by them. Interestingly, the political philosopher characterises the hyperliberal, “woke” movement as an intolerant derivative of monotheistic Christianity.

While this idea is not entirely original – American linguist John McWhorter makes a similar argument in his recent book Woke Racism: How A New Religion Betrayed America – Gray draws an interesting, unique parallel between the late liberal West and tsarist Russia. Both, he writes, “produced an intelligentsia that attacked the society that nurtured them ... from within”.

Hyper-critical of the totalitarian regimes in both Russia and China, Gray’s most scathing criticisms are reserved for the “woke”, whom he condemns for lacking any solid intellectual heritage. ”Hyper-liberalism vulgarizes postmodern philosophy” just as “fascism debased Nietzsche’s thinking,” he says, and “no woke ideologue comes anywhere close to Karl Marx in rigour, breadth and depth of thought”.

Such polemics are likely to alienate some readers, not because of the substance of the criticisms, but because of the manner in which they are delivered: with a dollop of scorn. Gray is given to straying from reason with occasional hyperbolic outbursts, such as when he claims that the contemporary West, “a spectacle of self-immolation, at once tragic and farcical”, lacks the self-awareness even for suicide.

While he might be forgiven his passion, Gray also exhibits a tendency to take refuge in his astute criticisms as he flits from one target to the next, never quite landing upon a definitive stance. Towards the end of the book, it becomes possible, if only fleetingly, to locate him: “There is no deliverance from the state of nature,” he opines. Here, Gray departs from Hobbes, who believed that the right Leviathan could act as a bulwark against our dissolution.

For Gray, there is no escape from the “nothingness” inside human beings, which drives us to our own ruin in the name of abstract myths – myths that were designed paradoxically to defend us against this very nothingness, a euphemism for death. The Leviathan is no permanent bulwark since it is, itself, a human creation. In the author’s view, Hobbes’s failure to recognise this inescapable drive to destruction, which originates not from outside but from within us, is symptomatic of unwelcome idealism.

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In the end, however, Gray appears to fall into a similar trap by attempting to resolve an existential dilemma of gargantuan proportions with the neat, abstract clause: “ ... human beings can act in the service of life”.

Despite its flaws, Gray’s book offers an incisive, unflinching journey into the bowels of the human condition. For those who do not mind hanging out inside echoey existential pits, his writing offers a long-awaited departure from the somewhat shallow, recycled musings of the mainstream.