Post-Liberal Musings of John Gray: A Book Review of The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

A Book Review of The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism by John Gray

Borrowing the title from R.G. Collingwood’s classic, The New Leviathan (1942), English Philosopher John Gray structured his work, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism, around Thomas Hobbes’ seminal work Leviathan (1651), which laid the foundation of the ‘social contract’ tradition used to justify a commonwealth. Hobbes employs the metaphor of ‘leviathan’—a term used to denote a giant sea monster in the Biblical tradition—to represent an absolute sovereign, whose existence is necessary to maintain order and peace in society. This sovereign in the Hobbesian schema enables us to escape the “state of nature” where life, in the absence of civil and political society, was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

The present work opens with the contention that “Twenty-first century states are becoming Leviathans,” yet ironically, they foster “insecurity” and revert us back to a “virtual state of nature.”¹ Thus, Gray contends that modern-day leviathans have given rise to social structures that do not align with the Hobbesian Leviathan but are similar to the “state of nature” that Hobbes desperately wanted to escape. So for Gray, the panacea is to bring them closer to Hobbes’ Leviathan, whose purpose is to protect individuals from one another and external foes, thereby ensuring peaceful coexistence. 

On the contrary, the leviathans of the 21st century promise salvation and meaning for their subjects in ‘material progress, security of belonging in imaginary communities and the pleasures of persecution.’² Gray, while foreshadowing the future of these new leviathans, sees Russia transform into a “steampunk Byzantium with nukes,” China continuing as a “high-tech panopticon,” the EU entering a global war while recovering its lost hegemony, and the U.S. descending into a chronic warfare among the identities and thereby becoming a playing field for “hybrid fundamental sects, woke cults and techno-futurist oligarchs.” The New Leviathans is an indictment of these new age leviathans, and in order for them to avoid collapsing under their own weight, they would do better if they resurrect the Hobbesian Leviathan as “the path to the future runs through the past” for Gray.³

Gray’s thought has evolved through various positions over the years, crystallizing into its current form in this work. In his first major work, Liberalism (1986), while professing himself a liberal, he sought to give an account of liberalism, its continuing influence, including its limits and difficulties. Three years later, he published a dozen essays in a single volume—Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy—in which he sounded the death knell of liberalism, concluding that the “particular path of justification of liberalism is a dead end and a liberal ideology an impossibility.”⁴ In his next significant work, Post-liberalism: Studies in Political Thought (1993), he tried to chart out the contours of “post-liberal perspective on government and society,” rejecting the foundationalist claims of liberal tradition while retaining his faith in its institutions, referring to them as best suited to achieve a modus vivendi. Eschewing all his earlier standpoints, he provincializes the supposed universality of liberal institutions, vouching for a pluralist conception instead, in Enlightenment’s Wake (1995). According to his estimate, post-communist societies can work out a framework for modus vivendi in which liberal practice is not accorded any privileges. Gray’s more recent works are less systematic and less organized, in which academic writing has given way to spontaneous prose. Some of the later works include Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and other Animals (2003) and Seven Types of Atheism (2018), while disparaging humanism in the former and evaluating various shades of contemporary atheism in the latter. 

The New Leviathans, is scattered with contentions that seem apparently disjointed, but they are skillfully woven together such that a reader can get a glimpse into the entire oeuvre of Gray’s intellectual landscape. The book consists of three chapters, each of which is in turn constituted of Gray’s apparently scattered musings themed around a select quote from Hobbes’ Leviathan. 

The first chapter opens with an epitaph to liberalism, whereby Gray tries to recover a reading of Hobbes that “can help us understand why liberal civilization has passed away”⁵ and ends with an uncanny mix of hope in emerging Artificial Intelligence technology and a pessimistic prophecy of disappearing human dominance over the planet—here borrowing from James Lovelock’s (1979) Gaia thesis that deems earth as a self-regulating living organism and thereby deprecates anthropocentrism. Throughout the chapter, Gray’s pessimism in liberalism’s ambitious claims is stated unambiguously. Contrary to popular belief, Gray claims that the end of the Cold War marked the “beginning of the end for liberalism,” for liberal values like liberty and democracy, whose triumph was declared by Franis Fukuyama, were soon found to be seriously undermined by the emergence of a repressive political culture that hegemonised the discourse on identity politics. 

The second chapter paints a gory picture of the Soviet state that, in Gray’s view, actively pursued a “God-building” project after having destroyed all traditional deities. He draws parallels between late-nineteenth-century Russian revolutionaries and early twenty-first-century Western “hyper-liberals,” both of whom share the belief that “human beings possess powers that used to be ascribed to the Deity.” Gray highlights how modern “hyper-liberal” culture deifies humans by attributing to them the capacity to liberate themselves from all contingent identities they have acquired “accidentally,” thereby granting them the power to be “whatever they wish.”⁶

The final chapter locates the origins of Liberalism in Western Christianity and engages in a scathing critique of contemporary woke culture. The origins of the ‘Woke’ culture can be traced back to the Black rights movement in the United States; however, contemporaneously, it is used to refer to an ethos exemplified by various social movements which highlight different kinds of social inequalities and advocate reform. Critics of these social movements use it in a pejorative sense to refer to the excessive moralising and intolerable culture symptomatic of the hyper liberal ideology from which these social movements have sprung up. Reminiscent of Thomas Spragens’ The Irony of Liberal Reason (1989), Gray writes that “Liberalism has once again become a creature eating on its own tail,” highlighting how the woke culture is hellbent on undermining the same civilization that has birthed the freedoms they currently enjoy.⁷ He offers a systematic reading of core ideals of Liberalism and unveils their affinity with those of Christianity.⁸

He further offers an overview of the deification of humanity through works of Auguste Comte and J. S. Mill, and artfully highlights the pitfalls of such an enterprise. Set on this process of remodeling individuals to actualise the assumed divinity in and through them—metonymized through unlimited freedom as defined earlier—the modern (new) leviathans end up becoming ‘totalitarian engineers of souls,’ rather than the Hobbesian ‘vessel(s) of peaceful co-existence.’ 

Further, Gray introduces the reader to his idea of Agonistic Liberalism that is undergirded by a radical faith in value pluralism. Agonistic Liberalism, unlike traditional liberalism, punctuates conflict and contestation over harmony and consensus as the overriding features of the political landscape, thereby capturing the conflictual and complex nature of human societies, which is an actual reflection of the dynamism and contingency found therein. As a result, it is more welcoming of the idea of value pluralism, which, when informing the public discourse, can potentially aid in reversing the depoliticization of the public sphere in contemporary liberal societies. Thus, it leaves no room for the imposition of a particular value system in resolving the matters of common concern. So, for Gray, the enforcement of any particular set of values by the state apparatus is doomed to fail. The debate about liberal rights, in that scenario, becomes a “political project promoted by the use of state power” that no longer reflects the “[diverse] values that are widely shared in the society.”⁹ If one were to survey the author’s colossal body of work, certain ideas would persistently recur. These include a critique of enlightenment rationalism and its birthchild, liberalism; a disbelief in the linear progress of history; pessimism about human nature; pluralism and anti-utopianism, or a distrust in grand-narratives, to use Jean-François Lyotard’s vocabulary. These three chapters offer a glimpse of the same range of ideas.

In those chapters, Gray’s book touches upon crucial aspects of modernity. It offers a robust internal critique of the liberal paradigm, highlighting its concomitant pathologies of unlimited freedom and a superficial universalism. Gray demonstrates that the liberal––and not Marxist—ideal of absolute individual liberty has engendered the contemporary ‘woke’ culture of Western societies.¹⁰ This insight problematizes the arguments of neo-conservatives like Jordan Peterson who is known, rather infamously, for attributing the origins of the contemporary woke culture and identity politics to post-modernism that, for him, is nothing but a ‘new skin’ of Marxism, and thus cannot be decoupled from the former. While critiquing the woke stance on identity formation, Gray takes a Hegelian approach, arguing that the identity of an individual cannot be a private fantasy but must be accepted by society, which in the Hegelian system would translate to recognition. For Hegel, identity formation is a dialectical process wherein self-consciousness can only emerge by interaction with and recognition from another consciousness.^{11 12} Similarly, Gray highlights the naive faith of liberals to consider the triumphal spread of their values like liberty and democracy inevitable, that ultimately led them to engage in “wars of choice” aimed at regime changes, as seen in Iraq 2003 or Libya 2011—wherever they were deemed to be obstructing the historical progression of realising the liberal utopia. This scheme, however, proved to be self-defeating as the U.S experienced firsthand when it was forced to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2021 after two decades of war. Gray refuses to see this debacle merely as “unsuccessful exercises in democracy,” but sees it as a symptom of a much deeper problem—one rooted in faulty beliefs about the essence of human beings and their societies. Gray therefore aims at denuding the liberal paradigm of its humanistic veneer and its concomitant pathology of deifying the individual, bringing the reader face to face with its systemic contradictions. However, he doesn’t recant his faith in liberalism and, rather, continues to profess faith in it, albeit a reformed version—a (neo)Hobbesian liberalism. This reformed version offering a modus vivendi is underpinned by a belief in what can be termed as a normative fact of pluralism of human societies. So far, so good. 

Nonetheless, Gray’s work doesn’t address the logistical challenges of accommodating this pluralism in the praxis of state or nation building.¹³ Gray’s project of Agonistic Liberalism bears a close resemblance to the contemporary Post-Marxist project of Agonistic Democracy that attempts to retain pluralism in societies without hollowing out the concept of the political. Howbeit, the latter acknowledges that there are limits to this pluralism and that the construction of democratic societies necessitates a citizenry that professes allegiance to a set of “shared ethico-political principles,’ but Gray’s work doesn’t clearly address this problem.¹⁴ No matter the system, the political is inevitably an exercise in hegemony, and Gray seems to underestimate that. 

Gray’s anti-rationalist attitude, combined with his opposition to ethical traditions embodying humanistic features, makes him toe an emotivist line whereby ethical and political issues are insusceptible to closure and can only be resolved temporally by political compromise. Emotivism is a theory in modern moral philosophy that considers evaluative moral judgements as expressions of attitude, feeling, or preference. Gray adopts a similar stance in dismissing any attempts to settle the moral debates by rational argumentation as futile.¹⁵ Even on the issue of abortion—one of the most contentious issues in the contemporaneous western political culture, so much so, that it has given rise to two bitterly polarised groups “pro-choice” who support the abortion rights for women, and “pro-life” who are bent on criminalizing the very practice—Gray suggests, again building on Hobbesian logic, that we do not need to subscribe to any particular view on abortion be it utilitarian, deontological or non-liberal based on moral law, or even Hobbes’ own view. Instead of substantive consensus, our goal should be modus vivendi, for rational argumentation is neither capable of resolving moral and political conundrums nor can it distinguish the stronger rational argument from the weaker one. 

This morally absurdist standpoint not only frustrates the liberal tradition, but at the same time, it is detrimental to any comprehensive non-liberal tradition, including Gray’s own position of value pluralism. He draws this conclusion because he contests the notion of ‘human exceptionalism’ and vehemently denies any unique human attributes that mark them different from animals like rationality, ethics, and so on. Drawing on Hobbes, Gray contends that values originate in the human animal, not in God or some spiritual realm.¹⁶ Insofar as the ethical issues are concerned, their unresolvable nature aligns with the modern sensibilities; however, the political pessimism manifested by Gray has led many humanists to dub him a nihilist and an absurdist, so much so that some of them find more hope in nihilism than in John Gray’s philosophy.¹⁷ However, Gray finds it unsurprising that his critique of humanism is labeled as nihilistic because for him, any view which contravenes human exceptionalism “is bound to be seen as nihilistic.”¹⁸

Likewise, when Gray criticizes all grand-narratives, he fails to demonstrate adequately as to why his own position shouldn’t be treated as one among the competing grand-narratives in the marketplace of ideas. On one hand, he insists on the unviability of absolute freedom, yet his own framework of agonistic liberalism seems to exhibit an affinity with relativism—which in essence roots for the blanket freedom to all competing positions and voices, given the absence of an objective reality. Further, Gray laments the depoliticization of contested issues when transported to the realm of legislation. Given the lack of a monolithic audience, the attempt to thrust a particular position top-down on the masses is a recipe for disaster. Instead, he argues that these issues need to be contested and resolved through politics.¹⁹ Had Gray continued to explain how this resolution can take place in praxis, this argument would have had more force. He naively overlooks the fact that, even in the realm of politics, these issues can only be resolved by and through power, which is distributed disproportionately among sections of society. Consequently, the power-yielding groups often translate their victories in politics to legislative corridors. 

As stated earlier, Gray fills this book with insights drawn from his own life experiences. Thus, readers might be left perplexed about the book’s actual scope. Like Gray has subtitled it, it is indeed a collection of ‘thoughts after liberalism’—and not rigorous theory. Owing to its ambitious gaze, the text, especially the second chapter, betrays a sense of monotony, often straying into tangential discussions of various German and Russian philosophers. And for those theory-geeks who might come to this book for food for academic theorisation proper, it is going to be a stretch of barren land. Notwithstanding the density of its ideas, the book manages to convey them to the reader without relying heavily on jargon, making this work more accessible to the common sensibilities compared to other works of its class. Its precise language enables it to successfully stake claim to a larger audience; however, that comes at the expense of depth, as it glosses over certain nuanced ideas that warrant a deeper explanation. Be that as it may, Gray’s drawing of parallels between historical totalitarian regimes and the current political trends, especially of the western society that rests on a degenerate liberalism, makes this work relevant to our times.

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Works Cited:

1. Gray, John. The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023. p. 7. [↩]
2. Gray, John. The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023. p. 22. [↩]
3. Gray, John. The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023. p. 162. [↩]
4. Gray, John. Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy. Routledge, 1989, p. vii. [↩]
5. Gray, John. The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023. p. 10. [↩]
6. Gray, John. The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023. p. 61. [↩]
7. Gray, John. The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023. p. 60. [↩]
8. Gray, John. The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023. p. 96. [↩]
9. Gray, John. The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023. p. 104. [↩]
10. Gray, John. The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023. p. 92. [↩]
11. Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller, Oxford University Press, 1977. Originally published 1807. [↩]
12. Habib, M. A. R. Hegel and the Foundations of Literary Theory. Cambridge University Press, 2019, p. 172. [↩]
13. Asad, T. (2018). Secular translations: Nation-state, modern self, and calculative reason. Columbia University Press. pp. 140. [↩]
14. Mouffe, C. (2005). On the political. Routledge. pp. 122. [↩]
15. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. [↩]
16. Gray, John. The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023. p. 15. [↩]
17. Eagleton, Terry. “Humanity and Other Animals.” [Review of the book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, by J. Gray]. The Guardian, 7 Sept. 2002, www.theguardian.com/books/2002/sep/07/highereducation.news2. [↩]
18. Norton, John, and Geoffrey Newey, editors. The Political Theory of John Gray. Routledge, 2007. [↩]
19. Gray, John. The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023. p. 105. [↩]