‘The New Leviathans’: Monsters of Our Own Making
A review of ‘The New Leviathans’, by John Gray; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.
Thomas Hobbes thought that if we did not submit to a ‘Leviathan’ ruler then our lives would be ‘nasty, brutish and short’. So his imagined ‘state of nature’ wasn’t all that pleasant. There was no law, no property, no justice. Fear was the ruling theme, and a fearful person tends to be a violent one. Given this, Hobbes thought we would all sign up to a ‘social contract’ and bow to a common power strong enough to stop us from doing awful things to one another.
No surprise, then, that our Thomas is usually thought to have had a rather gloomy view of human nature. Rousseau, for contrast, thought that in the state of nature, we could just call a meeting and decide how we wished to live; he thought that we were basically all right, and that society made us corrupt. But John Gray thinks the picture Hobbes paints in his Leviathan is not pessimistic enough. In fact, he thinks that Hobbes thought well of us:
‘Only humans seek death for themselves, and inflict it on others, in order to secure meaning in their lives or vent their rage at its absence; to realise some idea through which they can achieve a spurious exemption from mortality; and on occasion to wreak death on the world out of a passion for destruction. Hobbes’s pessimism is only seeming. When he asserts that self-preservation is the path to peace, he writes not as a realist but as a utopian visionary.’
But John Gray thinks the picture Hobbes paints in his Leviathan is not pessimistic enough. Indeed, he thinks it is cheerful.
This sets the tone for The New Leviathan, a lean, contrarian list of complaints in which Gray, a longtime sceptic of liberal humanism, mourns not the fall but what he sees as the end of liberalism, and its replacement by something darker, yet more familiar. Hobbes’s treatise (incidentally, the first work of philosophy ever published in English) is the lens to which Gray constantly returns, and through which he refracts our modern malaise. He sees the reemergence of Leviathan in Russia’s nationalism, China’s surveillance state, and the West’s domestic squabbles; in each, the state acts as a kind of engineer of the soul.
Gray believes that Hobbes is a liberal, at least insofar as he thinks the basic unit of the state is the person. Hobbes starts not with custom or tribe but with the individual, scared and alone in a world without order. The sovereign is all-powerful, but he exists to protect that individual. Today’s Leviathans do not just keep the peace, says Gray: they control thought, feeling and identity itself. This is no neutral umpire, then, preventing ‘a war of all against all’. The state plays a far more active and zealous role in our lives, with the ultimate aim of creating meaning. The belief that took root in the wake of the Cold War—that liberal democracy was, as Fukuyama claimed, ‘The End of History’—now seems silly. Russia is a theocratic-mafia state that uses menace, force, and religion to engineer obedience, threatens its neighbours with nuclear war, and starves its rivals of food and energy. China is an all-seeing Benthamite Panopticon slowly crushing what is left of individuality—more Huxley’s Brave New World than Orwell’s 1984.
Hobbes’s treatise, the first work of philosophy ever published in English, is the lens to which Gray constantly returns, and through which he refracts our modern malaise.
The ‘state of nature’ that Hobbes imagined was marked by an absence of order. Today’s ‘states of nature’ are invented conditions where insecurity is fostered in the name of safety. In the West, Gray thinks, we are once again ruled by fear—but fear of shame, ostracism, and cancellation. The death of which we are at risk is a ‘social death’, to use Eric Kaufman’s term. In other words, we are afraid to say the wrong thing or be the wrong kind of person, lest we lose our friends and jobs. For Gray, we Westerners are always treading on eggshells. The liberal mask has slipped, he says, and beneath it isn’t freedom, but surveillance with a moral face. Where we tolerated we must now affirm, what once protected speech condemns it, and the language of inclusion has been coopted to control. Gray claims that the ‘hyper-liberalism’ of our day has no metaphysical counterweight. Cut off from history, cut off from tradition, cut off from common values, all that remains are competing claims for power: woke versus woke, identity versus identity. This emptiness is readily filled by ever-more brawny Leviathans. These ‘new Leviathans’ are insidious and invasive, and justify their trespass on our minds, moods and morals by appealing to our safety.
Well, gosh. But Gray isn’t done. What kind of animal, he wonders, gives up its freedom quite so willingly? Perhaps, he thinks, the true Leviathan is within us. We are not just what Aristotle called zoon politikon, ‘political animals’, then. We are obsessive, hungry for meaning, fixated on death. In the face of grand cosmic uncertainty we grasp at illusions. Gray sees in the cosmic pessimism of H.P. Lovecraft our true quandary: that we are small, frightened creatures, and our inner Leviathan is our basic wish to survive at any cost. The modern state is the exterior shape of an interior need — for security, for meaning, and for escape from the terror of being. It is we, says Gray, who summon the Leviathan.
For Gray, we are treading on eggshells. The liberal mask, then, has slipped, and beneath it isn’t freedom, but surveillance with a moral face.
Which is all very bleak. This is Gray’s style: grim, a little frenzied, perhaps a little too sure of himself, and at times ad hominem. ‘Woke’ is a monolith, and its champions are caricatures, the liberal élite are redundant graduates, etc. etc. But this would be a very different book if he hedged and qualified. He is not selling bone-dry philosophy, but a polemic, or perhaps a jeremiad, both of which are much more fun. He likes presenting us with stark alternatives: Leviathan or the abyss, tyranny or chaos. And he collects a wide array of characters and stories which give his book the flavour of a mosaic, more than an argument. That said, he surely isn’t wrong to say that modern states like to think of themselves as shapers of our souls: the plainest irony of modern liberalism is surely its obvious illiberalism. I do not go out of my way to upset people (unless they have really earned it), but come on: we ought to be able to say what we want. We are not children.
One of the better things about a thinker like Gray is that he avoids the trap of thinking the diagnostician must be the healer. He is absolutely at peace with setting out a very long list of problems and then, as it were, wandering off. He is neither on the left nor the right; unlike most critics of liberalism, he views a wish to return to the past as silly. And this is good for the book, which is bleak, erudite, and incisive in its attack on the certainties of modern liberals whom, in Gray’s view, believe themselves to be marching towards bright, sunlit uplands when they are in fact sleepwalking into the abyss. Perhaps his message, if he has one, is to build up the inner citadel and stop trying to make a heaven of earth. In any case, The New Leviathans feels like a refreshingly cold splash of reality.
