In The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism, John Gray examines the evolution of sovereign dominion since the era of Thomas Hobbes, weaving his analysis through the lens of Hobbes himself. The bounds of governing institutions have expanded, contracted, then expanded again since Hobbes’ time. But the advance of Leviathans has not always proceeded in ways which Hobbes had conceived. John Gray tells us that, as the 21st century continues to unfold, Leviathans of a particularly strange character are encroaching.

In the main, I’m an optimist. But I still enjoy reading John Gray. I suppose its because I like to sharpen the blade by testing my ideas against the best opposition. And John Gray is pretty good. This book exhibits his usual merits and demerits. There is Gray’s highly pessimistic attitude and near-misanthropy. It features the usual pattern of Gray using bits of his philosophy, like surgical instruments, to dismember high-minded schemes and ideals. The usual obscure anecdotes of human suffering and extremity are included as well, and the demonstrable mastery of the history of ideas. This book is the most timely of Gray’s works, as far as I know. While in others he takes on philosophical topics in general, and only loosely relates their application to the present, in New Leviathans he is writing about events and trends of the 2020s.

Well, mostly. In keeping with his usual style, the book follows a meandering and discursive path. The anecdotes and arguments put forth do not always support a primary thesis. Gray is at pains to puncture anyone’s hope about anything with Enlightenment roots, so he will often do a drive-by on some unrelated idea or project just because he’s in the neighborhood. But despite the roaming, aphoristic form there is a main theme. It can be approximately stated as “Liberalism is dead and new Leviathans have arisen in it’s stead”.

Gray’s language is at times hyperbolic. But when he says that liberalism has passed into history, he really means that the torch of Liberal hopes has burned out. He isn’t taking aim at the state of liberal institutions so much as he is at elite opinion and mindset. Ask yourself this: if our liberal institutions completely fell apart today, would our elites have the energy to rebuild them? The answer is obvious. And liberal democracy failed to spread around the world as the endpoint of political evolution, which these same elites once proclaimed amid the triumphalist glow of Soviet collapse. The march to a Western-led liberal order of peaceful free-trade was regarded as a matter of fact. China, India and Russia were all headed in this direction and it was said to be inevitable. Yet instead of continually expanding liberty and rule of law, we got authoritarian regimes, rulers for life and a war in Europe.

Its a mistake to view a Leviathan as merely an authoritative king or a strong state. And that’s probably why Hobbes chose it for his metaphor: a Leviathan is large, powerful and partially indefinite — like the biblical sea monster. It amounts to a settlement among fellow countrymen which serves to curb each individual’s behavior to preserve order. Hobbes had a king in mind, true, but the king cannot rule if his legitimacy is not widely respected. So this legitimacy is part and parcel of the Leviathan itself. And where is legitimacy? In men’s minds. Leviathans are impersonal and transcend states, government buildings, and written law.

With this in mind, we can begin to recognize the new and strange Leviathans which are extending their tentacles here in the late-stage capitalist West. The birthplace of liberalism is now the site of its retreat. No, we are not living under a totalitarian system and we won’t be anytime soon. You can still say ‘I live in a liberal democracy’ and be largely correct. But there is no doubt that new Leviathans are circumscribing our behavior and directing our affairs in ways that would have been unthinkable but twenty years ago.

Perhaps wokism is the most obvious example. Here is the US, where our identity had been ‘land of the free’, both the right to and the spirit of free speech were understood to be sacrosanct across the political spectrum since the Founding Fathers. Art which must serve a political end was rightly recognized as propaganda and thought to be found exclusively in the domain of dictatorships. Yet fast-forward a bit, and there isn’t a single forum for arts where they aren’t judged by how they support political causes. Universities and schools inculcate the ruling progressive ideology and are governed by inquisitorial regimes. Language must be purified of any traces of thought-crime. Saying the wrong thing can cost you your job in a flash. And while you’re on the job, your mind is not a private realm but must come under scrutiny for hidden bias and errors. The most interesting aspect of this phenomenon is that its is not enforced by the state, as in 20th century Leviathans. Civil society willingly polices itself.

Gray states that surplus elites are adding to the woke drumbeat. The idea is that society, as late, has produced more elites that it can usefully absorb. Of all causes of wokism, this is one I never directly considered. Professional elites feel their job insecurity acutely and DEI has become a vehicle for trying to make their position more secure.

He also writes that wokism serves as an ersatz religion for those who cannot live without the hope of universal salvation. Here he is spot on, but he fails to explain why this religion and not others. For this reason his treatment is not quite adequate. Does DEI serve as a justification for a failing variety of capitalism, as Gray insists? This is most certainly correct but there is more that should be emphasized. The need for the rich and powerful to spin a narrative which justifies their position has always been. The trouble now is that exporting jobs to China and using software and LLMs to replace them has got the owners of capital boxed in to a corner. They can no longer reach for the “we‘re job creators” gloss. Neither will they invoke God or the divine, as they did long ago, since Christianity is dead to the masses. So woke is what they are left with.

Gray notes that woke is not Marxism, as Ben Shapiro-type conservatives allege. Again, he’s right but missing the chief point. Marxists are concerned with the conflict among classes (roughly speaking, between rich and poor). The fabulously wealthy Hollywood studios, Wall Street firms and tech companies which champion woke and DEI have little to say about income inequality and for good reason. For how would that  be remedied? Never mind! The real injustice in this world is lack of diversity! Simply hire a few gays, stock the office with young women — be sure to post about it — and all will be well.

Perhaps less obvious than the woke invasion is the expanded role of government in economic affairs. Oh sure, we have never been a purely free market. But we really aren’t in Kansas anymore. Quantitative easing during the pandemic increased the money supply by an ungodly percentage. Governments have become something of a capital-allocator-in-chief. In America the Fed backstops about 10% of all corporate debt, which is totally unprecedented. The scale of government borrowing is an order of magnitude higher than previous eras. The Keynesians giving way to austere Friedmanites is widely recognized as an economic watershed. But the change we have just made in the early ’20s is just as profound, if less talked about. Perhaps some thought things would return to normalcy after the pandemic. But they haven’t: the state has a permanently broader and deeper reach across the economy. The pundit class once proclaimed that China would become more like us, but it is us who has become more like China.

Gray’s discussion of trends abroad brings us to state-supported Leviathans which do not hide. What is presented strongly supports his contention (now all but universally accepted) that these states are not following an evolutionary course toward liberal democracy.

China’s tech-powered state panopticon is terrifying. Gray has an interesting way of characterizing it. He describes it as a vast political experiment, a “project of surpassing the scientific and technological advances of liberal societies while preserving social cohesion by means of an intelligent despotism”. Here I hope they fail. And I still believe that America has the advantage. Gray acknowledges that China has made mistakes, and he is uncertain if America would prevail in a fight over Taiwan. I don’t think any of us can know at this time. What is certain is that Western decay and disorder only helps the Chinese experiment on its way.

As for Russia, its the familiar story of the illiberal ruler for life and aggressor, Vladimir Putin. Gray offers no prognosis for the conflict, and rightfully so. He does, however, point out a detail that I hadn’t registered: the reach of the Russian Orthodox Church. Putin has drawn on the church to legitimate his war project in Ukraine. A high-ranking priest, blessing the troops before they took off to bomb Ukraine, was a puzzling site for Westerners to behold. Almost nothing could be more opposite to what liberal opinion predicted two decades ago. Its not secular, not peaceful, not democratic.

While delving into Gray’s work, there are moments when the reader may ask if he is just aimlessly spewing pessimism. But read enough and there is a method to his madness. He never offers an explicit account of his philosophy, but it does emerge in fairly consistent form as threads that run throughout his books. Some aspects of his belief system are more veiled than others: perhaps he respects the reader too much to belabor his points. Or maybe he walks lightly where he senses that he’s not on solid ground. But, essentially, he conceives of humans as just another animal species made of matter and governed by the laws thereof. Humans are language using animals, who reside in a largely incomprehensible world which is indifferent to them. He emphasizes the role of the unconscious, where he lays particular stress on fear of death. He believes that this specific fear results in a desire to achieve a kind of immortality through words, e.g. philosophy. To Gray, when we are seeking meaning in our lives, we aren’t doing anything beyond this.

The above is a highly truncated account of his worldview, but with it we can summarize the Grayian interpretation of liberalism run aground. Western cheerleaders proclaimed the End of History after Soviet collapse. They interpreted the Western triumph as proof that their model was the model and the natural evolutionary endpoint of political form. To Gray, all this was blinded by eschatological hopes for an end-time inherited from Christianity which Western liberals can’t shake. The idea that history is evolving toward a goal, and one that is to benefit humanity, is a worldview that puts humans at the center of the universe. It rests on a filtered version of the monotheistic idea that man is created in the image of God. While progressives have inherited their expectations from a Christian conception of history as sin followed by redemption, Gray offers praise to Eastern and Pagan philosophies in which time is cyclical and progressive times are always followed by cataclysm. To Gray there never was any evolutionary arrow, and the 20th century was an aberration where ideology appeared to be central. He foresaw that older and more primordial forces, such as culture, resources and territory, would once more become decisive as the Cold War receded. Without any end-time goal, politics in the Grayian view is a process of applying fixes to recurrent human problems. Liberalism was one such fix, one experiment that worked for a while but has now run its course. The result has been to make some fabulously wealthy, shake the economic security of others, dissolve freedoms at home and produce a new Leviathan in the East which uses market forces as instruments of the state.

On the topic of Sino-American conflict, Gray is not explicit but intones that China has the advantage. This also stems from his philosophy. In his way of thinking the Platonic forms of our Western tradition incline us toward regarding words are more real than they are; they make us prone to idealizations and Utopian plans which can’t succeed. China, having never made such Platonic forms central, exhibits a more flexible and practical mode of thinking. When Gray writes “societies that treat climate change as a morality tale in which they are the villains will disappear, or be adsorbed by others that are more pragmatic and resilient”, I believe this is what he has in mind.

Only one idea in the book struck me as totally wrong, and that was Gray’s suggestion that AI would become a deciding factor in determining the course of events. To be fair, he did not offer this is a solid prediction. But even raising the issue shows that he is letting his pessimism blur his judgment and is instinctively attracted to the more negative view. He seems not to have noticed that, if humans are just another species of animal — as he is fond of saying — with no particularly special or privileged place in the universe, how will these poor worms manage to fashion Gods for themselves? Its not only contradictory with Gray’s philosophy but its generally quite far-fetched. There is no AGI on the horizon; this I can guarantee. Large language models are wonderful, but a far cry from becoming your AI overlord. Gray’s worries, like that of typical writers and journalists, are desk-bred and show little understanding of the actual challenges.

So is liberalism really dead at home? It ultimately depends on definitions. If a civilization must be based on the practice of tolerance in order to be ‘liberal’, then we are no longer so. There are too many central institutions in which tolerance has been scrapped to meet that definition. This is not the only definition available, but if we are having to get legalistic and split-hairs over definitions then we are already in trouble.

We remain a freedom-loving people, and the curbs on free speech, both de facto and de jure, have been met with stiff opposition. As Gray is quick to point out, enclaves of freedom persist. We must recognize that their preservation is crucial.