The New Leviathans

Thoughts After Liberalism

By: John Gray

Narrated by: Lee Goettl

Ever since its publication in 1651, Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan has unsettled and challenged how we understand the world. Condemned and vilified by each new generation, his cold political vision continues to see through any number of human political and ethical vanities.

In his wonderfully stimulating book The New Leviathans, John Gray allows us to understand the world of the 2020s with all its contradictions, moral horrors, and disappointments. The collapse of the USSR ushered in an era of near apoplectic triumphalism in the West: a genuine belief that a rational, liberal, well-managed future now awaited humankind and that tyranny, nationalism, and unreason lay in the past. Since then, so many terrible events have occurred and so many poisonous ideas have flourished, and yet our liberal certainties treat them as aberrations that will somehow dissolve. Hobbes would not be so confident.

Filled with fascinating and challenging observations, The New Leviathans is a powerful meditation on historical and current folly. As a species we always seem to be struggling to face the reality of base and delusive human instincts. Might a more self-aware, realistic, and disabused ethics help us?

©2023 John Gray (P)2023 Tantor

Honest

Tragic realism at its finest. Wishes the facts are not true does not make it so.

Brilliant

Gray is one of the deepest thinkers on the scene today and writes beautifully and insightfully about the challenges to liberalism and the source if its current difficulties.

Good but Flawed

Gray has read widely and thought deeply but tries too hard to hang disparate elements on Hobbes' work. The performance was frequently dismal with the reader's lack or misplacement of emphasis belying lack of rehearsal, at best, or lack of understanding of the text

Great book lazily narrated

Anyone who enjoys John Gray’s books is likely to enjoy this one. Unfortunately, the narrator mispronounces most of the names of people and places in the text, and often seems not to understand the meaning of what he’s reading.