A bold, provocative reckoning with our current political delusions and
dysfunctions.
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 themas 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?
John Grayis the author of many critically acclaimed books, including The
Silence of Animals, The Immortalization Commission, Black Mass, and Straw
Dogs . A regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, he has been a
professor of politics at Oxford, a visiting professor at Harvard and Yale, and a
professor of European thought at the London School of Economics. He now
writes full-time.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
On Sale: Nov 7/23
5.38 x 8.25 • 160 pages
Notes, Index
9780374609733 • $35.00 • CL - With dust jacket
Philosophy / Political