Among the most remarkable paragraphs of the British political philosopher and public intellectual John Gray’s last book The New Leviathans,[1] the following one is especially striking:[2]
“Conservation thinkers are fond of talking of the suicide of the West. A spectacle of self-immolation, at once tragic and farcical, is being enacted; but suicide involves a measure of self-awareness of which the contemporary mind is incapable. An unconscious death-wish is at work. Any project of reviving the liberal West is like Plato’s Republic as described by George Santayana, ‘a prescription to a diseased old man to become young again and try a second life of superhuman virtue. The old man prefers to die.’”
The paragraph captures well what is Gray’s overarching thesis about the delusion of the proponents of liberal democracy of reinstating the global liberal order. This thesis, to be valid, supposes the truth of three distinct assertions: (i) the world has been living, at some point, under a global liberal order (though this order may have never been fully established everywhere in the world); (ii) we are no longer living under this global liberal order, but rather in a post-liberal era; (iii) any hope to return to the global liberal is doomed, the march of History is not meant to stop or to go backward. John Gray has been defending these claims in his writings for almost 40 years now, except for the fact, regarding claim (i), that he has never been naïve about the ability of liberal democracies to last forever and mark “the end of History.”
I’ve always found reading Gray to be both an inspiring and irritating experience at the same time. Even when he was still an academic, Gray was far from the figure of the standard political philosopher dealing with arcane subjects in a technical fashion that only the happy few can understand. He was already concerned with “big picture” issues and prone to discuss them in a language accessible to any intelligent person. He also already had a critical stance toward the masters of the profession, starting with John Rawls. Gray’s views about liberalism and his way of expressing them are refreshing because they are not amenable to any classification in a school of thought and are free from any reverence toward philosophers and ideas. I guess however that these very same features also explain why reading Gray can be irritating.
The New Leviathans is definitely of the same constitution as Gray’s previous work. It largely repeats ideas about the post-liberal age that he has developed in previous writings,[3] with minor updates brought by the war in Ukraine and the woke culture. And it defends them in a way that voluntarily departs from academic standards, not bothering to discuss competing views seriously and relying essentially on anecdotal evidence and short biographies of minor intellectual or artistic figures. That does not make the book uninteresting or irrelevant, at least as long as one is willing to accept this literary style. The book does have some new interesting insights to offer, and as Gray has kept it short, it is worth spending the few hours needed to read it.
As the title of the book suggests, the figure of Thomas Hobbes underlies its 179 pages. Gray has already in the past called for a “back to Hobbes” kind of move in liberal thinking but here he goes further, stating that Hobbes “was a liberal – the only one, perhaps, still worth reading.”[4] The leviathans (note the plural) to which Gray is referring are modern states that, contrary to Hobbes’s leviathan, are not dedicated to securing individuals against themselves and external threats. These modern leviathans are more far-reaching, they “aim to secure meaning in life for their subjects… [they] are new engineers of souls.”[5] Totalitarian regimes of the 20th century prefigured these new leviathans. Today, they are personified by Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China, and… the West's “hyper-liberalism” and its woke culture.
At the surface, the claim will appear absurd to many. First, decades of research tend to indicate that there is a difference in nature between totalitarian regimes that emerged almost a century ago and the “merely” authoritarian ones that pullulate today. The former were aiming at controlling people’s lives in all their details and shaping their thoughts and behavior. The latter are primarily organized toward the goal of neutralizing any potential threat to the dominant faction’s interests. Hitler’s and Stalin’s regimes probably were “engineers of souls.” It is not clear that this characterization fits well with Putin’s and Xi’s. Second, putting the West’s most decadent forms of liberalism in the same basket as authoritarian regimes may seem excessive and irrelevant. On the one hand, the woke culture is less a state-enforced phenomenon than a cultural evolution that largely emanates from civil society. On the other hand, though it is true that the woke culture is now so pervading in the US that state institutions, starting with universities, have started to enforce rules that formalize it, this remains mostly a distinctively North American phenomenon from which European societies are still largely immune.
While these may look like absurd claims, what is behind them is more interesting. Though he never mentions him explicitly (except in the acknowledgments), Gray’s thesis is largely influenced by Isaiah Berlin.[6] What underlies the new leviathans is an obsession with what Berlin conceptualized as “positive freedom.”[7] Famously, Berlin warned about the political dangers of a too strong emphasis on positive freedom:
“Although I may not get ‘negative’ liberty at the hands of the members of my own society, yet they are members of my own group; they understand me, as I understand them; and this understanding creates within me the sense of being somebody in the world. It is this desire for reciprocal recognition that leads the most authoritarian democracies to be, at times, consciously preferred by their members to the most enlightened oligarchies… Unless this phenomenon is grasped, the ideals and behaviour of entire peoples who, in Mill’s sense of the word, suffer deprivation of elementary rights, and who, with every appearance of sincerity, speak of enjoying more freedom than when they possessed a wider measure of these rights, becomes an unintelligible paradox.”[8]
I am skeptical that Berlin’s concept of positive freedom gives any real clue about the foundations of contemporary Russian and Chinese authoritarianism. But if we focus our attention on Western liberal democracies, there is a case to be made that there is a new demand for an increase in positive freedom. This new demand is fed by the perceived and objective deterioration of the economic conditions of a significant fraction of the population in those democracies. Gray indeed points out that the promise based on which capitalist societies have gained support – an unending economic growth benefitting everyone – appears today as impossible to keep (p. 133-4). The rise of populism (a term that Gray rejects), both on the far-right and the far-left, but also in mainstream political parties, is largely a response to this new political demand that emerges as a result of the loss of any illusion about future economic perspectives. Add to this the anxiety created by other perceived threats to one’s (national) identity, e.g., waves of immigration, and you have the perfect recipe for an illiberal dynamic articulated around an urge for more “positive freedom.”
In this sense, even though one may find Gray’s narrative far-stretched and lacking in rigor, I think that assertion (ii) is – unfortunately – not far from being true. Formally, Western countries are still liberal democracies, but the “minimal consensus” (an expression from Anthony Downs) based on which their institutions work has been so fragilized that there is today no real barrier to a transition toward less liberal and less democratic regimes. That is not to mean that the West will suddenly become ruled by authoritarian regimes, only that the probability that this happens at least to some of its societies has seriously increased.
What about assertion (iii)? In defending it, Gray appeals to arguments he has been playing with for decades. He notably repeats his criticisms against Rawls’s and Dworkin’s “legal” conception of liberalism according to which liberal rights are established by constitutional devices. Correspondingly, he also reasserts the inescapable necessity of politics as the realm of hard choices between competing and incommensurable values and forms of life. According to Gray, the best we can hope is to bring the new leviathans “closer to what Leviathan could be – a vessel of peaceful co-existence.”[9] This peaceful co-existence can take an indefinite number of different shapes. The future is open, there is no end of History, no necessity. The only certainty is that the time of liberalism has passed and that there is no more reason to think that it can return than an old man can become young again.
We don’t need to share Gray’s pessimism to agree that there is no philosophy of history to which we can appeal. There are moreover objective reasons to be pessimistic about the prospects of Western civilization and the possibility to return to an acceptable (i.e., not “hyper”) form of liberalism. Gray’s pessimistic outlook hides however two normative mistakes. First, the Hobbesian modus vivendi which he views as the only plausible state of affairs in the post-liberal era is not something that Hobbes himself would have agreed to. For Hobbes, the only plausible outcome is absolutism, neither a modus vivendi where interests are balanced nor a liberal democracy. Hobbes was obviously wrong. Gray is however not clear by what he means by a “modus vivendi.” Is it an anarchic state of affairs at the international level where different kinds of states interact? Or is it a model for individual societies? Ultimately, Gray’s thesis ends up saying that anything is possible. Well, that may be true, but that does not mean that the probabilities for all scenarios are the same, nor that they are equally desirable from a normative perspective.
Gray also repeats an error that he made in his intellectual biography on Berlin.[10] Endorsing Berlin’s value pluralism, Gray then argued that it was a mistake to grant negative freedom a prominent place among values, and ultimately to argue for the normative superiority of liberalism and democracy over other political regimes. There is no mistake, however. The political expression of value pluralism is only possible in a society that recognizes the importance of negative freedom. Negative freedom is the condition for the ultimately non-rational assessment between incommensurable values to materialize in competing forms of life. Because liberal societies are those that are, by definition, organized based on a political morality that recognizes the primacy of negative freedom, they are also in this sense the only ones that can accept value pluralism.
Gray’s pessimism may be well-founded. But it does not justify what at some point appears to be a nihilist normative outlook. To end this post by paraphrasing the quote with which I’ve started, Gray would be the kind of doctor telling his patient diagnosed with cancer that he doesn’t have to care about the survival odds of the various treatments available, as he will anyway die sooner or later. This is not an acceptable recommendation.
[1] John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism (Random House, 2023).
[2] Ibid, p. 155.
[3] See for instance John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London New York: Routledge, 1997).; John Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism (Oxford: The New Press, 2002).
[4] Gray, The New Leviathans, p. 4.
[5] Ibid, p. 2-3.
[6] This should not come as a surprise, as Gray is the author of a remarkable intellectual biography of Berlin.
[7] Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000).
[8] Ibid, p. 229.
[9] Gray, The New Leviathans, p. 157.
[10] John Gray, Isaiah Berlin: An Interpretation of His Thought, Isaiah Berlin (Princeton University Press, 1995 [2020]).