A Stale Critique of Modernity: A Review of John Gray’s The New Leviathans
Joseph Stieb, “A Stale Critique of Modernity,” The Vital Center 2, no. 1 (Winter 2023): 61–62.
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Gray’s scholarship remains important for critics and defenders of liberalism alike. In his fascinating book, Two Faces of Liberalism, he develops the idea of a value-pluralistic modus vivendi liberalism that enables people with competing conceptions of a good life to coexist. But readers interested in postliberal ideas should look elsewhere. As flawed as the works of figures like Patrick Deneen may be, they at least make coherent arguments, in contrast to this nearly incomprehensible book.
John Gray is one of contemporary liberalism’s most incisive critics. Unfortunately, The New Leviathans descends into a strange, meandering diatribe that adds little to his considerable intellectual legacy.
Gray’s bewildered readers have to piece together his argument from disjointed segments of the book. His thesis, so far as I can tell, is that modern liberal states have become “new Leviathans” that do not simply protect citizens’ rights and lives but try “to secure meaning in life for their subjects.” Politics has been reduced to a Schmittian struggle of rival groups seeking to “capture the power of the state in a new war of all against all” and engage in “an unrelenting struggle for the control of thought and language.” Giving no evidence or examples, he asserts that “Western societies have dismantled liberal freedoms” and renounced the liberal value of tolerance.
Grey’s evidence for these dramatic claims seems to be the rise of “woke” ideologies on campus. He laments that “education inculcates conformity with the ruling progressive ideology. The arts are judged by whether they serve approved political goals. Dissidents from orthodoxies on race, gender, and empire find their careers terminated and their public lives erased.”
“Grey endorses a more tragic political ethos that accepts there will be no teleological global triumph for liberal ideas, as too many liberals believed after the Cold War ended.”
These trends certainly intensified in the 2010s, as numerous critics have already contended. There is a type of “hyper-liberalism,” visible in both progressiv-ism and neo-liberalism, that seeks at all costs to “emancipate human beings from identities that have been inherited from the past” and free them to “make of themselves whatever they wish.” He wisely notes that “human beings can never be entirely self-defined. If their identity is to be more than a private fantasy, they must somehow induce others to accept it.”
Grey is right to challenge some of liberalism’s excesses and assumptions, as he has done throughout his career. However, he adds little insight into how and why these ideas ascended nor much evidence that liberalism has become defunct or irrelevant. He is maddeningly vague about who today’s modern “hyper-liberals” are. He also ignores that most of “woke” ideology is confined to progressive activists and segments of academia, that it remains hotly contested among liberals and rather unpopular among the public, and that this ideological fever may be fading.
Grey endorses a more tragic political ethos that accepts there will be no teleological global triumph for liberal ideas, as too many liberals believed after the Cold War ended. The world will remain one of “disparate regimes interacting with one another in a condition of global anarchy,” including states like China and Russia that will follow their own historical paths. This offers a healthy dose of realism for liberal crusaders, but other scholars have developed these critiques far more effectively.
Gray often undermines his own style as a hard-nosed truth-teller with comic hyperbole. At one point he declares, “The liberal West is possessed by an idea of freedom. Any curb on human will is condemned as a mode of repression.” This ignores that citizens of liberal societies accept dozens of reasonable limits on their freedoms and that part of the point of a liberal social contract is to continually debate the boundaries of liberty. US society may have an imbalanced approach to rights and responsibilities, but this book’s many exaggerations add more heat than light to this conversation.
The book’s haphazard structure is as frustrating as its hazy and histrionic arguments. Just as the reader is getting a foothold on an interesting idea, the book veers toward another topic, inducing the constant question, “Why am I reading this?” He devotes about one-third of the book to mini-biographies of intellectuals who became victims of Soviet or Nazi totalitarianism. As evocative as these stories are, he does not connect them to his argument. In fact, bringing up these accounts undermines his argument that modern liberalism is a new authoritarianism by reinforcing the horrors of actual tyranny. Later in the book, he deviates from critiquing liberal individualism into meditations on H. P. Lovecraft and Freudian psychology.
This book could have found value if it had expanded its tantalizing but inchoate analysis of Hobbes. Gray treats Hobbes as the archetypical liberal who believed the purpose of government was “to protect human beings from one another,” not to offer salvation, guarantee prosperity, or remake humanity. In a fascinating passage, he notes that Locke believed that human beings were ultimately the property of God while the more materialist Hobbes held that they were property only of themselves. This could have been the start of a compelling analysis of Hobbes’s influence on modern liberalism, but Grey abandons the thread.
The New Leviathans embodies two pitfalls of intellectual prominence. The first is the tendency to equate reflexive pessimism with substantive critique. The second is that prominent senior academics can get someone to print almost anything they write, no matter how half-baked, creating the moral hazard of producing shoddy, underdeveloped work that no junior scholar could ever dream of publishing.
Gray’s scholarship remains important for critics and defenders of liberalism alike. In his fascinating book, Two Faces of Liberalism, he develops the idea of a value-pluralistic modus vivendi liberalism that enables people with competing conceptions of a good life to coexist. But readers interested in postliberal ideas should look elsewhere. As flawed as the works of figures like Patrick Deneen may be, they at least make coherent arguments, in contrast to this nearly incomprehensible book.
