By Dan Lazare

John Gray’s pessimism is a direct descendant of the cultural pessimism preached by Oswald Spengler, whose best-seller, The Decline of the West, played a major role in the growth of fascism in the 1920s and ’30s.

The New Leviathans: Thoughts after Liberalism by John Gray. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 192 pages, $27.

The British political philosopher John Gray, formerly of the London School of Economics, has cranked out close to 30 books since the mid-1980s. That’s one roughly every 16 months. He certainly has his fans, people who find his cranky pessimism to be somehow reassuring and uplifting. And to be fair, his latest work, The New Leviathans, is not completely uninteresting. It opens with a brief sketch of the life and work of the 17^th-century political theorist Thomas Hobbes that’s sharp and amusing. A half-dozen pages on a Polish painter named Józef Czapski, who narrowly escaped execution in the 1940 Katyn massacre and then went on to lecture about Proust in a Stalinist prison camp, are certainly thought-provoking. A brief foray into the thinking of the scientific positivist Auguste Comte is not bad either.

But otherwise it’s a mess. Gray is a master (if that’s the right word) of free association. One big-name thinker leads to another and another. Hobbes reminds him of Friedrich Hayek, the free-marketeer famous for The Road to Serfdom (1944). Hayek reminds him of Hegel, who reminds him of Francis Fukuyama, whose End of History and the Last Man became a best-seller in 1992 because it perfectly captured the post-Soviet zeitgeist. Fukuyama reminds him of China, which he trashes on the grounds of excessive statism; of Russia, which he savages for the sin of being Eastern Orthodox, and of the old Soviet Union, which he condemns for being blood-thirsty and police-ridden. From there, Gray meanders on to Hindu nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism, for which he somehow holds Bolshevism responsible.

And that’s only the first 40 pages or so. More side trips follow into contemporary woke ideology, critical race theory, white privilege, psychoanalysis, and H.P. Lovecraft, all marshaled in support of his view that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. It’s the meaningless mutterings of a barroom philosopher with an Oxford degree. As is usually the case with such sound and fury, it ends up signifying zilch.

A short segment on the history of Christianity shows the woolly-headed nature of Gray’s approach. Liberalism, it begins, is a product of Christian monotheism because “[t]he primacy of the individual is a secular translation of the belief that each human being is created by the Deity, which has an authority over them which transcends any worldly power.” Well, er, OK, but where exactly do the Gospels say anything about the primacy of the individual? (Short answer: they don’t; Gray is guilty of the undergraduate sin of projecting a modern idea onto a pre-modern text.) “The egalitarian belief that human beings have the same moral status,” he continues, “reproduces the idea that all human beings are equal in the sight of God.” Perhaps. But doesn’t Islam preach the same thing? And if Christianity is so egalitarian, how did it beget societies that, for approximately 2,000 years, couldn’t have been more hierarchical? “The belief that human institutions are indefinitely improvable,” he adds, “replicates the theistic faith that history is a moral narrative of sin followed by redemption.” Does this means that the Christian belief in faith triumphing over sin somehow paved the way for the political reforms of the 18^th and 19^th century? If so, why did the church oppose those reforms? And why were so many radical reformers accused of being anti-Christian?

A few pages later, Gray writes that “Coptic, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and many contemporary varieties of Christianity have no special affinities with liberal values, or are hostile to them.” Since those represent most of the Christian mainstream across the ages, it would seem that Christianity had little, if anything, to do with political reform after all. Quoting the historian Rodney Stark, he says that Christianity triumphed during the late Roman Empire because, among other things, it enabled believers to enjoy “substantially higher rates of survival” amid the great plagues of the second century and after. But how, exactly, did Christianity achieve such a feat? If Gray really believes that it did, how does he explain the Bubonic Plague of the mid-14th century, the greatest plague in history, which devastated Christian Europe every bit as much as it did the Muslim Middle East? Why didn’t Christians enjoy substantially higher rates of survival them?

The idea is preposterous. All of this is in service of a relentlessly reactionary ideology that holds that liberalism is self-destructing, that the concept of individual rights is corrosive and self-defeating, and that progress is illusory. Obviously, Gray is not the only one who feels that society has gone awry. Thanks to global warming, social breakdown, and the explosive growth of rightwing populism, many, if not most people, believe that modern society has painted itself into a corner with no clear way out. But anti-modernist defeatism of the sort that The New Leviathans represents is another matter. It’s a direct descendant of the cultural pessimism preached by Oswald Spengler, whose best-seller, The Decline of the West, played a major role in the growth of fascism in the 1920s and ’30s. A century later, Gray is playing a similar role now that political democracy finds itself in crisis yet again.

Author John Gray in 2014. Photo: Wiki Common

Dragging poor Hobbes into all this is especially offensive. It’s a tribute to the 17^th-century philosopher that he’s still an object of controversy some three and a half centuries after his death. Most people don’t know anything about Hobbes beyond his statement in Leviathan (1651) that life in a state of nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” From this, they assume that he must have been one of those misanthropes who also believed that humanity was doomed. But he was in fact the opposite, an optimist who believed that the human capacity for collective self-organization provided society with the capacity to lift itself out of the mire. Following on the heels of the great French political thinker Jean Bodin (1530-96), he helped develop the theory of sovereignty, the idea that ultimate authority, defined as a self-directing power answerable to nothing other than itself, is the only force capable of preventing society from descending into anarchy and civil war. Hobbes assumed that only monarchy could fulfill such a role, which in one sense made him a precursor of the royal absolutism of Louis XIV, the “Sun King” who reigned from 1643 to 1715. But Hobbes acknowledged that democracy could do so as well. As a free-thinker who was reviled in his day as an atheist and enemy of religion, this meant that he ultimately wound up with more in common with a long line of democratic absolutists who believed in welding society into a battering ram capable of bursting the bonds of tradition and breaking through to something new.

It’s a long line that begins with Cromwell and Robespierre and continues on through Lincoln, Marx and Engels, and Luxemburg, Lenin, and Trotsky. Had Hobbes lived long enough, he might have recognized more than a few of his own ideas in La Marseillaise, if not The International. Turning him into the opposite, which is to say a prophet of breakdown and decay, is a travesty. Gray’s latest work is worthy of condemnation except that it’s so silly and insubstantial as to not even be worth the effort.

Daniel Lazare is the author of The Frozen Republic and other books about the US Constitution and US policy. He has written for a wide variety of publications including Harper’s and the London Review of Books. He currently writes regularly for the Weekly Worker, a socialist newspaper in London.