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The New Leviathans

Thoughts After Liberalism
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Brief Description
A philosophical meeting of minds, as John Gray reads Thomas Hobbes to understand our current predicament. Ever since its publication in 1651, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan has unsettled and challenged how we understand the world. Condemned and vilified by each new generation, Hobbes' cold political vision continues... Read More
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A philosophical meeting of minds, as John Gray reads Thomas Hobbes to understand our current predicament.

Ever since its publication in 1651, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan has unsettled and challenged how we understand the world. Condemned and vilified by each new generation, Hobbes' cold political vision continues to see through any number of 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 through a new reading of Hobbes' classic work. The collapse of the USSR ushered in an era of near-apoplectic triumphalism in the Westβ€”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 flourished, and yet still our liberal certainties treat them as aberrations which will somehow dissolve away. Hobbes would not be so confident.

Filled with fascinating and challenging perceptions, 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 all?

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9780141999432

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 05 September 2024

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Penguin Books Ltd

Audience: General / adult, Tertiary education, Professional and scholarly

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 11.0mm

Width: 129.0mm

Height: 198.0mm

Weight: 147g

Pages: 192

About the Author

John Gray is a political philosopher, whose books include Seven Types of Atheism, Straw Dogs, Black Mass, The Soul of the Marionette, The Silence of Animals and Feline Philosophy. He now principally writes for the New Statesman.

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