Thammasat University students who are interested in political philosophy, history, political science, and related subjects may find a newly available book useful.

The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism is by the English political philosopher John Gray, emeritus professor of European thought at the London School of Economics, the United Kingdom.

The title of his book refers to Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, about the structure of society and legitimate government.

The TU Library collection includes several books by and about Thomas Hobbes.

A Leviathan is a sea serpent noted in theology and mythology, cited in several books of the Hebrew Bible.

According to Dr. Gray, Hobbes believed that a powerful government was necessary to protect people from one another and from external enemies.

He felt that everyone must cope with efforts to be dominated by others, what Hobbes calls a war of all against all.

There is endless conflict and competition, with people trying to gain extra status and rank.

Hobbes notoriously claimed that this type of life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

However, in the past hundred years, Dr. Gray assures us, New Leviathans are trying to go further, to become engineers of souls.

This makes nations into new varieties of sea monsters.

Gray examines how Soviet leaders tried to mold people and how that approach has been repeated by Vladimir Putin in more recent times.

This tyrannical rule over the people uses societal improvement as an excuse for a totalitarian level of control.

Similar oppression is seen in China, where leaders see themselves as almost religious figures.

The author reminds the reader that it is necessary to fight totalitarianism:

If we go on, it is because we cannot do otherwise. It is life that pulls us on, against the tide, life that steers us into the storm.

Gray sees Russia as a kleptocracy, or a government whose corrupt leaders (kleptocrats) use political power to seize the wealth of the people and land they govern.

The noun kleptocracy derives from two ancient Greek terms meaning thief and rule.

He notes about Russia:

For all its cultural achievements, this vast country has never enjoyed an extended period of freedom — only interludes of chaos in immemorial despotism.

He foresees after Putin a struggle among private armies in Russia for control of natural resources.

China is described as aiming to be an ideal prison where citizens are kept under observation at all times.

Gray asks whether China must inevitably rise, and wonders whether China’s approach to governance will survive whoever follows the current ruler, Xi Jinping.

Economic and demographic challenges in China may lead to a breakup of the nation into warring states, or an empire of multiple fiefdoms with their own cultures and allegiances.

Here are some thoughts by John Gray from previous books, some of which are owned by the TU Library:

To affirm that humans thrive in many different ways is not to deny that there are universal human values. Nor is it to reject the claim that there should be universal human rights. It is to deny that universal values can only be fully realized in a universal regime. Human rights can be respected in a variety of regimes, liberal and otherwise. Universal human rights are not an ideal constitution for a single regime throughout the world, but a set of minimum standards for peaceful coexistence among regimes that will always remain different.

• Two Faces of Liberalism (2000)

The core of the belief in progress is that human values and goals converge in parallel with our increasing knowledge. The twentieth century shows the contrary. Human beings use the power of scientific knowledge to assert and defend the values and goals they already have. New technologies can be used to alleviate suffering and enhance freedom. They can, and will, also be used to wage war and strengthen tyranny. Science made possible the technologies that powered the industrial revolution. In the twentieth century, these technologies were used to implement state terror and genocide on an unprecedented scale. Ethics and politics do not advance in line with the growth of knowledge — not even in the long run.

• “Joseph Conrad, Our Contemporary,” from Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions (2004)

The whole world is in some ways better than it’s ever been in the past. And, indeed, I think for many people the meaning of their lives really depends on that belief. If you strip out that belief in progress, if you start thinking of the world in the way in which the ancient pre-Christian Europeans did, or the Buddhists and the Hindus or the Taoists of China do, many people think that’s a kind of despair. I don’t know how many times I’ve been told “If I thought that, John, I wouldn’t get up in the morning” and “If I agreed with you, John, that history had no pattern of that kind, I wouldn’t get up in the morning.” I said, “Well, stay in bed a bit longer, you might find a better reason for getting up.”

• A discussion on ABC Radio National (2008)

Religious fundamentalists see themselves as having remedies for the maladies of the modern world. In reality they are symptoms of the disease they pretend to cure. They hope to recover the unreflective faith of traditional cultures, but this is a peculiarly modern fantasy. We cannot believe as we please; our beliefs are traces left by our unchosen lives. A view of the world is not something that can be conjured up as and when we please.

• Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Scientific fundamentalists claim that science is the disinterested pursuit of truth. But representing science in this way is to disregard the human needs science serves. Among us, science serves two needs: for hope and censorship. Today, only science supports the myth of progress. If people cling to the hope of progress, it is not so much from genuine belief as from fear of what may come if they give it up. The political projects of the twentieth century have failed, or achieved much less than they promised. At the same time, progress in science is a daily experience, confirmed whenever we buy a new electronic gadget, or take a new drug. Science gives us a sense of progress that ethical and political life cannot.

• Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)