John Gray

Broschiertes Buch

The New Leviathans

Thoughts After Liberalism

Beschreibung

A bold, provocative reckoning with our current political delusions and dysfunctions. Ever since its publication in 1651, Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan has unsettled and challenged how we understand the world. Condemned and vilified by each new generation, his cold political vision continues to see through any number of human 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. The collapse of the USSR ushered in an era of near apoplectic triumphalism in the West: 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 have flourished, and yet our liberal certainties treat them as aberrations that will somehow dissolve. Hobbes would not be so confident. Filled with fascinating and challenging observations, 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?

Autor

John Gray is the author of many critically acclaimed books, including The Silence of Animals, The Immortalization Commission, Black Mass, and Straw Dogs. A regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, he has been a professor of politics at Oxford, a visiting professor at Harvard and Yale, and a professor of European thought at the London School of Economics. He now writes full-time.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Picador USA
• Seitenzahl: 192
• Erscheinungstermin: 5. November 2024
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 210mm x 137mm x 14mm
• Gewicht: 218g
• ISBN-13: 9781250338310
• ISBN-10: 125033831X
• Artikelnr.: 69672147

Rezensionen

A timely meditation on the passing of the liberal age, and on the life and afterlives of its grandfather, Thomas Hobbes. Composed with Gray's characteristic erudition and taste for the ironies of intellectual history, The New Leviathans is a provocative delight, even as the author's premonitions about the world to come are thoroughly discomfiting. Sohrab Ahmari New Statesman