The New Leviathans Quotes

“The concept of decline has been cancelled from the Western lexicon. If it is allowed at all, it is only as a pedagogic device signifying a history that can be corrected. Signs of decay are hailed as progress, disasters as learning experiences that augur a better future.”
― John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

“The tracks of Christian theology, Nietzsche had complained, wound everywhere. In the early twenty-first century, they led – as they had done in earlier ages – in various and criss-crossing directions. They led towards TV stations in which televangelists preached the headship of men over women; and they led as well to gender studies departments, in which Christianity was condemned for heteronormative marginalization of LBTQIA+. Nietzsche had foretold it all … Any condemnation of Christianity as patriarchal and repressive derived from a framework of values that was itself utterly Christian.12”
― John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

“One function of woke movements is to deflect attention from the destructive impact on society of market capitalism.”
― John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

“Their moral philosophy is but a description of their own passions. Leviathan, Chapter 46 The origins of what has come to be called the woke movement are in the decay of liberalism. The movement is most powerful in English-speaking countries – tellingly, the countries where classical liberalism was strongest. Beyond the Anglosphere, in China, the Middle East, India, Africa and most of continental Europe, it is regarded with indifference, bemusement or contempt. While its apostles regard it as a universal movement of human emancipation, it is recognized in much of the world as a symptom of Western decline – a hyperbolic version of the liberalism the West professed during its brief period of seeming hegemony after the Cold War. Hyper-liberal ideology plays a number of roles. It operates as a rationale for a failing variety of capitalism, and a vehicle through which surplus elites struggle to secure a position of power in society. Insofar as it expresses a coherent system of ideas, it is the anti-Western creed of an antinomian intelligentsia that is ineffably Western. Psychologically, it provides an ersatz faith for those who cannot live without the hope of universal salvation inculcated by Christianity. Contrary to its right-wing critics, woke thinking is not a variant of Marxism. No woke ideologue comes anywhere close to Karl Marx in rigour, breadth and depth of thought. One function of woke movements is to deflect attention from the destructive impact on society of market capitalism. Once questions of identity become central in politics, conflicts of economic interests can be disregarded. Idle chatter of micro-aggression screens out class hierarchy and the abandonment of large sections of society to idleness and destitution. Flattering those who protest against slights to their well-cultivated self-image, identity politics consigns to obloquy and oblivion those whose lives are blighted by an economic system that discards them as useless. Neither is woke thinking a version of ‘post-modernism’. There is nothing in it of Jacques Derrida’s playful subtlety or Michel Foucault’s mordant wit. Derrida never suggested every idea should be deconstructed, nor did Foucault suppose society could do without power structures. Just as fascism debased Nietzsche’s thinking, hyper-liberalism vulgarizes post-modern philosophy. In their economic”
― John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

“The new Leviathans offer meaning in material progress, the security of belonging in imaginary communities and the pleasures of persecution.”
― John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

“In contemporary capitalism, the underclass and widening sections of the former middle classes are not only exposed to destitution. They are denied any hope. Capitalism has legitimated itself through a myth of unending economic growth. Now, with pandemics and quickening climate change, this myth is no longer sustainable. With its disappearance, the losers in society are left with nothing.”
― John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

“The term has no clear meaning, but it is used by liberals to refer to political blowback against the social disruption produced by their own policies.”
― John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

“This loss of a way of life was one of the causes of the rise from 2016 onwards of ‘populism’.”
― John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

“The fundamental cause of that epidemic [of deaths of despair] … was not economic fluctuations, but rather the long-term loss of a way of life among white working class Americans.”
― John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

“Feudal societies conferred benefits on their subordinate populations that contemporary societies cannot provide. In return for their labour, serfs were promised protection by lords. Twenty-first-century serfs are abandoned to anarchy and despair”
― John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

“No modern society has the cultural resources that are needed to reinvent a feudal order.”
― John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

“According to the American social theorist Joel Kotkin, a feudal social order is being rebuilt:”
― John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

“Society descends into a state of moral warfare unrestrained by the Christian insight into human imperfection.”
― John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

“When these values are unmoored from their theological matrix, they become inordinate and extreme.”
― John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

“The Court is not prohibiting abortion. It is devolving the issue to Congress and state legislatures. But conservative judges may go on to challenge contraception and same-sex marriage as well. A moral counter-revolution is being mounted by means of the political capture of the American judicial system.”
― John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

“As Hobbes wrote in the Conclusion of Leviathan, ‘there is scarce a Commonwealth in the world, whose beginnings can in conscience be justified.”
― John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

“In being imposed from above on recalcitrant populations, nineteenth-century capitalism had much in common with twentieth-century communism.”
― John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

“History has passed by any idea that law can insulate liberal values from political contestation. A bill of rights may be useful in codifying liberties and entitlements, but it will be viable only insofar as it expresses values that are widely shared in society.”
― John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

“Beginning with Augustine, Christian thinkers transformed eschatological expectations of an end-time into a theology in which time and eternity co-exist. Yet Christianity never renounced the hope that the downtrodden of the world would be raised to salvation in heaven.”
― John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

“hyper-liberalism is a vehicle for Christian hopes of a new world.”
― John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

“Woke hyper-liberalism is Puritan moral frenzy unrestrained by divine mercy or forgiveness of sin. There is no tolerance for those who refuse to be saved.”
― John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

“This Christian message inflamed the millenarian movements of medieval times and the secular revolutionaries of the twentieth century. It underpinned classical liberalism, and inspires hyper-liberals today. In woke movements, victimhood confers moral authority, as it does in Christianity.”
― John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

“Comte’s illiberalism left Mill in a quandary. Throughout his life he struggled with a conflict between progress and freedom. In On Liberty he proposed that a publicly funded advocatus diaboli be tasked with producing counter-arguments to the most widely accepted beliefs. The ‘Saint of Rationalism’ – as the British prime minister W. E. Gladstone called Mill – looked to the devil for salvation.6”
― John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

“Injustice and oppression cannot be modelled on the experience of any one society or period.”
― John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

“Woke thinking represents itself as a global movement in which America is taking the lead. In practice it is highly parochial.”
― John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

“Books such as Robin D’Angelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism (2018) provincialize a universal evil.”
― John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

“Woke is a career as much as a cult. By advertising their virtue, redundant graduates hope to gain a foothold on the crumbling ladder that leads to safety as one of society’s guardians.”
― John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

“Elites have been produced in numbers greater than society can absorb.”
― John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

“Just as fascism debased Nietzsche’s thinking, hyper-liberalism vulgarizes post-modern philosophy.”
― John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

“hyper-liberalism vulgarizes post-modern philosophy.”
― John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism