John Gray on ‘The New Leviathans - Thoughts after Liberalism’

John Gray on ‘The New Leviathans - Thoughts after Liberalism’ | Professor John Gray | Tuesday 19th March 2024, Queen Square, Bath.
In 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 Soviet Union ushered in an era of near-apocalyptic 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 flourished, and yet still our liberal certainties treat them as aberrations which will somehow dissolve away. Hobbes would not be so confident.
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[@philnewton3096]

1:01/49 h melville. What about the Thomas Armstrong novel of Liverpool "King cotton " ? My Dad swore by it.

[@philnewton3096]

And the Rennes professor Jaques Guys "a journey across the channell" He taught here on exchange. "

[@tonyaldridge8917]

So how many were in the room? Put me in the tombola for… 29, amazing talk tho, will watch again, been a big fan for many years

[@ubiktd4064]

I noticed recently as an avid searcher for new philosophy books that John Grays books that used to be a staple have all disappeared ? Has he been cancelled?

[@leststoner]

👏👏👏

[@steffg8351]

53:12 'I think the next [what?] is probably going to be universities....'

[@abdulhafidhahmed1556]

"Shoe to drop"

[@MrBeautifulmountain]

Someone should have asked him about the role of Islam in the West in the next 50 years.

[@ajs41]

He's talked about that a lot in his other interviews/talks/lectures.

[@Troy-Weight]

I found it disturbing that Grey adopted Collingwood’s title but never distanced himself from Collingwood - you should know what I mean - if you have read Collingwood’s advice on bullying and lying in politics. To me Grey maybe understood Russian and China but did not understand England. I would start the clock with Bacon not Hobbes, and see a slow crawl towards scientific enlightenment and democracy which really reached a peak with universal suffrage in 1928, pushed by Mill, Russell etc. Keynes, like Collingwood, was terrified of democracy and was actively working to undermine it before it even started. That is undeniable, but Grey seemed completely blind to it. From this outing he seemed to have (correctly) rejected the frying pan of complacency in Fukuyama, but only in order to (disastrously) jump into the fire of arbitrary denial of scientific and social progress served up by Kuhn. The both of them rather deliberate corollaries to Keynes

[@wmgodfrey1770]

Zeihan and Gray should get together for a discussion in the same room.

[@advocate1563]

Why? Fundamentally different fields and approaches

[@MrBeautifulmountain]

@@advocate1563 There is some overlap in the sense that they both forecast.

[@rogcrater8193]

No

[@OrwellsHousecat]

London is nice & safe & pieceful

[@janmalaszek1459]

I guess this meant to be ironic?

[@NorthernObserver]

Many people in many pieces.

[@advocate1563]

April 1st? London has fallen.