John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts after Liberalism

Excerpt

John Gray’s world is not a happy place. The “liberal world order,” a projection of America’s waning power, has collapsed. We have returned to 1914, to the dangers of competing and aggressive “leviathans.” Gray’s main interest is the West, but he says quite a lot about the rest as well. Russia is a “full-blown kleptocracy” combined with a “quasi-theocracy” (p. 38): packed with FSB agents, the Orthodox Church is the spiritual arm of Russian imperialism. Riddled with family breakdown, drug addiction, and suicide, Russian social life is a desperate affair. The notion propagated by right-wing populists that Russia embodies an ethically superior alternative to the West is a “decadent fever dream” (p. 38). China is a different kind of leviathan, a surveillance state, a “panopticon.” Impressed by the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, the Chinese Communist Party takes it to be the task of a state to protect not individuals, but rather “a unified people.” And so, to make sure it has a people to protect, it is ruthlessly imposing “Chinese values” on everyone, “obliterating” those who, like the Tibetans and Uighurs, resist such values (p. 42). Having inserted multiple tentacles into the infrastructure of Western capitalism, China is in the process of “bury[ing] the remains of the liberal West” (p. 47). Gray does not provide an update on Africa, but one can infer his view from the remark that, apart from the major leviathans, the rest of the world is coming to consist in “ungovernable zones, some of which will never emerge from anarchy” (p. 158). …