John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts after Liberalism

Excerpt

In the preface to R. G. Collingwood’s The New Leviathan (1942)—which John Gray cites as an inspirational book he read at school—Collingwood helpfully prompts readers that there are two ways his book might, plausibly, be interpreted: first, as an anatomy of absolutism in the twentieth century, ending with the culminating case of Nazi Germany; or, second, as a new treatment of Hobbes’s problems, in the philosophical order that Hobbes used in Leviathan (1651). Hobbes’s sections were the following: Of Man; Of Commonwealth; Of a Christian Commonwealth; Of the Kingdom of Darkness. Collingwood’s were Man; Society; Civilization; and Barbarism. As Collingwood tells us, his preferred reading is the second—the book is not a historical, scientific, or philosophical account of how absolute power was claimed by dictators like Hitler, or how to analyze their tyrannical and terrorist regimes. Rather, he brings psychology, sociology, and political science to bear on the matters of public power and private freedom, the conditions under which “peace and plenty” could be achieved in a state and society like England, and how “barbarists” can dominate in a state and society like Germany. …