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0:01:29 Those are the words of the great and now infamous Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century English philosopher.
0:01:39 You can find them in his 1651 book, The Leviathan, which is often considered the founding text of modern political philosophy.
0:01:47 Hobbes’ big contribution was to challenge the right of kings and religious authorities to rule.
0:01:52 The foundation of political power for him was the consent of the governed.
0:01:58 And the only reason to hand over authority to the state, or anyone else for that matter,
0:02:00 was for the protection of the individual.
0:02:05 If that sounds familiar, it’s because it is.
0:02:12 That’s basically the political philosophy that came to dominate the Western world from the Enlightenment on.
0:02:15 It’s what we now call liberalism.
0:02:21 But we’re in an era where liberalism and democracy are being contested from within and without.
0:02:28 And while I wouldn’t say that liberalism is dead, that doesn’t quite make sense.
0:02:31 I would say that it’s wobbly.
0:02:35 What should we make of that?
0:02:38 Is the liberal experiment coming to an end?
0:02:43 And if it is, what does that mean for our political future?
0:02:50 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
0:03:03 Today’s guest is political philosopher John Gray.
0:03:12 We spoke before last year’s elections, and lately, I have found myself returning to that conversation over and over again.
0:03:18 In his book, The New Leviathans, Thoughts After Liberalism,
0:03:27 Gray challenges the idea that the liberal dream of history, with a capital H, is over, and that liberal democracy has won.
0:03:35 Hobbes is at the center of his book because he thinks Hobbes’ liberalism was more realistic in its ambitions,
0:03:41 and that his most important lessons about the limits of politics have been forgotten.
0:03:48 It is, as you might suspect, a challenging book, but it is an essential read.
0:03:56 And I invited Gray onto the show to talk about what he thinks has gone wrong, and more importantly, where he thinks we’re headed.
0:04:03 John Gray, welcome to The Gray Area.
0:04:04 Thank you very much, Sean.
0:04:12 What’s interesting about this new book is that you’re not even bothering to announce the death of liberalism.
0:04:17 Like Nietzsche’s madman screaming about God in the town square.
0:04:22 You’re saying liberalism has already passed, and most of us don’t quite know it yet.
0:04:23 Is that right?
0:04:33 Yes, I think there are many visible signs that anything like a liberal order or a liberal civilization has passed.
0:04:43 In the last 30 years, shall we say, since 1990, 30-odd years, there’s been an enormous…
0:04:52 After that moment in which it seemed that liberal democracy was going to become universal or nearly universal following the collapse of communism,
0:04:58 What, in fact, happened was that the transition from communism to liberal democracy did not occur in Russia.
0:05:00 It has not occurred in China.
0:05:15 The wars that were fought, so-called wars of choice, by the United States and its followers, including Britain, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, to some degree, and Libya, were all failures.
0:05:28 None of those countries became democratic or anything near it, and, in fact, they only damaged those countries in profound ways and damaged the United States, and particularly the United States and Britain in various ways.
0:05:39 So, I think if you just look at geopolitical trends, you can see that the so-called liberal West, if something like that ever fully existed, is in steep retreat.
0:06:08 And in Western societies themselves, what were taken for granted, even within my lifetime, and perhaps yours, Sean, as fully accepted, liberal freedoms of speech and inquiry and expression and so forth, have been curtailed, not by a dictatorial state, interestingly, as in the former Soviet Union or today in Xi’s China, but actually by civil institutions themselves.
0:06:27 It’s been universities and museums and publishers and media organizations, that of charities and cultural institutions and so on, have imposed various kinds of limits on themselves, such that they police the expression of their members.
0:06:36 And those who deviate from a prevailing progressive orthodoxy or are in various ways canceled or excluded, that’s quite new.
0:06:39 But it’s rather widespread now and pervasive.
0:06:50 And although, of course, it’s true that there are enclaves of free expression, enclaves or niches like the one we’re enjoying now.
0:07:00 Although we’re not in the position that people are in, in Xi’s China or Putin’s Russia, we can still communicate relatively freely.
0:07:12 There are large areas of life, including the institutions I mentioned earlier, which used to be, let’s say, governed by liberal norms, and aren’t any longer.
0:07:26 So I think it makes sense just as an empirical observation to say that liberal civilization that existed and could be described as a liberal civilization, with all its faults and flaws, doesn’t exist any longer.
0:07:34 Of course, you might say liberalism as a theory continues to exist, but then so does medieval political theory or any modern political theory.
0:07:36 It just doesn’t describe the world anymore.
0:07:46 Well, let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves here, because the term liberalism is one of those big, unwieldy terms that means a million different things to a million different people.
0:07:53 What do you mean by liberalism, just so it’s clear what we’re diagnosing the death of here?
0:08:08 The core of liberalism as a philosophy is the idea that no one has a natural right to rule, and that all rulers, all regimes, all states serve those whom they govern.
0:08:11 So that this is a view which differs from Plato.
0:08:24 Plato thought that philosophers had the best authority to rule because they could better than other people perceive truths beyond the shadows of the improbable world.
0:08:32 In Hobbes’ day, some people believed, many people believed that kings had divine right to rule.
0:08:40 And later on, we’ve had beliefs, we have had philosophies which have developed according to which it’s the most virtuous people who should rule.
0:08:52 And I think actually the hyper-liberal, or what is now sometimes called the woke movement, has something of that in it, which is that they imagine that they represent virtue better than, and progressiveness better than others.
0:08:58 And therefore, they have a right at least to shape society according to their vision.
0:09:11 But a liberal, and in this sense, Hobbes is a liberal, and I’m still a liberal in this sense, actually, is one who thinks that any sovereign, any ruler, depends for their authority on protecting the well-being of the ruled.
0:09:15 And in liberal theory, it’s normally, liberal thoughts are normally individuals.
0:09:19 And when it doesn’t do that, then any obligation to obey is dissolved.
0:09:23 And Hobbes says explicitly, the book is partly about Thomas Hobbes, of course.
0:09:30 As you know, the 17th century political philosopher that wrote the book, Leviathan, that’s why it’s called New Leviathan.
0:09:53 Hobbes said that when the sovereign, which could be a king or a Republican assembly or a parliament or whatever, but when the sovereign fails to protect the individual from violence for other human beings, when the sovereign fails to provide security, all obligations are dissolved, and the individual can leave or kill the sovereign.
0:09:54 Kill the sovereign.
0:09:59 So there is a fundamental equality between the ruler and the root.
0:10:00 I think that’s the core of liberalism.
0:10:03 And in that sense, I say Hobbes is still a liberal, and so am I.
0:10:12 But it had many, many different meanings later or attached to it about rights and progressiveness and so on, which I don’t subscribe to, and neither did Hobbes.
0:10:22 Do you actually call Hobbes the first and last great liberal philosopher, which might surprise more than a few political philosopher types?
0:10:23 Why is that?
0:10:25 Why is he the first and the last great liberal philosopher for you?
0:10:27 Well, it shouldn’t surprise them.
0:10:36 If they knew a bit more than they normally do about the history of political ideas, they would know that the best 20th century scholars of Hobbes all regarded him as a liberal.
0:10:44 So Michael Oakeshott, the British conservative philosopher, the Canadian Marxist philosopher, C.B.
0:10:51 Macpherson, and Leo Strauss, the American conservative philosopher, they all regarded Hobbes as a liberal.
0:10:57 And so it’s only philosophers who don’t read ideas and their philosophy, which is the majority, I’m afraid.
0:11:00 It’s only those who are surprised by it.
0:11:01 So they shouldn’t be.
0:11:07 But I think the sense in which he is is exactly the sense of which I just mentioned earlier, which is that he doesn’t accept any.
0:11:09 The most virtuous don’t have the right to rule.
0:11:12 The cleverest or the most intelligent don’t have the right to rule.
0:11:15 None are appointed by God to rule.
0:11:24 States or sovereigns or human constructions or human creations, which exist only so long as they serve the purposes of those over whom they rule.
0:11:30 And so that, I think, is still alive, that idea, not only in philosophy.
0:11:31 I think it’s alive in the world.
0:11:39 And there’s nowhere in the world now, there was in the past, even relatively recent past, where anyone rules by prescriptive right.
0:11:51 If someone just says, I have the right to rule you, as our King Charles did in the Civil War in Britain in the 17th century, I have the divine right to rule.
0:11:51 He was executed.
0:11:53 He was executed by the parliament.
0:11:57 So that liberal idea, I think, is still quite strong in the world.
0:12:02 But it’s quite different from lots of other liberal ideas about progress and humanity and rights and so on.
0:12:12 I used to teach Hobbes, and I always wondered what it was I liked so much about him, because he is so dark and gloomy.
0:12:21 I mean, even if you’ve never read Hobbes, you probably know his famous description of human life as nasty, brutish, and solitary, and short, that kind of thing.
0:12:29 And I think what appeals to me in his thought is the tragic dimension.
0:12:34 You know, anarchy, for him, was never something we transcend.
0:12:36 It was something we stave off.
0:12:38 But it remained a permanent possibility.
0:12:45 That awful state of nature that he worried about was always lurking just beneath civilization.
0:12:59 Do you think modern liberalism went awry when it lost sight of this and maybe drifted away from Hobbes’ very limited view of the purpose of the state, which is just to keep us from eating each other, basically?
0:13:05 I think liberalism, over time, turned into something different.
0:13:12 I mean, one has to say that, although historically, in terms of the history of ideas, Hobbes is definitely a liberal.
0:13:30 Most people who’ve called themselves liberals subsequently in the 19th and 20th and 21st centuries wouldn’t regard Hobbes and don’t regard Hobbes as a liberal, because although he has this feature that sovereigns or states serve the individuals over whom they rule,
0:13:41 He doesn’t think that what the state or the sovereign can do to provide security can be limited or should be limited by rights or some of the principles.
0:13:42 He doesn’t think that.
0:13:58 And that’s the sort of difficulty that many people find in thinking about Hobbes, which is that although he thinks the state has a very limited purpose, it can do anything that it judges, the sovereign judges, that will achieve that purpose.
0:14:04 So, for example, the state in Hobbes has no obligation to respect freedom of speech.
0:14:10 If freedom of speech harms social peace and political order, it can intervene.
0:14:18 Hobbes even says that the sovereign can define the term, define the words used in the Bible to kind of define what those words mean.
0:14:31 And probably when you taught him, you notice this, so that society can avoid the religious wars that were raging, had been raging in Europe in his time and around his time over what the Bible meant.
0:14:33 Peace determines everything.
0:14:35 So there’s no right to free speech.
0:14:39 There’s no right to demonstrate that none of these rights can restrain the state.
0:15:01 On the other hand, and here he’s different from modern liberals, the state can’t intervene in society, can’t curb human beings in order to achieve some idea of social justice or progress or a higher type of humanity, a more civilized or superior or ethically superior type.
0:15:05 It can’t do that either, it shouldn’t promote virtue, it’s indifferent to those matters.
0:15:08 So, it’s a very unfamiliar type of liberalism.
0:15:11 But I share your view, I’m not sure it’s tragic.
0:15:12 I would just say it’s a reality.
0:15:20 Hobbes thought it was a reality that at any time, order in society can break down anywhere, if certain, and it can happen quite quickly.
0:15:23 In other words, order is fragile in human life.
0:15:26 The default condition of human life is not harmony.
0:15:29 I guess that’s where he differs from many liberals.
0:15:34 They’ve assumed that basically human beings want to cooperate, that’s what they try and do.
0:15:44 And if they’re thwarted, it’s by tyranny or reaction or evil demagogues or some sort of evil force which prevents them.
0:15:45 Hobbes doesn’t assume that.
0:15:57 Hobbes thinks the default condition of humanity is conflict and that, therefore, one can fall into brutal and terrible and civilization forms of that conflict at any time.
0:16:03 And I would say that the history of the 20th century exhibited that in many ways.
0:16:12 The main destroyers, I guess, of human life and peace and the main agencies that inflict violence then were states.
0:16:16 But in the 21st century, they’re not necessarily states.
0:16:19 They can be terrorist organizations or criminal gangs.
0:16:31 And so anarchy has emerged now, I think, in the 21st century as at least as much of a threat to human security and human freedom as totalitarian and tyrannical states were in the 20th century.
0:16:35 And that’s, I think, a relatively new development in recent times.
0:16:39 And it’s one which, I think, makes Hobbes more topical, if you like.
0:16:52 I mean, when it was states that were committing vast crimes, his argument that the state should be unfettered in its pursuit of peace kind of seemed weak because states weren’t pursuing peace.
0:16:57 They were pursuing other gods and were killing countless or tens of millions of human beings.
0:17:05 Now, it’s more often the case that states are collapsed or are destroyed.
0:17:15 And sometimes they’re destroyed, as they were in Iraq and Afghanistan and in Libya, for example, by the attempt to bring in a better kind of state.
0:17:25 And so I think one big error of contemporary liberalism, which has actually affected policies in America and elsewhere, has been the idea that nothing is worse than tyranny.
0:17:34 Whereas Hobbes’ insight, his relatively simple insight, but his rather profound one, is that anarchy can be worse than tyranny.
0:17:43 And what’s also true is that once you’re in an anarchical condition, once the state is broken down, once you’re in a failed state, it’s very difficult, actually, to reconstruct the state.
0:17:47 Well, in what sense has liberalism, for you, passed into the dustbin of history?
0:17:56 I mean, liberalism is still very much a thing, even if the shape of it has changed, and it is very much alive, if not terribly well.
0:18:02 So what does it mean to say that liberalism has passed away or died or however you like to put it?
0:18:04 Well, as I’ve said, there are still ideas.
0:18:05 Yeah, yeah.
0:18:12 I mean, you could go into a library and pull a book down, and it will describe medieval or ancient Greek and Roman political philosophy to you.
0:18:14 In that sense, these ideas are alive.
0:18:23 But in the actual world, the actual human world, liberal regimes or liberal societies or a liberal civilization, I think, is in the past.
0:18:30 So, well, let me give you a kind of rather obvious example, since we’re talking partly in an American context.
0:18:48 Thirty years ago, I wrote that I thought that what would happen, I quote myself, perhaps rather vainly, in this new book of mine, I wrote that what I expected to happen in the United States was that as more and more freedoms and activities became covered by rights, by legal rights,
0:19:00 and when some of those rights did not reflect a moral consensus in society, but there were rights to do things that were morally conflicted in society, like abortion.
0:19:03 Now, I’m pro-abortion, but that’s pro-choice, but that’s irrelevant here.
0:19:12 I thought that what would eventually happen would be that the judicial institutions, up to and including the Supreme Court, would be politicized.
0:19:14 They’d become objects of political capture.
0:19:33 Now, when I said that thirty-odd years ago, people like Dworkin, whom I knew in Oxford and others, were incredulous, because for them it was natural, it was some kind of settled fact of life that the majority of judges had become liberal and would stay liberal.
0:19:34 I never thought that for a moment.
0:19:47 I thought that a different dynamic would take place, that the more rights discourse and the practice of rights was extended to morally disputable and conflicted areas, the judicial institutions would be politicized and taken over.
0:20:01 So that, I think, is a feature of, if you think of a liberal regime or a liberal society, one of which there are judicial institutions that are not politically contested, that aren’t part of the political arena, then that’s passed away, that’s gone.
0:20:13 And so, I think, also, has the area of private life, of life in which what you say to friends or work colleagues is not sort of judiciable, is not actionable.
0:20:28 That’s much smaller than it used to be, certainly in Britain, which I know well, and I’m pretty sure it is in America, too, in that what used to be a private conversation could be cited against you because it deviates from some progressive norm.
0:20:40 So, the defining features of liberalism, not as a philosophy that exists in libraries, but as a practicing set of institutions and norms, has at least become weaker.
0:20:44 And I would say it’s more of a pretty well gone now, and I don’t expect it to come back.
0:20:57 We’ll be back with more of my conversation with John Gray after a quick break.
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0:25:11 As you know, Nietzsche thought that liberalism was rooted in these Christian ideas about human equality and the value of the human person.
0:25:21 But modern liberals rejected the religious roots of these values while still attempting to preserve them on secular grounds.
0:25:25 That was a move he thought was destined to fail.
0:25:36 You seem to think that Hobbesian liberalism was intended to be a kind of political atheism, but it eventually shape-shifted into something like a political religion.
0:25:39 Only it didn’t recognize itself as such.
0:25:41 Is that sort of the core problem here?
0:25:42 Or one of them?
0:25:55 One of the core problems – I mean, I think I talk at some length in the book when I discuss the way in John Stuart Mill, who I think for many liberals is still a canonical liberal, or even the canonical liberal.
0:26:06 But he explicitly, undeniably, yet overtly adopted the view that from Auguste Comte, the French positive thinker, who was an anti-liberal, actually.
0:26:17 But anyway, he adopted from Comte the idea of a religion of humanity, which he said should replace all the existing religions and would be better than any of the existing religions.
0:26:22 He explicitly took that from Comte and cited and said that and wrote that in several places.
0:26:30 So, I think it was probably in Mill, at least in Britain, that liberalism became itself a kind of religion.
0:26:39 But, of course, there are still many respects in which it secularized monotheistic assumptions or values or premises.
0:26:59 So, I think it is undoubtedly the case, historically, that liberalism was a set of footnotes to, particularly the liberalism that later emerged as a kind of religion in its own right, to monotheism, to Christian and Jewish monotheism, and as a competitor to it.
0:27:07 And, basically, liberals, conventional liberals, 90% of liberals, are adamantly resistant to this view.
0:27:19 They adamantly insist that their views at no point depend on anything in theism, but they would say it’s a kind of genetic fallacy to think that just something may have come from theism.
0:27:20 It depends on that.
0:27:23 But it’s actually, I think, quite difficult.
0:27:33 You know, it has become more difficult for me to identify what I am, and it’s not just because the fault lines around me are so scrambled.
0:27:41 I think on some level, it’s because, and maybe I’m projecting a little bit onto Hobbes, I have a pretty tragic view of political life.
0:27:54 And because of that, I have a fairly modest understanding of the goal of politics, which is to navigate this tension between order and chaos with the understanding that nothing is permanent.
0:27:59 Everything is contingent, and history has no ultimate direction.
0:28:04 I mean, in so many ways, this was the political lesson of the 20th century.
0:28:13 And after a handful of decades of liberal triumphalism, which is barely a blink in historical time, by the way, people seem to have forgotten this.
0:28:16 And this is probably where you and I are maybe most aligned.
0:28:20 But you don’t think the belief in progress is a complete delusion, right?
0:28:22 I mean, the world has indeed gotten much, much better.
0:28:26 It’s just that that progress isn’t fixed, and it’s dangerous to believe otherwise.
0:28:27 Well, I don’t know.
0:28:35 I mean, what I say in the book is that progress meant in those who believed in it.
0:28:40 It didn’t mean that things would get better for a while and then get worse.
0:28:43 I guess it meant two things, both of which are false.
0:28:53 One is that progress was cumulative in the sense that what was achieved in one generation could be carried on in the next generation.
0:28:54 That’s what meliorism was.
0:29:04 Meliorism as a philosophy isn’t just the idea or the belief, which is some societies or some parts of history, some are better than others.
0:29:08 I think everybody would accept that, whatever their values are, actually.
0:29:13 But it was the belief that the human lot could be cumulatively improved.
0:29:19 That’s to say that certain achievements could be embedded and they would remain fixed.
0:29:21 You could have some retrogression.
0:29:27 You could go from stair seven on the escalator of progress back to stair three.
0:29:33 But then the stakers would start moving again and you would get back to seven.
0:29:35 And then you could get to eight or nine.
0:29:40 So you might make two steps back, but you would then make two or three steps forward.
0:29:41 That was meliorism.
0:29:43 And I think that’s clearly false.
0:29:46 You might be tempted to think that it was true if you thought of only the last 300 years.
0:29:51 But if you look at the larger, there was no apocalyptic revelation 300 years ago.
0:29:53 Some apocalyptic change in human events.
0:30:00 Human beings remained what they were before that in ancient Greece and ancient China and elsewhere.
0:30:01 And then medieval times.
0:30:07 They remained basically, I think, still what they were in their natures and appetites and so on.
0:30:10 And so meliorism in that sense is false.
0:30:21 Well, one thing that seems obvious enough at this moment is that liberal societies are experiencing a lot of internal disruption.
0:30:29 I mean, maybe the only thing that really unites the far right and the far left is their contempt for the society that produced them.
0:30:36 And you say something in the book that I think cuts right to the core of this.
0:30:40 And I just want to read it to you and ask you what you mean by that.
0:30:48 You say in its current and final phase, the liberal West is possessed by an idea of freedom.
0:30:51 What does it mean to be possessed by an idea of freedom?
0:31:07 Well, the sense in which I use it in the book is the sense in which it was used by late 19th century intellectuals in Tsarist Russia were possessed by an idea of freedom, which is that an idea of freedom comes to be prevalent.
0:31:30 That means not the reduction of coercion by other human beings or by the state, not a set of procedures which enables people to live together, not a set of norms of tolerance or peaceful coexistence or even of mutual indifference, which enable people to live together in some rough and ready way.
0:31:32 Freedom means self-creation.
0:31:36 Freedom means creating yourself as the person you want to be.
0:31:40 And that I buy here, I think, is definitely not in Hobbes.
0:31:43 It’s not even in Locke or other liberals.
0:31:44 But it is in Mill.
0:32:00 It is in the chapter of Mill’s essay on liberty where he talks about individuality, where he says that anyone who inherits their way of living or what we would now call their identity from the society, from conventions, from traditions, from history, lacks individuality.
0:32:10 Individuality means being the author of your own life, changing it, fashioning it as if it was a work of art so that it fits something unique and authentic about yourself.
0:32:14 And I think that is what the West is what the West is possessed by.
0:32:30 Because the reason it’s an impossible ideal to realize is that if you want to author your life in a certain way and have a certain identity, it doesn’t mean much or anything unless that identity is somehow accepted by others as well.
0:32:34 Otherwise, it’s just a fiction of yours or a dream.
0:32:49 And that’s, I think, one of the things that’s provoked deep conflict in Western society because there is the underlying idea of a strong version of autonomy as self-creation has become not part of the far right or the far left.
0:32:52 It’s not that which has produced the present conflict.
0:32:54 It’s not the far right or the far left.
0:32:57 It’s become part of liberal thinking and practice itself.
0:33:04 And that, I guess, goes back to Mill and to romantic theorists and philosophers who Mill read.
0:33:10 It’s an element in the liberal tradition that wasn’t very strong or perhaps present at all there, but it’s very, very strong now.
0:33:22 So I guess that’s what it means by being possessed by an idea of freedom, that unless you can be what you want to be and unless you can actually somehow have that validated by others, you’re not free.
0:33:24 Well, that’s not really possible.
0:33:34 And I think the more traditional liberal idea of toleration, which is that you don’t have to be fully validated by other people and they don’t have to be fully validated by you.
0:33:42 They can simply, you can rub along as the different miscellaneous personalities and contingent human beings that you are.
0:33:48 That seems to me a more achievable ideal, but it’s not one that satisfies many people today.
0:33:50 Not many liberals, anyway.
0:33:56 Yeah, I mean, I think that the pursuit of individual freedom is good.
0:34:03 The desire to free ourselves from our inherited identities is good and necessary.
0:34:15 But we do seem to run into a ditch if we pursue it too far because the pursuit, as I think you’re saying, the pursuit of self-definition doesn’t end with the self because no one can be wholly self-defined.
0:34:18 So it becomes a political contest for recognition.
0:34:22 And I don’t think liberal politics are equipped to handle that very well or for very long.
0:34:32 Well, I agree with that, especially if it becomes a matter of rights, because then, of course, you have a perpetual conflict between the rights of rival groups, basically.
0:34:41 If these identities, especially if they’re framed in ways which are antagonistic or polarized, it’s a recipe for unending conflict.
0:34:49 I’m not sure, you see, I wouldn’t even go as far as you do in saying that is wanting to free oneself from traditional is necessarily good.
0:34:56 I think some people want it so they can go ahead and live like that in what used to be called a liberal society if they want to.
0:35:02 But others might be quite happy to just jog along with whatever they’ve inherited and be left.
0:35:04 I think people should have the choice is what I was saying.
0:35:05 I don’t mean imposing that.
0:35:06 No, no, not imposing.
0:35:07 But you think it’s, I don’t think it’s even better.
0:35:09 I don’t think one is better than the other.
0:35:11 I think they’re just preferences, actually.
0:35:24 And so I would never say, as Mill does, Mill constantly says, people who accept the definition of their inherited identities are, he doesn’t use the word inferior, but he says, he implies all the way throughout that they’re inferior.
0:35:34 He suggests that they’re not themselves, they obey a convent by rote, they’re puppet-like creatures, and so I wouldn’t say any of that.
0:35:39 There may be those, I mean, who want to construct themselves, turn themselves into works of art, if you like.
0:35:41 They can go ahead and try.
0:35:44 But quite a lot of people, at least in the past, didn’t want to do that.
0:35:48 And I think there are still quite a lot of people who don’t want to do that now.
0:35:55 And they should have as much freedom and as much respect, it’s an important point, I would say, as these others.
0:36:15 I mean, the key point, I guess, of the book is that the problems of liberal society or the fact that it’s passed away, as I claim, isn’t something that’s happened, as many conservatives or leftists or others say, because liberalism has been sidelined by Marxism or post-modernism or some other philosophy.
0:36:25 The problems of liberal societies come from within liberal societies, come from within liberal societies themselves.
0:36:36 And they are all problems, if you like, that liberalism has proved, the problems it’s generated, the contradictions it’s generated, have proved to be ones that it’s not very good at resolving.
0:36:58 This contemporary obsession with self-expression and self-creation and status and that sort of thing, do you see that as symptomatic of some deep failure of liberal politics, that this was bound to happen because liberal politics did not and cannot satisfy this kind of need?
0:37:09 No, I mean, that’s a kind of Hegelian view or a Fukuyama-like view, which says that what people want is recognition and that liberal societies haven’t been able to, etc., etc.
0:37:28 I think that the main challenges to liberal societies now are quite different, which is that the economic model of liberal society, which was adopted after the collapse of communism, after the Cold War, has left large parts of society behind, not just minorities.
0:37:37 There have been working-class communities in Britain and American parts of Europe, which have just been more or less abandoned.
0:37:54 But also, large parts of what used to be called the middle classes have not seen their incomes or their standards ever being improved much or at all in the last 30 years, while the societies as a whole have gotten considerably better.
0:38:16 So, I think the economic model, actually, of Western liberal societies, the dominant one after the Cold War, during the Cold War, we tend to forget now, although it’s within my lifetime, we tend to forget that after the Second World War, there was a model of social democracy in which the state intervened in many different ways to smooth out the hard edges of market capitalism and constrain it.
0:38:24 I think the abandonment of that model after the end of the Cold War has led to deep-seated contradictions, but maybe they’re not what you’re referring to.
0:38:26 They are, certainly in part.
0:38:43 I mean, I’m glad you said that, because one of the things that irks me about a lot of right-wing types who like to rail against identity politics or wokeism, a term I really hate to use because it has been stretched to the point of meaninglessness, in our discourse at least.
0:38:56 There is this whole materialist history to be told about the failures of liberal capitalism, and those failures have produced a lot of our political pathologies, and a lot of people on the right don’t want to hear about that, and I think that’s a huge mistake.
0:39:05 I agree with you, and in fact, I say in the book, it’s a very simple point, but very hard for many liberals, right-wing liberals in particular, to understand.
0:39:17 I say that what these people call populism is the political blowback against the social disruption produced by their own policies, which they don’t understand or deny.
0:39:19 That’s what populism is.
0:39:29 They talk about populism as if it was a sort of demonic thing that arose from nowhere, that it was a few demagogues that whipped it up out of practically nothing.
0:39:48 I’m not saying there aren’t demagogues, but the reason the demagogues were successful in 2016 and later, and not in 1950 or 60 or 70s in Europe and America, is that there were periods, certainly in Europe, and to some extent even in America, of social democracy,
0:40:01 in which there was a more extensive state, the Eisenhower state, the Rooseveltian state, even before that in America, which limited the impact of market capitalism on human well-being and provided some protection for its casualties.
0:40:17 If you scrap that, which was done to a considerable extent after the end of the Cold War, then over time you create large sections of the population which are suffering and dislocate or simply have no place in the productive process.
0:40:20 And you’ve got to expect some sort of kickback.
0:40:22 So that’s what liberals call populism.
0:40:28 They call populism the political movements around them that they have caused, which they don’t understand.
0:40:30 That’s what populism is, basically.
0:40:33 But you could never get that across to them, actually.
0:40:36 I’ve tried to do this, and they say, but it’s the demagogues.
0:40:37 It’s Trump.
0:40:38 It’s Forrest Johnson.
0:40:40 It’s Nigel Farage.
0:40:41 It’s all these wicked people.
0:40:44 If you could only shut these wicked people up, everything would be fine.
0:40:46 Or some of them say it’s the Russians.
0:40:59 So what they’re doing is they’re denying, or maybe just not understanding, maybe they’re just stupid, they’re just not understanding why these movements have arisen when they did.
0:41:10 I guess the problem for me, and this is why I’m still basically a liberal, is that I don’t think any of the conservative alternatives are preferable for a thousand different reasons.
0:41:14 And I’m not a fan of any imaginable version of authoritarianism.
0:41:17 So I don’t really have anywhere else to go, ideologically.
0:41:18 Liberalism, it is.
0:41:20 It’s up to you.
0:41:27 But it depends how far you think the degeneration of liberal society has gone and how far it can remain livable.
0:41:42 I mean, one of the things in Europe now is that the far right in many European countries, not in Britain yet, but in France and Germany, is now a very substantial political bloc.
0:41:51 In other words, there isn’t a flawed liberal society around us, uncontested, which can carry on pretty well whatever happens.
0:42:01 There are powerful movements, not exactly like in the 30s, but there are powerful far right movements, and in some countries also far left movements, which are challenging it.
0:42:07 So the liberal position might be a kind of luxury of history that is now passing away.
0:42:19 We’ll be back with more of my conversation with John Gray after one more quick break.
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0:45:07 For as long as I can remember, bread has given me hiccups.
0:45:11 I always get the hiccups when I eat baby carrots.
0:45:16 Sometimes when I am washing my left ear, just my left ear, I hiccup.
0:45:20 And my tried and true hiccup here is…
0:45:27 Pour a glass of water, light a match, put the match out in the water, drink the water, throw away the match.
0:45:31 Put your elbows out, point two fingers together and sort of stare at the point between the fingers.
0:45:35 It doesn’t work if you bring your elbows down, but it works.
0:45:38 Just eat a spoonful of peanut butter.
0:45:39 Think of a green rabbit.
0:45:42 I taught myself to burp on commands like…
0:45:46 Excuse me.
0:45:51 And I discovered that when I make myself burp, it stops my hiccups.
0:45:56 Unexplainable is taking on hiccups.
0:45:57 What causes them?
0:46:00 And is there any kind of scientific cure?
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0:46:29 I sometimes wonder how long America can continue to exist with the level of fragmentation and internal confusion that we have.
0:46:31 And the same is true of much of Europe.
0:46:38 How easy is it for you to imagine a political future where America and Europe cease to exist in any recognizable form?
0:46:41 Well, Europe doesn’t exist in any recognizable form.
0:46:44 There isn’t a European super-state, and there isn’t going to be.
0:46:50 What there are are a variety of nation-states with internal problems of various kinds.
0:46:52 And so I think that will basically continue.
0:46:54 They might shift into becoming a kind of…
0:47:00 I mean, what’s been happening in the last few years is that they’re shifting into becoming almost a hard-right block.
0:47:06 Not that the far-right has taken over, though some people might say it did in Hungary and did in Poland for a while.
0:47:10 But it’s the far-right which is shaping policy on lots of issues.
0:47:12 But it won’t become a super-state.
0:47:18 As to America, I don’t expect the American state to fragment in the way that by secession…
0:47:24 I mean, I know some Americans talk about that, and Texans and Californians and others.
0:47:25 I don’t actually expect that.
0:47:38 I would more expect a kind of semi-stable, semi-anarchy, in which there are lots of regions of American society and of cities and so on which are semi-anarchical.
0:47:42 That’s also true in places like Mexico, is it not, and parts of Latin America.
0:47:45 That could go on for quite a long time.
0:47:50 The big change, I guess, will be, if I’m right, it will be in the capacity of America to project its power globally.
0:47:52 I think that is steeply declining.
0:47:59 And I think that will, within your and my lifetime, will be actually seen to be greatly diminished.
0:48:07 Because although America still has an enormous amount, the U.S., an enormous amount of hard firepower, more than anywhere else, actually, China’s catching up.
0:48:13 But also, its capacity to use that hard firepower intelligently has not been very great.
0:48:30 You actually say something pretty interesting, if that’s the right word, about America in the book, which is that it’s become Schmittian in the sense that we believed, rather foolishly, that the law could protect liberal values from political contestation.
0:48:35 But the law has become indistinguishable from politics.
0:48:39 And Trump just pushed us right past the threshold.
0:48:48 And now we’re in, in my estimation, just a full-blown legitimacy crisis, where it doesn’t even matter who wins the next election.
0:48:50 Just something like 30% of the country.
0:48:51 Do you agree with that, by the way?
0:48:52 That is what I think.
0:48:53 But do you agree with that?
0:48:53 Do I agree with what?
0:48:56 That America’s in a legitimation crisis.
0:48:56 Oh, yes.
0:48:58 I’ve written this many times.
0:49:00 It doesn’t matter who wins the next election.
0:49:03 Something like 30% of the country will consider it illegitimate.
0:49:04 That’s that liberal politics, John.
0:49:07 That’s something much closer to war, really.
0:49:09 Well, it’s what Schmitt thought politics was.
0:49:10 Friends and enemies.
0:49:18 And I think the achievement of liberalism in the various liberalism was to replace the war by something else, or at least attenuate the war.
0:49:21 I mean, this was true, by the way, even in my time.
0:49:23 Let me give you an autobiographical example.
0:49:34 During the Thatcherite period, when I was an actor of Thatcherite, I remained, in terms of close friendship, with leading members, both theoretical members and even politicians, in the Labour Party.
0:49:49 So, we could meet, we could have dinner, we could talk with each other, we could share ideas, didn’t agree, didn’t share goals, thought that this great Thatcherite experiment could come to grief in various different ways, as I then came to think, and so on, for slightly different reasons.
0:49:54 But that’s actually, in America, I would say, it’s rare, I would think.
0:49:58 Is it not shown for people to interact in that way?
0:50:02 How many Trumpists have friendly relations with Washington Post liberals?
0:50:03 Not many, I think.
0:50:06 No, I’d say that’s, and that’s becoming increasingly so.
0:50:09 That’s unfortunate, because that’s the triumph of the Schmittian model.
0:50:13 It’s the triumph of friend-enemy relations.
0:50:19 And once you’ve gotten to friend-enemy relations, I think you’re in deep trouble, at least from a liberal standpoint.
0:50:25 It’s very hard to get back from that situation, because both sides want to win.
0:50:27 And that means it’s a sort of downward spiral.
0:50:31 Very hard to, I don’t say impossible, you know, something could happen that we haven’t thought of.
0:50:33 But it’s very difficult to get out.
0:50:35 So I agree completely with you.
0:50:41 And it’s one of the things I constantly say, which is that, in one sense, it’s very important who wins the American election next year.
0:50:45 Because if it’s Trump, the changes will be huge and quick, I believe.
0:50:53 But in another sense, it doesn’t matter at all, because whoever wins will not be accepted, as you say, by maybe a quarter or a third of American society, American voters.
0:50:58 So the legitimization crisis will just get worse, whoever wins.
0:51:06 That’s a very profound fact of the world, because the world still depends on a kind of shadow of Pax Americana.
0:51:09 It still depends on that, or has depended on that.
0:51:23 And as that is comprehensively removed, I mean, if Trump pulls American forces out of Europe, which, if he winds up NATO, if he pulls out of the Gulf, where there is now the new Middle Eastern war, that would be a very profound change.
0:51:31 Yeah, I think the unfortunate truth is that liberalism doesn’t really have a solution to a legitimacy crisis.
0:51:34 No, I agree with you entirely, which is why it’s so difficult to speculate.
0:51:46 I mean, what I don’t expect is any new order emerging from this, whether of the right or the left, but just of continued disintegration, not into civil war in America.
0:51:47 I’m not an American.
0:51:52 Sometimes since I’ve been there, I spent a long time in America in the 70s and 80s and 90s.
0:51:55 So I knew it better then than I do now.
0:51:58 But I don’t expect a full-scale civil war.
0:52:16 But I can imagine a fairly long period, decades, you know, maybe generations of civil warfare, when different identity groups, different political ideologies, different parts of America, states of America, American states and municipalities, just go their own way with lots of the conflicts that that involves.
0:52:33 That involves, but with a kind of area, which I think will still exist of high technology, an oligarchy, which preserves its own position one way or another, and the rest of society is doing as best it can.
0:52:35 I mean, large parts of it abandoned.
0:52:42 That’s what I sort of expect a kind of hybrid like that could go on for an awfully long time.
0:52:50 I don’t think America faces the internal pressures that, say, Russia does, because Russia has powerful ethnic divisions within minorities.
0:52:58 And the state apparatus in Russia, although more ruthless and more violent domestically, is much more corroded and much more corrupt.
0:53:07 So I think there is a real possibility that Russia could actually break up, whereas I don’t actually, you may be more optimistic or less hyperbolic, if you like, than I am.
0:53:09 I don’t see that as likely in America.
0:53:13 I think just continuing decay is a much more likely prospect.
0:53:15 Yeah, I would agree with that.
0:53:17 I have no idea what’s going to happen.
0:53:23 I take some solace in the fact that, at least in America, we’ve survived much, much worse in our past.
0:53:29 And, you know, we may just lumber along in this interregnum for a very, very long time.
0:53:31 It may be a very long interregnum.
0:53:32 It might be.
0:53:35 And look, maybe we need a new order.
0:53:48 My fear has always been the road from the present order to the next one is historically a rather bumpy one, and one probably none of us want to take.
0:53:53 And I’d prefer to fix the world we have before we tear it down.
0:53:54 But I don’t know.
0:53:58 Again, I’m not in the prophecy business, so I don’t know what’s going to happen.
0:54:04 I mean, I’ve been talking about this idea of politics as tragedy, too, for the last few years.
0:54:12 And what some liberals and others say is, they say, well, we want to get to a world where tragedy is diminished.
0:54:23 Now, very few of them say now where there is no tragedy, though some of them say we want to get to a world, some of them have said, in which the only tragedies are failed love affairs or familial disputes and so on.
0:54:26 We’ll never get to a world like that, I’m sure.
0:54:46 But what I think the danger of trying to eliminate tragedy in politics is that in order to survive in any political system and to gain the power and retain the power and exercise the power, you would need to get to a society in which tragedy is supposedly diminished or mitigated or abolished.
0:54:54 You have to enter into tragic choices which replicate the tragedy you’re trying to get rid of, trying to transcend.
0:55:09 So, for example, one of the things that happens in all revolutions, certainly in all the European, Russian, Chinese revolutions and so on, is that once the old regime fails, if it’s really knocked down and fails, then the revolutionary contestants fight among themselves.
0:55:11 And the one that prevails is the one that’s the most ruthless.
0:55:19 So that in Soviet Union, early Soviet Russia, which I know the best, the anarchists were the first to be suppressed.
0:55:22 Then the social revolutionaries, because they were less well organized, they were less ruthless.
0:55:29 So what actually produces the authoritarianism is the struggle by the revolutionary groups against each other.
0:55:30 And that always happens.
0:55:37 And that sort of illustrates my deeper point, which is that in order to get to a supposedly post-tragic world,
0:55:49 you have all kinds of ruthless, tragic decisions have had to be made about shooting anarchists en masse, assassinating, murdering, and putting in camps and so on, various dissidents.
0:55:55 And once you’ve done that, you’re back into the world where you’ve never left it, actually, of tragic choices.
0:56:05 So I would much prefer politics, which accepted that tragedy was primordial and omnipresent and would always be, but use this.
0:56:14 I mean, this is why I’ve had a kind of Occam’s razor approach to tragedy, which is the aim should be to minimize tragedies beyond what was strictly necessary.
0:56:19 And don’t go around, multiply them by trying to create new regimes all over the place.
0:56:21 Tragedy in politics isn’t imperfectibility.
0:56:23 We have no idea of perfection.
0:56:26 It isn’t that progress is always reversible and ephemeral.
0:56:28 It’s something deeper than that.
0:56:38 It’s that there are recurring situations in politics, and always will be, in which whatever we do has deep and enduring losses attached to it.
0:56:40 And I think that will always be the case.
0:56:42 So I think that’s what I prefer.
0:56:59 But I think in order to get a view of the world like that, you do actually have to go back before Christianity to maybe to the book of Job, but also to ancient Greek tragedy, where there’s no ultimate redemption at all, actually.
0:57:16 It recurs a bit in Shakespeare later on in a Christian civilization, but you have to go all the way back to the Greek tragic dramas to get that sense that human beings are not autonomous in the sense of being ever able to shape the choices they have to make.
0:57:23 Tragedies are unchosen choices, choices that human beings don’t want to make and would prefer not to make, but have to make.
0:57:30 Once again, the book is called The New Leviathans, Thoughts After Liberalism.
0:57:32 John Gray, always a pleasure.
0:57:33 Thank you for coming in today.
0:57:35 Great pleasure on my part as well.
0:57:37 Let’s have another conversation in a couple of years, shall we?
0:57:38 Let’s do it.
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0:01:29 Those are the words of the great and now infamous Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century English philosopher.
0:01:39 You can find them in his 1651 book, The Leviathan, which is often considered the founding text of modern political philosophy.
0:01:47 Hobbes’ big contribution was to challenge the right of kings and religious authorities to rule.
0:01:52 The foundation of political power for him was the consent of the governed.
0:01:58 And the only reason to hand over authority to the state, or anyone else for that matter,
0:02:00 was for the protection of the individual.
0:02:05 If that sounds familiar, it’s because it is.
0:02:12 That’s basically the political philosophy that came to dominate the Western world from the Enlightenment on.
0:02:15 It’s what we now call liberalism.
0:02:21 But we’re in an era where liberalism and democracy are being contested from within and without.
0:02:28 And while I wouldn’t say that liberalism is dead, that doesn’t quite make sense.
0:02:31 I would say that it’s wobbly.
0:02:35 What should we make of that?
0:02:38 Is the liberal experiment coming to an end?
0:02:43 And if it is, what does that mean for our political future?
0:02:50 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
0:03:03 Today’s guest is political philosopher John Gray.
0:03:12 We spoke before last year’s elections, and lately, I have found myself returning to that conversation over and over again.
0:03:18 In his book, The New Leviathans, Thoughts After Liberalism,
0:03:27 Gray challenges the idea that the liberal dream of history, with a capital H, is over, and that liberal democracy has won.
0:03:35 Hobbes is at the center of his book because he thinks Hobbes’ liberalism was more realistic in its ambitions,
0:03:41 and that his most important lessons about the limits of politics have been forgotten.
0:03:48 It is, as you might suspect, a challenging book, but it is an essential read.
0:03:56 And I invited Gray onto the show to talk about what he thinks has gone wrong, and more importantly, where he thinks we’re headed.
0:04:03 John Gray, welcome to The Gray Area.
0:04:04 Thank you very much, Sean.
0:04:12 What’s interesting about this new book is that you’re not even bothering to announce the death of liberalism.
0:04:17 Like Nietzsche’s madman screaming about God in the town square.
0:04:22 You’re saying liberalism has already passed, and most of us don’t quite know it yet.
0:04:23 Is that right?
0:04:33 Yes, I think there are many visible signs that anything like a liberal order or a liberal civilization has passed.
0:04:43 In the last 30 years, shall we say, since 1990, 30-odd years, there’s been an enormous…
0:04:52 After that moment in which it seemed that liberal democracy was going to become universal or nearly universal following the collapse of communism,
0:04:58 What, in fact, happened was that the transition from communism to liberal democracy did not occur in Russia.
0:05:00 It has not occurred in China.
0:05:15 The wars that were fought, so-called wars of choice, by the United States and its followers, including Britain, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, to some degree, and Libya, were all failures.
0:05:28 None of those countries became democratic or anything near it, and, in fact, they only damaged those countries in profound ways and damaged the United States, and particularly the United States and Britain in various ways.
0:05:39 So, I think if you just look at geopolitical trends, you can see that the so-called liberal West, if something like that ever fully existed, is in steep retreat.
0:06:08 And in Western societies themselves, what were taken for granted, even within my lifetime, and perhaps yours, Sean, as fully accepted, liberal freedoms of speech and inquiry and expression and so forth, have been curtailed, not by a dictatorial state, interestingly, as in the former Soviet Union or today in Xi’s China, but actually by civil institutions themselves.
0:06:27 It’s been universities and museums and publishers and media organizations, that of charities and cultural institutions and so on, have imposed various kinds of limits on themselves, such that they police the expression of their members.
0:06:36 And those who deviate from a prevailing progressive orthodoxy or are in various ways canceled or excluded, that’s quite new.
0:06:39 But it’s rather widespread now and pervasive.
0:06:50 And although, of course, it’s true that there are enclaves of free expression, enclaves or niches like the one we’re enjoying now.
0:07:00 Although we’re not in the position that people are in, in Xi’s China or Putin’s Russia, we can still communicate relatively freely.
0:07:12 There are large areas of life, including the institutions I mentioned earlier, which used to be, let’s say, governed by liberal norms, and aren’t any longer.
0:07:26 So I think it makes sense just as an empirical observation to say that liberal civilization that existed and could be described as a liberal civilization, with all its faults and flaws, doesn’t exist any longer.
0:07:34 Of course, you might say liberalism as a theory continues to exist, but then so does medieval political theory or any modern political theory.
0:07:36 It just doesn’t describe the world anymore.
0:07:46 Well, let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves here, because the term liberalism is one of those big, unwieldy terms that means a million different things to a million different people.
0:07:53 What do you mean by liberalism, just so it’s clear what we’re diagnosing the death of here?
0:08:08 The core of liberalism as a philosophy is the idea that no one has a natural right to rule, and that all rulers, all regimes, all states serve those whom they govern.
0:08:11 So that this is a view which differs from Plato.
0:08:24 Plato thought that philosophers had the best authority to rule because they could better than other people perceive truths beyond the shadows of the improbable world.
0:08:32 In Hobbes’ day, some people believed, many people believed that kings had divine right to rule.
0:08:40 And later on, we’ve had beliefs, we have had philosophies which have developed according to which it’s the most virtuous people who should rule.
0:08:52 And I think actually the hyper-liberal, or what is now sometimes called the woke movement, has something of that in it, which is that they imagine that they represent virtue better than, and progressiveness better than others.
0:08:58 And therefore, they have a right at least to shape society according to their vision.
0:09:11 But a liberal, and in this sense, Hobbes is a liberal, and I’m still a liberal in this sense, actually, is one who thinks that any sovereign, any ruler, depends for their authority on protecting the well-being of the ruled.
0:09:15 And in liberal theory, it’s normally, liberal thoughts are normally individuals.
0:09:19 And when it doesn’t do that, then any obligation to obey is dissolved.
0:09:23 And Hobbes says explicitly, the book is partly about Thomas Hobbes, of course.
0:09:30 As you know, the 17th century political philosopher that wrote the book, Leviathan, that’s why it’s called New Leviathan.
0:09:53 Hobbes said that when the sovereign, which could be a king or a Republican assembly or a parliament or whatever, but when the sovereign fails to protect the individual from violence for other human beings, when the sovereign fails to provide security, all obligations are dissolved, and the individual can leave or kill the sovereign.
0:09:54 Kill the sovereign.
0:09:59 So there is a fundamental equality between the ruler and the root.
0:10:00 I think that’s the core of liberalism.
0:10:03 And in that sense, I say Hobbes is still a liberal, and so am I.
0:10:12 But it had many, many different meanings later or attached to it about rights and progressiveness and so on, which I don’t subscribe to, and neither did Hobbes.
0:10:22 Do you actually call Hobbes the first and last great liberal philosopher, which might surprise more than a few political philosopher types?
0:10:23 Why is that?
0:10:25 Why is he the first and the last great liberal philosopher for you?
0:10:27 Well, it shouldn’t surprise them.
0:10:36 If they knew a bit more than they normally do about the history of political ideas, they would know that the best 20th century scholars of Hobbes all regarded him as a liberal.
0:10:44 So Michael Oakeshott, the British conservative philosopher, the Canadian Marxist philosopher, C.B.
0:10:51 Macpherson, and Leo Strauss, the American conservative philosopher, they all regarded Hobbes as a liberal.
0:10:57 And so it’s only philosophers who don’t read ideas and their philosophy, which is the majority, I’m afraid.
0:11:00 It’s only those who are surprised by it.
0:11:01 So they shouldn’t be.
0:11:07 But I think the sense in which he is is exactly the sense of which I just mentioned earlier, which is that he doesn’t accept any.
0:11:09 The most virtuous don’t have the right to rule.
0:11:12 The cleverest or the most intelligent don’t have the right to rule.
0:11:15 None are appointed by God to rule.
0:11:24 States or sovereigns or human constructions or human creations, which exist only so long as they serve the purposes of those over whom they rule.
0:11:30 And so that, I think, is still alive, that idea, not only in philosophy.
0:11:31 I think it’s alive in the world.
0:11:39 And there’s nowhere in the world now, there was in the past, even relatively recent past, where anyone rules by prescriptive right.
0:11:51 If someone just says, I have the right to rule you, as our King Charles did in the Civil War in Britain in the 17th century, I have the divine right to rule.
0:11:51 He was executed.
0:11:53 He was executed by the parliament.
0:11:57 So that liberal idea, I think, is still quite strong in the world.
0:12:02 But it’s quite different from lots of other liberal ideas about progress and humanity and rights and so on.
0:12:12 I used to teach Hobbes, and I always wondered what it was I liked so much about him, because he is so dark and gloomy.
0:12:21 I mean, even if you’ve never read Hobbes, you probably know his famous description of human life as nasty, brutish, and solitary, and short, that kind of thing.
0:12:29 And I think what appeals to me in his thought is the tragic dimension.
0:12:34 You know, anarchy, for him, was never something we transcend.
0:12:36 It was something we stave off.
0:12:38 But it remained a permanent possibility.
0:12:45 That awful state of nature that he worried about was always lurking just beneath civilization.
0:12:59 Do you think modern liberalism went awry when it lost sight of this and maybe drifted away from Hobbes’ very limited view of the purpose of the state, which is just to keep us from eating each other, basically?
0:13:05 I think liberalism, over time, turned into something different.
0:13:12 I mean, one has to say that, although historically, in terms of the history of ideas, Hobbes is definitely a liberal.
0:13:30 Most people who’ve called themselves liberals subsequently in the 19th and 20th and 21st centuries wouldn’t regard Hobbes and don’t regard Hobbes as a liberal, because although he has this feature that sovereigns or states serve the individuals over whom they rule,
0:13:41 He doesn’t think that what the state or the sovereign can do to provide security can be limited or should be limited by rights or some of the principles.
0:13:42 He doesn’t think that.
0:13:58 And that’s the sort of difficulty that many people find in thinking about Hobbes, which is that although he thinks the state has a very limited purpose, it can do anything that it judges, the sovereign judges, that will achieve that purpose.
0:14:04 So, for example, the state in Hobbes has no obligation to respect freedom of speech.
0:14:10 If freedom of speech harms social peace and political order, it can intervene.
0:14:18 Hobbes even says that the sovereign can define the term, define the words used in the Bible to kind of define what those words mean.
0:14:31 And probably when you taught him, you notice this, so that society can avoid the religious wars that were raging, had been raging in Europe in his time and around his time over what the Bible meant.
0:14:33 Peace determines everything.
0:14:35 So there’s no right to free speech.
0:14:39 There’s no right to demonstrate that none of these rights can restrain the state.
0:15:01 On the other hand, and here he’s different from modern liberals, the state can’t intervene in society, can’t curb human beings in order to achieve some idea of social justice or progress or a higher type of humanity, a more civilized or superior or ethically superior type.
0:15:05 It can’t do that either, it shouldn’t promote virtue, it’s indifferent to those matters.
0:15:08 So, it’s a very unfamiliar type of liberalism.
0:15:11 But I share your view, I’m not sure it’s tragic.
0:15:12 I would just say it’s a reality.
0:15:20 Hobbes thought it was a reality that at any time, order in society can break down anywhere, if certain, and it can happen quite quickly.
0:15:23 In other words, order is fragile in human life.
0:15:26 The default condition of human life is not harmony.
0:15:29 I guess that’s where he differs from many liberals.
0:15:34 They’ve assumed that basically human beings want to cooperate, that’s what they try and do.
0:15:44 And if they’re thwarted, it’s by tyranny or reaction or evil demagogues or some sort of evil force which prevents them.
0:15:45 Hobbes doesn’t assume that.
0:15:57 Hobbes thinks the default condition of humanity is conflict and that, therefore, one can fall into brutal and terrible and civilization forms of that conflict at any time.
0:16:03 And I would say that the history of the 20th century exhibited that in many ways.
0:16:12 The main destroyers, I guess, of human life and peace and the main agencies that inflict violence then were states.
0:16:16 But in the 21st century, they’re not necessarily states.
0:16:19 They can be terrorist organizations or criminal gangs.
0:16:31 And so anarchy has emerged now, I think, in the 21st century as at least as much of a threat to human security and human freedom as totalitarian and tyrannical states were in the 20th century.
0:16:35 And that’s, I think, a relatively new development in recent times.
0:16:39 And it’s one which, I think, makes Hobbes more topical, if you like.
0:16:52 I mean, when it was states that were committing vast crimes, his argument that the state should be unfettered in its pursuit of peace kind of seemed weak because states weren’t pursuing peace.
0:16:57 They were pursuing other gods and were killing countless or tens of millions of human beings.
0:17:05 Now, it’s more often the case that states are collapsed or are destroyed.
0:17:15 And sometimes they’re destroyed, as they were in Iraq and Afghanistan and in Libya, for example, by the attempt to bring in a better kind of state.
0:17:25 And so I think one big error of contemporary liberalism, which has actually affected policies in America and elsewhere, has been the idea that nothing is worse than tyranny.
0:17:34 Whereas Hobbes’ insight, his relatively simple insight, but his rather profound one, is that anarchy can be worse than tyranny.
0:17:43 And what’s also true is that once you’re in an anarchical condition, once the state is broken down, once you’re in a failed state, it’s very difficult, actually, to reconstruct the state.
0:17:47 Well, in what sense has liberalism, for you, passed into the dustbin of history?
0:17:56 I mean, liberalism is still very much a thing, even if the shape of it has changed, and it is very much alive, if not terribly well.
0:18:02 So what does it mean to say that liberalism has passed away or died or however you like to put it?
0:18:04 Well, as I’ve said, there are still ideas.
0:18:05 Yeah, yeah.
0:18:12 I mean, you could go into a library and pull a book down, and it will describe medieval or ancient Greek and Roman political philosophy to you.
0:18:14 In that sense, these ideas are alive.
0:18:23 But in the actual world, the actual human world, liberal regimes or liberal societies or a liberal civilization, I think, is in the past.
0:18:30 So, well, let me give you a kind of rather obvious example, since we’re talking partly in an American context.
0:18:48 Thirty years ago, I wrote that I thought that what would happen, I quote myself, perhaps rather vainly, in this new book of mine, I wrote that what I expected to happen in the United States was that as more and more freedoms and activities became covered by rights, by legal rights,
0:19:00 and when some of those rights did not reflect a moral consensus in society, but there were rights to do things that were morally conflicted in society, like abortion.
0:19:03 Now, I’m pro-abortion, but that’s pro-choice, but that’s irrelevant here.
0:19:12 I thought that what would eventually happen would be that the judicial institutions, up to and including the Supreme Court, would be politicized.
0:19:14 They’d become objects of political capture.
0:19:33 Now, when I said that thirty-odd years ago, people like Dworkin, whom I knew in Oxford and others, were incredulous, because for them it was natural, it was some kind of settled fact of life that the majority of judges had become liberal and would stay liberal.
0:19:34 I never thought that for a moment.
0:19:47 I thought that a different dynamic would take place, that the more rights discourse and the practice of rights was extended to morally disputable and conflicted areas, the judicial institutions would be politicized and taken over.
0:20:01 So that, I think, is a feature of, if you think of a liberal regime or a liberal society, one of which there are judicial institutions that are not politically contested, that aren’t part of the political arena, then that’s passed away, that’s gone.
0:20:13 And so, I think, also, has the area of private life, of life in which what you say to friends or work colleagues is not sort of judiciable, is not actionable.
0:20:28 That’s much smaller than it used to be, certainly in Britain, which I know well, and I’m pretty sure it is in America, too, in that what used to be a private conversation could be cited against you because it deviates from some progressive norm.
0:20:40 So, the defining features of liberalism, not as a philosophy that exists in libraries, but as a practicing set of institutions and norms, has at least become weaker.
0:20:44 And I would say it’s more of a pretty well gone now, and I don’t expect it to come back.
0:20:57 We’ll be back with more of my conversation with John Gray after a quick break.
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0:25:11 As you know, Nietzsche thought that liberalism was rooted in these Christian ideas about human equality and the value of the human person.
0:25:21 But modern liberals rejected the religious roots of these values while still attempting to preserve them on secular grounds.
0:25:25 That was a move he thought was destined to fail.
0:25:36 You seem to think that Hobbesian liberalism was intended to be a kind of political atheism, but it eventually shape-shifted into something like a political religion.
0:25:39 Only it didn’t recognize itself as such.
0:25:41 Is that sort of the core problem here?
0:25:42 Or one of them?
0:25:55 One of the core problems – I mean, I think I talk at some length in the book when I discuss the way in John Stuart Mill, who I think for many liberals is still a canonical liberal, or even the canonical liberal.
0:26:06 But he explicitly, undeniably, yet overtly adopted the view that from Auguste Comte, the French positive thinker, who was an anti-liberal, actually.
0:26:17 But anyway, he adopted from Comte the idea of a religion of humanity, which he said should replace all the existing religions and would be better than any of the existing religions.
0:26:22 He explicitly took that from Comte and cited and said that and wrote that in several places.
0:26:30 So, I think it was probably in Mill, at least in Britain, that liberalism became itself a kind of religion.
0:26:39 But, of course, there are still many respects in which it secularized monotheistic assumptions or values or premises.
0:26:59 So, I think it is undoubtedly the case, historically, that liberalism was a set of footnotes to, particularly the liberalism that later emerged as a kind of religion in its own right, to monotheism, to Christian and Jewish monotheism, and as a competitor to it.
0:27:07 And, basically, liberals, conventional liberals, 90% of liberals, are adamantly resistant to this view.
0:27:19 They adamantly insist that their views at no point depend on anything in theism, but they would say it’s a kind of genetic fallacy to think that just something may have come from theism.
0:27:20 It depends on that.
0:27:23 But it’s actually, I think, quite difficult.
0:27:33 You know, it has become more difficult for me to identify what I am, and it’s not just because the fault lines around me are so scrambled.
0:27:41 I think on some level, it’s because, and maybe I’m projecting a little bit onto Hobbes, I have a pretty tragic view of political life.
0:27:54 And because of that, I have a fairly modest understanding of the goal of politics, which is to navigate this tension between order and chaos with the understanding that nothing is permanent.
0:27:59 Everything is contingent, and history has no ultimate direction.
0:28:04 I mean, in so many ways, this was the political lesson of the 20th century.
0:28:13 And after a handful of decades of liberal triumphalism, which is barely a blink in historical time, by the way, people seem to have forgotten this.
0:28:16 And this is probably where you and I are maybe most aligned.
0:28:20 But you don’t think the belief in progress is a complete delusion, right?
0:28:22 I mean, the world has indeed gotten much, much better.
0:28:26 It’s just that that progress isn’t fixed, and it’s dangerous to believe otherwise.
0:28:27 Well, I don’t know.
0:28:35 I mean, what I say in the book is that progress meant in those who believed in it.
0:28:40 It didn’t mean that things would get better for a while and then get worse.
0:28:43 I guess it meant two things, both of which are false.
0:28:53 One is that progress was cumulative in the sense that what was achieved in one generation could be carried on in the next generation.
0:28:54 That’s what meliorism was.
0:29:04 Meliorism as a philosophy isn’t just the idea or the belief, which is some societies or some parts of history, some are better than others.
0:29:08 I think everybody would accept that, whatever their values are, actually.
0:29:13 But it was the belief that the human lot could be cumulatively improved.
0:29:19 That’s to say that certain achievements could be embedded and they would remain fixed.
0:29:21 You could have some retrogression.
0:29:27 You could go from stair seven on the escalator of progress back to stair three.
0:29:33 But then the stakers would start moving again and you would get back to seven.
0:29:35 And then you could get to eight or nine.
0:29:40 So you might make two steps back, but you would then make two or three steps forward.
0:29:41 That was meliorism.
0:29:43 And I think that’s clearly false.
0:29:46 You might be tempted to think that it was true if you thought of only the last 300 years.
0:29:51 But if you look at the larger, there was no apocalyptic revelation 300 years ago.
0:29:53 Some apocalyptic change in human events.
0:30:00 Human beings remained what they were before that in ancient Greece and ancient China and elsewhere.
0:30:01 And then medieval times.
0:30:07 They remained basically, I think, still what they were in their natures and appetites and so on.
0:30:10 And so meliorism in that sense is false.
0:30:21 Well, one thing that seems obvious enough at this moment is that liberal societies are experiencing a lot of internal disruption.
0:30:29 I mean, maybe the only thing that really unites the far right and the far left is their contempt for the society that produced them.
0:30:36 And you say something in the book that I think cuts right to the core of this.
0:30:40 And I just want to read it to you and ask you what you mean by that.
0:30:48 You say in its current and final phase, the liberal West is possessed by an idea of freedom.
0:30:51 What does it mean to be possessed by an idea of freedom?
0:31:07 Well, the sense in which I use it in the book is the sense in which it was used by late 19th century intellectuals in Tsarist Russia were possessed by an idea of freedom, which is that an idea of freedom comes to be prevalent.
0:31:30 That means not the reduction of coercion by other human beings or by the state, not a set of procedures which enables people to live together, not a set of norms of tolerance or peaceful coexistence or even of mutual indifference, which enable people to live together in some rough and ready way.
0:31:32 Freedom means self-creation.
0:31:36 Freedom means creating yourself as the person you want to be.
0:31:40 And that I buy here, I think, is definitely not in Hobbes.
0:31:43 It’s not even in Locke or other liberals.
0:31:44 But it is in Mill.
0:32:00 It is in the chapter of Mill’s essay on liberty where he talks about individuality, where he says that anyone who inherits their way of living or what we would now call their identity from the society, from conventions, from traditions, from history, lacks individuality.
0:32:10 Individuality means being the author of your own life, changing it, fashioning it as if it was a work of art so that it fits something unique and authentic about yourself.
0:32:14 And I think that is what the West is what the West is possessed by.
0:32:30 Because the reason it’s an impossible ideal to realize is that if you want to author your life in a certain way and have a certain identity, it doesn’t mean much or anything unless that identity is somehow accepted by others as well.
0:32:34 Otherwise, it’s just a fiction of yours or a dream.
0:32:49 And that’s, I think, one of the things that’s provoked deep conflict in Western society because there is the underlying idea of a strong version of autonomy as self-creation has become not part of the far right or the far left.
0:32:52 It’s not that which has produced the present conflict.
0:32:54 It’s not the far right or the far left.
0:32:57 It’s become part of liberal thinking and practice itself.
0:33:04 And that, I guess, goes back to Mill and to romantic theorists and philosophers who Mill read.
0:33:10 It’s an element in the liberal tradition that wasn’t very strong or perhaps present at all there, but it’s very, very strong now.
0:33:22 So I guess that’s what it means by being possessed by an idea of freedom, that unless you can be what you want to be and unless you can actually somehow have that validated by others, you’re not free.
0:33:24 Well, that’s not really possible.
0:33:34 And I think the more traditional liberal idea of toleration, which is that you don’t have to be fully validated by other people and they don’t have to be fully validated by you.
0:33:42 They can simply, you can rub along as the different miscellaneous personalities and contingent human beings that you are.
0:33:48 That seems to me a more achievable ideal, but it’s not one that satisfies many people today.
0:33:50 Not many liberals, anyway.
0:33:56 Yeah, I mean, I think that the pursuit of individual freedom is good.
0:34:03 The desire to free ourselves from our inherited identities is good and necessary.
0:34:15 But we do seem to run into a ditch if we pursue it too far because the pursuit, as I think you’re saying, the pursuit of self-definition doesn’t end with the self because no one can be wholly self-defined.
0:34:18 So it becomes a political contest for recognition.
0:34:22 And I don’t think liberal politics are equipped to handle that very well or for very long.
0:34:32 Well, I agree with that, especially if it becomes a matter of rights, because then, of course, you have a perpetual conflict between the rights of rival groups, basically.
0:34:41 If these identities, especially if they’re framed in ways which are antagonistic or polarized, it’s a recipe for unending conflict.
0:34:49 I’m not sure, you see, I wouldn’t even go as far as you do in saying that is wanting to free oneself from traditional is necessarily good.
0:34:56 I think some people want it so they can go ahead and live like that in what used to be called a liberal society if they want to.
0:35:02 But others might be quite happy to just jog along with whatever they’ve inherited and be left.
0:35:04 I think people should have the choice is what I was saying.
0:35:05 I don’t mean imposing that.
0:35:06 No, no, not imposing.
0:35:07 But you think it’s, I don’t think it’s even better.
0:35:09 I don’t think one is better than the other.
0:35:11 I think they’re just preferences, actually.
0:35:24 And so I would never say, as Mill does, Mill constantly says, people who accept the definition of their inherited identities are, he doesn’t use the word inferior, but he says, he implies all the way throughout that they’re inferior.
0:35:34 He suggests that they’re not themselves, they obey a convent by rote, they’re puppet-like creatures, and so I wouldn’t say any of that.
0:35:39 There may be those, I mean, who want to construct themselves, turn themselves into works of art, if you like.
0:35:41 They can go ahead and try.
0:35:44 But quite a lot of people, at least in the past, didn’t want to do that.
0:35:48 And I think there are still quite a lot of people who don’t want to do that now.
0:35:55 And they should have as much freedom and as much respect, it’s an important point, I would say, as these others.
0:36:15 I mean, the key point, I guess, of the book is that the problems of liberal society or the fact that it’s passed away, as I claim, isn’t something that’s happened, as many conservatives or leftists or others say, because liberalism has been sidelined by Marxism or post-modernism or some other philosophy.
0:36:25 The problems of liberal societies come from within liberal societies, come from within liberal societies themselves.
0:36:36 And they are all problems, if you like, that liberalism has proved, the problems it’s generated, the contradictions it’s generated, have proved to be ones that it’s not very good at resolving.
0:36:58 This contemporary obsession with self-expression and self-creation and status and that sort of thing, do you see that as symptomatic of some deep failure of liberal politics, that this was bound to happen because liberal politics did not and cannot satisfy this kind of need?
0:37:09 No, I mean, that’s a kind of Hegelian view or a Fukuyama-like view, which says that what people want is recognition and that liberal societies haven’t been able to, etc., etc.
0:37:28 I think that the main challenges to liberal societies now are quite different, which is that the economic model of liberal society, which was adopted after the collapse of communism, after the Cold War, has left large parts of society behind, not just minorities.
0:37:37 There have been working-class communities in Britain and American parts of Europe, which have just been more or less abandoned.
0:37:54 But also, large parts of what used to be called the middle classes have not seen their incomes or their standards ever being improved much or at all in the last 30 years, while the societies as a whole have gotten considerably better.
0:38:16 So, I think the economic model, actually, of Western liberal societies, the dominant one after the Cold War, during the Cold War, we tend to forget now, although it’s within my lifetime, we tend to forget that after the Second World War, there was a model of social democracy in which the state intervened in many different ways to smooth out the hard edges of market capitalism and constrain it.
0:38:24 I think the abandonment of that model after the end of the Cold War has led to deep-seated contradictions, but maybe they’re not what you’re referring to.
0:38:26 They are, certainly in part.
0:38:43 I mean, I’m glad you said that, because one of the things that irks me about a lot of right-wing types who like to rail against identity politics or wokeism, a term I really hate to use because it has been stretched to the point of meaninglessness, in our discourse at least.
0:38:56 There is this whole materialist history to be told about the failures of liberal capitalism, and those failures have produced a lot of our political pathologies, and a lot of people on the right don’t want to hear about that, and I think that’s a huge mistake.
0:39:05 I agree with you, and in fact, I say in the book, it’s a very simple point, but very hard for many liberals, right-wing liberals in particular, to understand.
0:39:17 I say that what these people call populism is the political blowback against the social disruption produced by their own policies, which they don’t understand or deny.
0:39:19 That’s what populism is.
0:39:29 They talk about populism as if it was a sort of demonic thing that arose from nowhere, that it was a few demagogues that whipped it up out of practically nothing.
0:39:48 I’m not saying there aren’t demagogues, but the reason the demagogues were successful in 2016 and later, and not in 1950 or 60 or 70s in Europe and America, is that there were periods, certainly in Europe, and to some extent even in America, of social democracy,
0:40:01 in which there was a more extensive state, the Eisenhower state, the Rooseveltian state, even before that in America, which limited the impact of market capitalism on human well-being and provided some protection for its casualties.
0:40:17 If you scrap that, which was done to a considerable extent after the end of the Cold War, then over time you create large sections of the population which are suffering and dislocate or simply have no place in the productive process.
0:40:20 And you’ve got to expect some sort of kickback.
0:40:22 So that’s what liberals call populism.
0:40:28 They call populism the political movements around them that they have caused, which they don’t understand.
0:40:30 That’s what populism is, basically.
0:40:33 But you could never get that across to them, actually.
0:40:36 I’ve tried to do this, and they say, but it’s the demagogues.
0:40:37 It’s Trump.
0:40:38 It’s Forrest Johnson.
0:40:40 It’s Nigel Farage.
0:40:41 It’s all these wicked people.
0:40:44 If you could only shut these wicked people up, everything would be fine.
0:40:46 Or some of them say it’s the Russians.
0:40:59 So what they’re doing is they’re denying, or maybe just not understanding, maybe they’re just stupid, they’re just not understanding why these movements have arisen when they did.
0:41:10 I guess the problem for me, and this is why I’m still basically a liberal, is that I don’t think any of the conservative alternatives are preferable for a thousand different reasons.
0:41:14 And I’m not a fan of any imaginable version of authoritarianism.
0:41:17 So I don’t really have anywhere else to go, ideologically.
0:41:18 Liberalism, it is.
0:41:20 It’s up to you.
0:41:27 But it depends how far you think the degeneration of liberal society has gone and how far it can remain livable.
0:41:42 I mean, one of the things in Europe now is that the far right in many European countries, not in Britain yet, but in France and Germany, is now a very substantial political bloc.
0:41:51 In other words, there isn’t a flawed liberal society around us, uncontested, which can carry on pretty well whatever happens.
0:42:01 There are powerful movements, not exactly like in the 30s, but there are powerful far right movements, and in some countries also far left movements, which are challenging it.
0:42:07 So the liberal position might be a kind of luxury of history that is now passing away.
0:42:19 We’ll be back with more of my conversation with John Gray after one more quick break.
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0:45:07 For as long as I can remember, bread has given me hiccups.
0:45:11 I always get the hiccups when I eat baby carrots.
0:45:16 Sometimes when I am washing my left ear, just my left ear, I hiccup.
0:45:20 And my tried and true hiccup here is…
0:45:27 Pour a glass of water, light a match, put the match out in the water, drink the water, throw away the match.
0:45:31 Put your elbows out, point two fingers together and sort of stare at the point between the fingers.
0:45:35 It doesn’t work if you bring your elbows down, but it works.
0:45:38 Just eat a spoonful of peanut butter.
0:45:39 Think of a green rabbit.
0:45:42 I taught myself to burp on commands like…
0:45:46 Excuse me.
0:45:51 And I discovered that when I make myself burp, it stops my hiccups.
0:45:56 Unexplainable is taking on hiccups.
0:45:57 What causes them?
0:46:00 And is there any kind of scientific cure?
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0:46:29 I sometimes wonder how long America can continue to exist with the level of fragmentation and internal confusion that we have.
0:46:31 And the same is true of much of Europe.
0:46:38 How easy is it for you to imagine a political future where America and Europe cease to exist in any recognizable form?
0:46:41 Well, Europe doesn’t exist in any recognizable form.
0:46:44 There isn’t a European super-state, and there isn’t going to be.
0:46:50 What there are are a variety of nation-states with internal problems of various kinds.
0:46:52 And so I think that will basically continue.
0:46:54 They might shift into becoming a kind of…
0:47:00 I mean, what’s been happening in the last few years is that they’re shifting into becoming almost a hard-right block.
0:47:06 Not that the far-right has taken over, though some people might say it did in Hungary and did in Poland for a while.
0:47:10 But it’s the far-right which is shaping policy on lots of issues.
0:47:12 But it won’t become a super-state.
0:47:18 As to America, I don’t expect the American state to fragment in the way that by secession…
0:47:24 I mean, I know some Americans talk about that, and Texans and Californians and others.
0:47:25 I don’t actually expect that.
0:47:38 I would more expect a kind of semi-stable, semi-anarchy, in which there are lots of regions of American society and of cities and so on which are semi-anarchical.
0:47:42 That’s also true in places like Mexico, is it not, and parts of Latin America.
0:47:45 That could go on for quite a long time.
0:47:50 The big change, I guess, will be, if I’m right, it will be in the capacity of America to project its power globally.
0:47:52 I think that is steeply declining.
0:47:59 And I think that will, within your and my lifetime, will be actually seen to be greatly diminished.
0:48:07 Because although America still has an enormous amount, the U.S., an enormous amount of hard firepower, more than anywhere else, actually, China’s catching up.
0:48:13 But also, its capacity to use that hard firepower intelligently has not been very great.
0:48:30 You actually say something pretty interesting, if that’s the right word, about America in the book, which is that it’s become Schmittian in the sense that we believed, rather foolishly, that the law could protect liberal values from political contestation.
0:48:35 But the law has become indistinguishable from politics.
0:48:39 And Trump just pushed us right past the threshold.
0:48:48 And now we’re in, in my estimation, just a full-blown legitimacy crisis, where it doesn’t even matter who wins the next election.
0:48:50 Just something like 30% of the country.
0:48:51 Do you agree with that, by the way?
0:48:52 That is what I think.
0:48:53 But do you agree with that?
0:48:53 Do I agree with what?
0:48:56 That America’s in a legitimation crisis.
0:48:56 Oh, yes.
0:48:58 I’ve written this many times.
0:49:00 It doesn’t matter who wins the next election.
0:49:03 Something like 30% of the country will consider it illegitimate.
0:49:04 That’s that liberal politics, John.
0:49:07 That’s something much closer to war, really.
0:49:09 Well, it’s what Schmitt thought politics was.
0:49:10 Friends and enemies.
0:49:18 And I think the achievement of liberalism in the various liberalism was to replace the war by something else, or at least attenuate the war.
0:49:21 I mean, this was true, by the way, even in my time.
0:49:23 Let me give you an autobiographical example.
0:49:34 During the Thatcherite period, when I was an actor of Thatcherite, I remained, in terms of close friendship, with leading members, both theoretical members and even politicians, in the Labour Party.
0:49:49 So, we could meet, we could have dinner, we could talk with each other, we could share ideas, didn’t agree, didn’t share goals, thought that this great Thatcherite experiment could come to grief in various different ways, as I then came to think, and so on, for slightly different reasons.
0:49:54 But that’s actually, in America, I would say, it’s rare, I would think.
0:49:58 Is it not shown for people to interact in that way?
0:50:02 How many Trumpists have friendly relations with Washington Post liberals?
0:50:03 Not many, I think.
0:50:06 No, I’d say that’s, and that’s becoming increasingly so.
0:50:09 That’s unfortunate, because that’s the triumph of the Schmittian model.
0:50:13 It’s the triumph of friend-enemy relations.
0:50:19 And once you’ve gotten to friend-enemy relations, I think you’re in deep trouble, at least from a liberal standpoint.
0:50:25 It’s very hard to get back from that situation, because both sides want to win.
0:50:27 And that means it’s a sort of downward spiral.
0:50:31 Very hard to, I don’t say impossible, you know, something could happen that we haven’t thought of.
0:50:33 But it’s very difficult to get out.
0:50:35 So I agree completely with you.
0:50:41 And it’s one of the things I constantly say, which is that, in one sense, it’s very important who wins the American election next year.
0:50:45 Because if it’s Trump, the changes will be huge and quick, I believe.
0:50:53 But in another sense, it doesn’t matter at all, because whoever wins will not be accepted, as you say, by maybe a quarter or a third of American society, American voters.
0:50:58 So the legitimization crisis will just get worse, whoever wins.
0:51:06 That’s a very profound fact of the world, because the world still depends on a kind of shadow of Pax Americana.
0:51:09 It still depends on that, or has depended on that.
0:51:23 And as that is comprehensively removed, I mean, if Trump pulls American forces out of Europe, which, if he winds up NATO, if he pulls out of the Gulf, where there is now the new Middle Eastern war, that would be a very profound change.
0:51:31 Yeah, I think the unfortunate truth is that liberalism doesn’t really have a solution to a legitimacy crisis.
0:51:34 No, I agree with you entirely, which is why it’s so difficult to speculate.
0:51:46 I mean, what I don’t expect is any new order emerging from this, whether of the right or the left, but just of continued disintegration, not into civil war in America.
0:51:47 I’m not an American.
0:51:52 Sometimes since I’ve been there, I spent a long time in America in the 70s and 80s and 90s.
0:51:55 So I knew it better then than I do now.
0:51:58 But I don’t expect a full-scale civil war.
0:52:16 But I can imagine a fairly long period, decades, you know, maybe generations of civil warfare, when different identity groups, different political ideologies, different parts of America, states of America, American states and municipalities, just go their own way with lots of the conflicts that that involves.
0:52:33 That involves, but with a kind of area, which I think will still exist of high technology, an oligarchy, which preserves its own position one way or another, and the rest of society is doing as best it can.
0:52:35 I mean, large parts of it abandoned.
0:52:42 That’s what I sort of expect a kind of hybrid like that could go on for an awfully long time.
0:52:50 I don’t think America faces the internal pressures that, say, Russia does, because Russia has powerful ethnic divisions within minorities.
0:52:58 And the state apparatus in Russia, although more ruthless and more violent domestically, is much more corroded and much more corrupt.
0:53:07 So I think there is a real possibility that Russia could actually break up, whereas I don’t actually, you may be more optimistic or less hyperbolic, if you like, than I am.
0:53:09 I don’t see that as likely in America.
0:53:13 I think just continuing decay is a much more likely prospect.
0:53:15 Yeah, I would agree with that.
0:53:17 I have no idea what’s going to happen.
0:53:23 I take some solace in the fact that, at least in America, we’ve survived much, much worse in our past.
0:53:29 And, you know, we may just lumber along in this interregnum for a very, very long time.
0:53:31 It may be a very long interregnum.
0:53:32 It might be.
0:53:35 And look, maybe we need a new order.
0:53:48 My fear has always been the road from the present order to the next one is historically a rather bumpy one, and one probably none of us want to take.
0:53:53 And I’d prefer to fix the world we have before we tear it down.
0:53:54 But I don’t know.
0:53:58 Again, I’m not in the prophecy business, so I don’t know what’s going to happen.
0:54:04 I mean, I’ve been talking about this idea of politics as tragedy, too, for the last few years.
0:54:12 And what some liberals and others say is, they say, well, we want to get to a world where tragedy is diminished.
0:54:23 Now, very few of them say now where there is no tragedy, though some of them say we want to get to a world, some of them have said, in which the only tragedies are failed love affairs or familial disputes and so on.
0:54:26 We’ll never get to a world like that, I’m sure.
0:54:46 But what I think the danger of trying to eliminate tragedy in politics is that in order to survive in any political system and to gain the power and retain the power and exercise the power, you would need to get to a society in which tragedy is supposedly diminished or mitigated or abolished.
0:54:54 You have to enter into tragic choices which replicate the tragedy you’re trying to get rid of, trying to transcend.
0:55:09 So, for example, one of the things that happens in all revolutions, certainly in all the European, Russian, Chinese revolutions and so on, is that once the old regime fails, if it’s really knocked down and fails, then the revolutionary contestants fight among themselves.
0:55:11 And the one that prevails is the one that’s the most ruthless.
0:55:19 So that in Soviet Union, early Soviet Russia, which I know the best, the anarchists were the first to be suppressed.
0:55:22 Then the social revolutionaries, because they were less well organized, they were less ruthless.
0:55:29 So what actually produces the authoritarianism is the struggle by the revolutionary groups against each other.
0:55:30 And that always happens.
0:55:37 And that sort of illustrates my deeper point, which is that in order to get to a supposedly post-tragic world,
0:55:49 you have all kinds of ruthless, tragic decisions have had to be made about shooting anarchists en masse, assassinating, murdering, and putting in camps and so on, various dissidents.
0:55:55 And once you’ve done that, you’re back into the world where you’ve never left it, actually, of tragic choices.
0:56:05 So I would much prefer politics, which accepted that tragedy was primordial and omnipresent and would always be, but use this.
0:56:14 I mean, this is why I’ve had a kind of Occam’s razor approach to tragedy, which is the aim should be to minimize tragedies beyond what was strictly necessary.
0:56:19 And don’t go around, multiply them by trying to create new regimes all over the place.
0:56:21 Tragedy in politics isn’t imperfectibility.
0:56:23 We have no idea of perfection.
0:56:26 It isn’t that progress is always reversible and ephemeral.
0:56:28 It’s something deeper than that.
0:56:38 It’s that there are recurring situations in politics, and always will be, in which whatever we do has deep and enduring losses attached to it.
0:56:40 And I think that will always be the case.
0:56:42 So I think that’s what I prefer.
0:56:59 But I think in order to get a view of the world like that, you do actually have to go back before Christianity to maybe to the book of Job, but also to ancient Greek tragedy, where there’s no ultimate redemption at all, actually.
0:57:16 It recurs a bit in Shakespeare later on in a Christian civilization, but you have to go all the way back to the Greek tragic dramas to get that sense that human beings are not autonomous in the sense of being ever able to shape the choices they have to make.
0:57:23 Tragedies are unchosen choices, choices that human beings don’t want to make and would prefer not to make, but have to make.
0:57:30 Once again, the book is called The New Leviathans, Thoughts After Liberalism.
0:57:32 John Gray, always a pleasure.
0:57:33 Thank you for coming in today.
0:57:35 Great pleasure on my part as well.
0:57:37 Let’s have another conversation in a couple of years, shall we?
0:57:38 Let’s do it.
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What exactly is the basis for democracy?
Arguably Iiberalism, the belief that the government serves the people, is the stone on which modern democracy was founded. That notion is so ingrained in the US that we often forget that America could be governed any other way. But political philosopher John Gray believes that liberalism has been waning for a long, long time.
He joins Sean to discuss the great liberal thinker Thomas Hobbes and America’s decades-long transition away from liberalism.
Host: Sean Illing (@SeanIlling)
Guest: John Gray, political philosopher and author of The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism
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