Name: John Gray 'The New Leviathans' with Peter Salmon
Start: 2023-10-11T18:00:00+01:00
End: 2023-10-11T19:00:00+01:00
Location: Blackwell's Bookshop

John Gray 'The New Leviathans' with Peter Salmon

Blackwell's on Broad Street has been trading in Oxford since 1879.

Blackwell's, Broad Street Oxford

'Blackwell's Inspired Festival' is a series of academic events. John Gray discusses his latest book, 'The New Leviathans' with Peter Salmon.

Blackwell's Bookshop

Blackwell's Inspired Festival

We'll be welcoming new and returning students to Oxford this October with a diverse programme of academic events. 
This will include a collection of free and paid for events and take place both in the shop and at some of Oxford's most prestigious venues.

T﻿he New LeviathansEver since its publication in 1651, Thomas Hobbes&#x27; Leviathan has unsettled and challenged how we understand the world. Condemned and vilified by each new generation, Hobbes&#x27; cold political vision continues to see through any number of political and ethical vanities.In his wonderfully stimulating book The New Leviathans, John Gray allows us to understand the world of the 2020s with all its contradictions, moral horrors and disappointments through a new reading of Hobbes&#x27; classic work. The collapse of the USSR ushered in an era of near-apoplectic triumphalism in the West: a genuine belief that a rational, liberal, well-managed future now awaited humankind and that tyranny, nationalism and unreason lay in the past. Since then, so many terrible events have occurred and so many poisonous ideas flourished, and yet still our liberal certainties treat them as aberrations which will somehow dissolve away. Hobbes would not be so confident.Filled with fascinating and challenging perceptions, The New Leviathans is a powerful meditation on historical and current folly. As a species we always seem to be struggling to face the reality of base and delusive human instincts. Might a more self-aware, realistic and disabused ethics help us all?J﻿ohn GrayJohn Gray is a political philosopher and author with interests in analytic philosophy, the history of ideas, and philosophical pessimism. He retired in 2008 as School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Gray contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman, where he is the lead book reviewer. He is an atheist.Gray has written several influential books, including False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (1998), which argues that free market globalization is an unstable Enlightenment project currently in the process of disintegration; Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002), which attacks philosophical humanism, a worldview which Gray sees as originating in religions; and Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007), a critique of utopian thinking in the modern world.Gray sees volition, and hence morality, as an illusion, and portrays humanity as a ravenous species engaged in wiping out other forms of life. Gray has written that &quot;humans ... cannot destroy the Earth, but they can easily wreck the environment that sustains them.&quot;P﻿eter Salmon, author of &#x27;An Event, Perhaps&#x27; will be chairing this talk.T﻿his event is part of the &#x27;Blackwell&#x27;s Inspired Festival&#x27; and is free to attend.

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John Gray 'The New Leviathans' with Peter Salmon

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John Gray 'The New Leviathans' with Peter Salmon

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