Newsletter

Receive regular updates about forthcoming events and other news from Intelligence Squared

Thanks

You have been added to our mailing list and will now be among the first to hear about events.

Watch

John Gray on a World After Liberalism

History &
Social Policy

Authoritarianism is on the rise, liberalism has fallen out of favour at the ballot box and populism has taken root globally. Where do we go from here?

‘The belief that a single form of rule is best for everyone is itself a kind of tyranny.’ – John Gray, The New Leviathans 

We once thought liberalism could and should be universal. The collapse of the USSR in 1991 ushered in an era of triumphalism in the West in which it seemed inevitable that the world was moving towards a global community of liberal nations.

But recent decades have shown that this presumption could be flawed. Authoritarianism is on the rise, liberalism has fallen out of favour at the ballot box and populism has taken root globally. Where do we go from here?

In November 2024 John Gray came to the Intelligence Squared stage to argue that we must accept that we are living in a world where liberalism’s best days are behind us. In conversation with academic Helen Thompson, he discussed the themes of his latest book, The New Leviathans, drawing on new readings of Hobbes and other political philosophers to discuss the current state of the global order, the human condition, and a path forward for a more self-aware, realistic and honest politics.

 

Praise for The New Leviathans

‘John Gray is Britain’s best philosopher – and he knocks it out of the park with a book that details the unravelling of the Western order.’ ― The Telegraph

‘Confronts the truth that no politician dares utter: that things are very bad with a world in which, in Gray’s words, either market forces are directed by the state or the state has been captured by corporate power.’ ― Terry Eagleton

‘One of the most important thinkers alive.’ ― The Times

Speakers for the motion

  • John Gray

    One of the UK’s most popular political philosophers whose latest book is The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

Chair

  • Helen Thompson

    Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University and author of Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century

Speakers are subject to change.

Speakers

Speaker

John Gray

One of the UK’s most popular political philosophers whose latest book is The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

One of the UK’s best known and most popular philosophers. Between 1998 and 2007 he was Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, and since 2008 he has been Emeritus Professor there. He has published over twenty books, including Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings; The Silence of Animals: Thoughts on Progress and Other Modern Myths, Seven Types of Atheism and Feline Philosophy. He writes regularly for The New Statesman. His new book is the The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism.   
Host

Helen Thompson

Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University and author of Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century

Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University and author of Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century. Her research focuses on the political economy of energy and the long history of the democratic, economic, and geopolitical disruptions of the twenty-first century. She used to host the Talking Politics podcast with David Runciman and is a columnist for the New Statesman.