I'm Will Lloyd, commissioning editor and writer for The New Statesman. You're listening

to The New Statesman podcast. In this episode, I'm speaking to the political

philosopher John Gray, whose fascinating new book re-contextualizes Thomas Hobbes'

seminal philosophical text, Leviathan, for the 21st century.

Nature, the art whereby God hath made and governs the world, is by the art of man as in many

other things, so in this also imitated that it can make an artificial animal. With those

words, Thomas Hobbes begins Leviathan, one of the most influential works of philosophy

ever written. Ever since it was published in 1651, Leviathan has unsettled and challenged

how we see the world. Hobbes' stark political vision continues to see through every generation's

ethical and political vanities. In The New Leviathan's John Gray illuminates the insoluble

dilemmas, paradoxes, and absurdity of our world today, four centuries after Hobbes' death.

Lively, wide-ranging, provocative, and realistic, The New Leviathan's is, like everything John

writes for the New Statesman, filled with fascinating and daunting perceptions. He joins

me today to discuss the life and work of Thomas Hobbes and the New Leviathan's that prowl our

own times. So John, when did you first read Thomas Hobbes and what was your initial reaction to his

writing? I must have first read Hobbes, and that would have been Hobbes' Leviathan,

when I was in my late teens, and my initial impression was partly stylistic, which is that I admired

the vigor, what I call in my book, the lapidary finality of his pro-style. He's a great pro-stylus.

There's a certain almost brutality in his way of writing whereby he forces home

truths that most readers then, when he published the book in the 17th century, and later in the 20th

century, when I read it in the 1960s, that most readers don't want to accept. In terms of the argument,

I thought the argument, then, the basic claim of Hobbes, which is that the default condition of

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