Dense with provocative ideas—a solid choice for budding political philosophers.
In a challenging book, an esteemed philosopher examines how liberalism yielded to a totalitarianism impulse.
Gray is emeritus professor of European thought at the London School of Economics and a prolific author. In his latest, he gathers a number of the themes he has pursued throughout his life and work. He uses Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan as a starting point, explaining how Hobbes believed that a powerful government was necessary to protect people from one another and from external enemies—and nothing more. In the past century, however, we have seen the rise of the “New Leviathans,” who want to go much further, to “become engineers of souls.” Gray looks at the attempts of the Soviet leaders to mold people and at how that pattern was adopted by Putin. It justifies a totalitarian level of control, all in the name of the greater good. There is a similar pattern in China, with leaders who see themselves as fulfilling a quasi-divine purpose. A related strain of thinking Gray labels as “hyper-liberalism,” which “vulgarizes post-modern philosophy.” Though “enclaves of freedom persist…a liberal civilization based on the practice of tolerance has passed into history,” writes the author. “In schools and universities, education inculcates conformity with the ruling progressive ideology. The arts are judged by whether they serve approved political goals.” Gray questions the obsession with race and slavery, noting that slavery and racism have had many faces throughout history, and he views as arrogant the idea that the American experience represents a universal experience. Gray does not provide an easy solution, but he sees an obligation to fight totalitarianism in whatever way we can. He concludes: “If we go on, it is because we cannot do otherwise. It is life that pulls us on, against the tide, life that steers us into the storm.”
Dense with provocative ideas—a solid choice for budding political philosophers.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780374609733
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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