The New Leviathans

Twenty-first-century states are becoming Leviathans, spawn of the biblical sea-monster mentioned in the Book of Job, which the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes used to picture the sovereign power that alone could bring peace to unruly humankind. Only by submitting to unlimited government could they escape the state of nature, a war of all against all in which no one is safe from their fellows. (Location 54)

Today, states have cast off many of the restraints of the liberal era. From being an institution that claimed to extend freedom, the state is becoming one that protects human beings from danger. Instead of a safeguard against tyranny, it offers shelter from chaos. (Location 63)

Second World War. These are not Leviathans Hobbes would recognize. The goals of Hobbes’s Leviathan were strictly limited. Beyond securing its subjects against one another and external enemies, it had no remit. The purposes of the new Leviathans are more far-reaching. In a time when the future seems profoundly uncertain, they aim to secure meaning in life for their subjects. Like the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, the new Leviathans are engineers of souls. (Location 66)

In schools and universities, education inculcates conformity with the ruling progressive ideology. The arts are judged by whether they serve approved political goals. Dissidents from orthodoxies on race, gender and empire find their careers terminated and their public lives erased. This repression is not the work of governments. The ruling catechisms are formulated and enforced by civil society. (Location 75)

… had very few books. I never saw above half a dozen about him in his chamber … He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men, he should have known no more than other men. (Location 124)

Hobbes took care not to be poor, but found himself hard up at several points in his life. By choice, he did not enter a profession. Serving the Church or any institution that claimed authority over his mind was intolerable to him. (Location 141)

Though he was soaked in the classics, Hobbes had little respect for classical philosophy. He scorned Plato, Aristotle and their medieval disciples. All of them, he believed, treated words as if they were things. Imagining that abstractions conjured up by language were independently existing realities, they led the human mind into millennia of feeble self-deception. (Location 160)

The privilege of absurdity is to make sense of life through nonsense. A prime example is the word many are nowadays fond of applying to themselves. As commonly used, the idea of ‘humanity’ confuses ‘a living creature’ – the multitudinous human animal – with ‘a general thing’. A species may be a useful abstraction, but when it refers to an actor in the world humanity – sometimes dignified with a capital H – is a category mistake. When people say ‘we’ must fight against social injustice or global warming, it is an inexistent agency they are identifying with. God is also inexistent, but no more so than Humanity. Both can only be defined by their absence. (Location 255)

‘Humanity’ is a dangerous fiction. When some human beings are identified as being less human than others, it is a small step to eliminating them. The arrival of Humanity is always preceded by mass killing. (Location 264)

Here Fukuyama departs from the most important discovery in modern science. As understood by Charles Darwin, evolution has no destination. Humankind is not the endpoint of natural selection, which may well result in its extinction. As Darwin wrote in his autobiography, ‘There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course in which the wind blows.’12 (In other writings, including The Origin of Species, Darwin retreated from this conclusion, though it is the inexorable implication of his theory.13) (Location 316)

Natural selection of genes is a purposeless process that is going nowhere. Theories of social evolution, on the other hand, invariably come with a destination, which almost always embodies the values of the theorist. (Location 322)

If an evolutionary process is at work, there is no reason to think it favours the West. Evolution is natural selection among random mutations. The regimes that prevail will be those that best adapt to the random walk of history. Not the most productive societies but those that best exploit opportunities thrown up by chance are the fittest. (Location 348)

A vapid brand of nihilism can be found in the writings of rationalists such as Steven Pinker.24 Of course, they would indignantly reject this description of their beliefs. Yet none of them has presented any justification for the liberal values they profess. Their belief in the liberating power of science is more contrary to reason than any traditional faith, for it ignores the well-attested fact that science can just as well serve oppression as freedom. (Location 993)

Late-nineteenth-century Russian revolutionaries and early twenty-first-century Western hyper-liberals have much in common. In each case, a swollen lumpen-intelligentsia has become a powerful political force. Both hold to the faith that human beings possess powers that used to be ascribed to the Deity. Both – Russian radicals knowingly, twenty-first-century hyper-liberals unthinkingly – are engaged in a project of God-building. (Location 1065)

published in Russia, but it is not known whether Dostoevsky read (Location 1115)