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Podcast: Arts & Ideas
Episode: Hobbes and New Leviathans
Description: "Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" is the way Thomas Hobbes described the life of man in a state of nature in his 1651 book The Leviathan. The seventeenth century philosopher reasoned that what men needed was a "common power to keep them in awe". It was a conclusion that has not endeared him to the enlightenment and liberal thinkers of the centuries that followed. The philosopher John Gray thinks that Hobbes' bleak vision of the human condition might help us understand the recent disappointments of progressive politics and the failures of liberal democracies. Anne McElvoy talks to him about...