Enlightenment's Wake : Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age

John Gray is the bestselling author of such books as Straw Dogs and Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern which brought a mainstream readership to a man who was already one of the UK's most well respected thinkers and political theorists. Gray wrote Enlightenment’s Wake in 1995 – six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and six years before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Turning his back on neoliberalism at exactly the moment that its advocates were in their pomp, trumpeting 'the end of history' and the supposedly unstoppable spread of liberal values across the globe, Gray’s was a lone voice of scepticism. The thinking he criticised here would lead ultimately to the invasion of Iraq. Today, its folly might seem obvious to all, but as this edition of Enlightenment’s Wake shows, John Gray has been trying to warn us for some fifteen years – the rest of us are only now catching up with him.

now In Paperback, enlightenment's Wake Stakes Out The Elements Of John Gray's New Position. He Argues That All Schools Of Contemporary Political Thought Are Variations On The Enlightenment Project - The Westernizing Project Of A Universal Civilization - And That This Enlightenment Project Has Proved Self-undermining And Is Now Exhausted. Fresh Thought Is Needed On The Dilemmas Of The Late Modern Age.

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for Readers Familiar With Gray's Previous Works It May Come As A Surprise That He Rejects Conservatism In This Latest Critique, As Well As Liberalism, Though Further Developing The Seeds Of A Cooperative Green Approach To Social Politics. Gray's Arguments Rest In The Slaying Of Enlightenment Thinking That Continues To Shape Contemporary Thought On The Right And Left, And Which, He Claims, Undermines New, Necessary Alternatives. Gray Advocates A Post Post-modern Attitude, Moving From Theoretical Criticism To Implementation Of A Decentralized Cultural Cooperation And Rejection Of The Traditional Heritage Of Western Cultural Imperialism As The Project Of A Universal Civilization. Annotation C. Book News, Inc., Portland, Or (booknews.com)

John Gray argues that all the intellectual traditions of modernity are applications of the Enlightenment project, which has proved to be self-undermining. This effect was due to the project's extension of rational self-criticism and demystification to its own foundational commitments which ultimately dissolved them. From this position Gray argues that both the desire of fundamentalist liberalism to salvage the Enlightenment, and the traditionalist or reactionary desire to reverse it, are doomed to failure. The central problem of contemporary political thought and practice, the author contends, is that of securing peaceful co-existence for incommensurable world-views in an intellectual and cultural context that is at once post-rational and post-traditional. While it is crucial to resist the re-enchantment of the world by new forms of fundamentalism, neither the Left nor the Right in any of their traditional forms are able, according to Gray, to offer a viable alternative. It is a commonplace that political philosophy was reborn in 1971. John Gray. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.