Enlightenment's Wake

John Gray
Paperback, 320 pages
9780415424042

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.

Contents
1. Against the new liberalism
2. Notes toward a definition of the political thought of Tlon
3. Toleration: a post-liberal perspective
4. Enlightenment, illusion and the fall of the Soviet state
5. The post-communist societies in transition
6. Agnostic liberalism
7. The undoing of conservatism
8. After the new liberalism
9. From post-liberalism to pluralism
10. Enlightenment's Wake