Endgames: Questions in Late Modern Political Thought

by John Gray

In this book John Gray argues that we live in a time of endings for the ideologies that governed the modern period. The Enlightenment projects of universal emancipation animates all the political doctrines and movements that are central in contemporary western societies. Yet it does not reflect the reality of the plural world in which we live. The western cultural hegemony which the Enlightenment embodied is coming to a close. Western liberal societies are not precursors of a universal civilization, but only one form of life among many in the late modern world.


Our inherited stock of political ideas no longer tracks that world. The crisis of New Right thought is as profound as that of the Left. Green theorists and communitarian thinkers have not understood the deep diversity and intractable conflicts of contemporary societies. And postmodernists, whose thought is ruled by the dated utopias of the modern period, do not engage with the real conditions of the world's emerging postmodern societies. Late modern thought occurs in an interregnum between modern projects that are no longer credible and postmodern realities that many find intolerable.


John Gray suggests that some Enlightenment hopes of progress must be extinguished if we are to learn to respect cultural diversity and accept ecological limits. Respect for the Earth and for other species and cultures means abandoning the utopian and arcadian projects that haunt modern thought. We should aim to moderate the impact of human activity on the Earth while alleviating the unavoidable evils of human life. Yet the hubris which treats the Earth as an instrument of human purposes, and which regards other cultures as approximations to a universal civilization, embodies ancient and powerful traditions. John Gray's aim is to question these traditions and thereby to prepare our thinking for a time of beginnings.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published May 5, 1997

About the author

John Nicholas Gray is a English political philosopher with interests in analytic philosophy and the history of ideas. He retired in 2008 as School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Gray contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman, where he is the lead book reviewer.

Reviews

[Tom Calvard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read some of Gray's more recent work, but keep getting drawn back to other books by him and his points of view. This one is a collection of his writings from the 1990s, some of it journalistic, some of it more academic. It's slightly dated in that it reflects on Thatcherism and the decline of the Conservatives in the 1990s in many places (Tony Blair is imminent, but barely mentioned).

Some readers may find Gray's views too pessimistic, misanthropic and unhelpful - he can be very critical of both the political Left and Right, and even of humans in general as we lay waste to the planet in denial of our hubris and failures at achieving progress. But I personally find these views thoughtful and well-reasoned. He pokes holes in many of the major ideologies still hanging on to modern life and politics in a world that has moved on in various ways into something more characteristic of the labels 'late modernity' or even 'postmodernity', depending on how you want to define them.

I think where most people will get frustrated with books like this and others by Gray, is in his inability to take a more positive view, or at least to sketch out solutions more clearly (something he occasionally claims is 'not his purpose here' anyway).

I would like to see a book from Gray that expands on some of his solutions more fully - he recommends that we temper global market forces with new forms of social and cultural institution that support pluralistic ways of living and meet enduring forms of human need; and also that we instil more radical pro-Environmental policies that more strongly acknowledge the limits of the planet and the arrogance of the human race. How realistic these are now is another matter, but I harbour modest hopes here and there amidst the general pessimism.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice to see the early Gray and how he formulated his ideas back when everyone was riding high thinking global capitalism and liberalism were on the march to the future, calling him a bugbear, and not realizing how they were only slightly less delusional than the USSR bureaucrats they derided.