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

by John Gray

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.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, History, Cultural, British Literature

320 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 1995

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

[Ryan Murdock · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this densely written collection from 2004, published six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Gray warns of the perils of identity politics long before they came on the radar, and of a post-communist world that wouldn't herald 'the end of history' or the global hegemony of Western liberal values (Marxism itself was a failed Western Enlightenment ideology), but a twenty-first century characterized by fundamentalist, nationalist, and Malthusian convulsions.

The 9/11 attacks happened six years later, followed by the rise of populism, nationalist retrenchment within the EU, and ecological disasters and migration crises sparked by climate change.

Gray sees the legacy of the Enlightenment project culminating in the turning of nature into an object of human will, to be dominated by technology for our own short-sighted ends. Emancipated from theistic and metaphysical content, we're left with a form of nihilism that offers technological progress and mastery without meaning.

The book was written at a time when everyone else seemed convinced Enlightenment values would sweep the globe. Post-Soviet Russia, the rise of China, and the failure of the Arab Spring to usher in liberal democracy revealed how short sighted such views were.

[Rhys · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gray's critique of Enlightenment ideologies and endorsement of a more pragmatic 'pluralism' is more timely today than when the book was first written twenty years ago.

That we continue to cling to Enlightenment values like individualism & scientific rationalism, Gray considers akin to Pascal's Wager. Better, he says, to accept differences in values between communities (defined as sharing a culture) and work to find political compromises that enhance peace. Ironically, 'peace' becomes Gray's Enlightenment universal ideal/value upon which he bases his pluralism (or agonistic liberalism).

I do agree, however, that it "is difficult to envisage any path through the nihilism of contemporary Western culture which does not begin by clearing away the humanist conception of humankind's privileged place among other forms of life on the earth. Such a clearing is a necessary prelude to practices in which human beings seek to find harmony with the earth, rather than to master it, and devise technologies which assist them in this practice, instead of expressing their will to power" (p.272).

[Jamey · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brilliant exposition of the limitations of Enlightenment ideas about social, economic, and political life. Gray is the best articulator (that I've read) of the fact that "free markets" and "democracy" are much worse than useless when applied to societies whose institutions and identities just aint like that.

[Jonathan Garvey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent take down of Enlightenment Liberalism

[Robharries · Rating 2 out of 5]

The undoing of conservatism is still a useful read 30 years later, the rest is of academic and historical interest on debates in the 90s and Gray's own history of work.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazon Reviews

The view from nowhere

Enlightenment's Wake delivers a superb account of the fragile philosophical underpinnings of the modern and post-modern world.

All the important bases are touched: Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Burke, Herder, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Mill, Rawls, Berlin, Rorty, Heidegger... Yes, there are a lot of philosophical bricks in our world.

Gray believes that these bricks are are not solid and, in fact, have been crumbling for quite some time. He supports his views with keen and wide-ranging analysis that not only considers our minds and thoughts but also what has actually gone on out there in the "real world" since Kant awoke from his metaphysical slumber.

While his writing style is not as felicitous as Berlin's (one of the few savants that Gray avidly admires) he casts a wider net into anthropology, sociology and the modern western mecca of multiculturalism.

Unlike most of the twentieth century savants consigned to continental Europe Gray makes his point with aporias, differences, slippages, etc. that encumber much modern thought.

The negative in 'Enlightenment's Wake' is that as a collection of mostly previously published essays, there is a bit of inevitable repetition.

All in all a masterful snapshot of the view from nowhere. A must read if you want to unclog your mind from received wisdoms.

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Another enlightenment ideology of the Enlightenment America's future

I've read some of the author's recent works recently, but it may be better to read them first in order. It is mainly the re-recording of papers published in several magazines in the early 1990s. It is a work that thoroughly criticizes neoliberalism and the Enlightenment ideology behind it, as a result of the collapse of the Cold War. There is a strong view of the collapse of the Soviet Union as the final defeat of the ideology of liberal democracy, rather than the Enlightenment ideology and the demon (the other one is America).

In the following order: Lurking behind this discussion is a strong aversion to the centralized values that make up the United States and its society. By reading this work, you can understand the connection and differences between Isiah Berlin's mindset.

In conclusion, as the author pointed out as one of the possibilities (page 276), East Asia releases the grotesque of its own technological faith and its rotting in following Western nihilism as the achievement of the Enlightenment seems to be the same.

And the subsequent movements of the former Eastern European countries that do not stop the flow to the EU seems to reverse the resilience of the ideology of the Westernization. The undoing of conservatism also sharply points out the modern conservatism cul-de-sac, which therefore broke the foundation that stood.

[Translated from Japanese]

[Emmet Clarke · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Gray burns it all to the ground but I can't help feeling like he can't escape it himself - and ends up at the nihilism he is so keen for us to avoid. I think the earlier, critical essays are more engaging than those in the latter half of the book.

[Hayden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of the most lucid political philosophical thinking I've come across. Grey outlines the major epistemological dilemmas shaping our current "post-Enlightenment" age — a noble task that produces far more questions than answers. It's a thrill wrapping one's head around the ideas toward the end of the book: new liberalism/conservatism coalitions can be imagined by examining their ideological roots. The book compelled me to learn a lot more about the interrelationship between Isiah Berlin, Richard Rorty, and Eric Voegelin.

[Juan Amiguet Vercher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting take on what our current times represent. Specially how the Enlightenment project has set up its own demise. This has occurred, among other causes, due to the inability of rationality to deal with value pluralism. The main example is then focused on the US and on how there liberalism, one of the many outcomes of the enlightenment, has become a secular religion, with its dogma set on market institutions.

[Philip Craggs · Rating 3 out of 5]

Less friendly to the general reader than 'Straw Dogs', but full of insight and intellect.

[Brendan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little opaque at first, but the chapter on tolerance ( Ch. 3 ) is worth the whole thing. Just what I was looking for too.