Enlightenment's Wake

About this book

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.

Themes & subjects

About the author

John Gray

17 Apr 1948

John Nicholas Gray (born 17 April 1948) is an English political philosopher and author 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. He is an atheist. **Source**: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gray_(philosopher)" target="blanck">John Gray</a> on Wikipedia