> A copy of John Gray's False Dawn, just published by the New Press, arrived
> in the mail today. Does anyone know the rap on him? He seems a slightly
> higher brow version of Soros (whom he quotes, thanks, and is blurbed by),
> with vague calls for restraints on The Market, more enamored of "culture"
> and "place" and "tradition" and "indigenous values" than Soros, very
> anti-Marxist (part of the whole Enlightenment delusion), full of references
> to Demos and the Social Market Foundation and Polanyi.
John Gray is a professor of political theory at Oxford---pretty goddamn highbrow by a usual criterion. Gray used to be a Hayekian-Thatcherite until he saw what that doctrine has done where it has been implemented. Now he seems like a Burkean tory (we call them 'red tories' in Canada). The concepts like "tradition", "culture", "communal bonds", "moral fabric" are all Burkean ones. Concepts like "demos" are Burkean concepts dressed up in more intellectually fashionable language. Burkeans believe that community feeling, tradition, and culture are the cement of society and not naked self-interest as libertarians believe. Burke himself admitted that what he was doing was trying to legitimate the traditional social hierarchy in England. In his favor, Burke when a member of the House of Commons was strongly opposed to colonialism especially the British in India and Ireland. Burkeans believe that a tension in conservatism exists between belief in tradition and communal bonds and belief in unrestrained market forces. The latter destroy the former and must be tamed. This critique rests on a flawed understanding of capitalism. Any attempt to control the market will result in a breakdown of capital accumulation. The very rapaciousness of the market that the Burkeans critise is a necessary condition for the accumulation of capital and hence the survival of capitalism. The burkeans I've known all like Wilde's phrase "a cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing". Gray has done some theoretical work notably his paper "Against Cohen on Exploitation" a would be refutation of G.A. Cohen's 'locked room' argument against capitalism. That's my 2 cents.
Sam Pawlett