John Gray on Liberalism

 John Gray on Liberalism

 

 

John Gray demolishes the myths and self-deceptions of liberals with gleeful rhetorical flourishes. History-as-progress is bunk. Especially, the Enlightenment project of universal liberalism as the endpoint of historical progress is shot, finished, dustbinned by the intractable vagaries and contradictions of human nature and societies.

John Gray in Conversation

John Gray in Conversation

I have written before about John Gray in a blog about liberalism and toleration (Feb 2016). To recap: Gray is a genial pessimist about human societies, but a staunch upholder of human decencies. He rebuts any notion of a benevolent Progress, or History, always moving humankind towards a better future.

Beyond Hobbes's Leviathan: the Alarming Visions of JG Ballard

         Beyond Hobbes’s Leviathan: The Alarming Visions of JG Ballard

The 17^th philosopher Thomas Hobbes believed that, without a civilising authority, humankind is condemned to live in a state of nature, where there is war of all against all and life is nasty, brutish and short. In his book Leviathan, Hobbes proposed that there was a profound drive, or law of nature, to escape this fate:

Liberalism and Toleration - a Tricky Combination

Liberalism and Toleration – a Tricky Combination

(This a revised and expanded version of post from November 2015 on Toleration and replaces that post)

Most people would probably agree that toleration is an essential component of liberalism, even if, if pressed, people’s definition of “liberalism” may differ wildly. Nonetheless, it is broadly true that modern liberalism, in most of its guises, has a large part of its origin in developing theories of toleration.