Enlightenment's Wake by John Gray (9780415163354)

Description - Enlightenment's Wake by John Gray

John Gray's previous book "Beyond the New Right" developed a radical critique of the New Right from the standpoint of traditional conservatism. This study goes on to stake out the elements of a new position, whose starting point is the obsolescence of the received traditions of thought, conservative as well as liberal. The author argues that all the intellectual traditions of modernity are applications of the Enlightenment project and thereby suffer the fate of that project, which has proved to be self-undermining. 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, he contends, is that of securing peaceful co-existence for incommensurable world views in an intellectual and cultural context.

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