Gray Dawn

by Cliopatria

At a certain point while working on my review of Black Mass, the little light bulb went off over my head and I thought:"The best way of characterizing John Gray's outlook would be to say that it's like Isaiah Berlin in a really bad mood."

Quite right -- and yet not something I had room to unpack, since the word count assigned for the piece was strict. The final version comes to exactly one page of the New York Times Book Review, and is accompanied by a rather striking little piece of artwork:

I might have to write about Gray again. His understanding of Marx and Marxism is feeble indeed, which is probably a function of knowing it at second or third hand, via Sir Isaiah.

There are some real howlers in the book, such as when Gray quotes Lenin saying, "The combination of the Russian revolutionary sweep with American efficiency is the essence of Leninism." Nobody with any real background in the history would fall for the idea of Lenin talking about "Leninism." That alone is a dead giveaway that the quotation is inaccurate.

But it's really just the tip of the iceberg. Treating Marx as a figure of the Counter-Enlightenment and opposed to individualism and trade? Having him be deeply influenced by the Saint-Simonians? Sheesh. Credible to the credulous but not to anybody who knows the texts.

Again, something I had to bracket, for reasons of space -- and in any case a matter deserving of its own essay. I got a lot out of Gray's book Enlightenment's Wake; and have quite a bit to say about Straw Dogs that would require a real detour to explore.

For his own sake, though, I hope Gray never writes about Marx again -- or at least not until he's read some better cribs than he's been relying on. George Lichtheim or Leszek Kolakowski would probably have saved him some embarrassment.

comments powered by Disqus

More Comments:

Scott McLemee - 11/26/2007

I think you are on to something, though I'd want to tweak your categories a bit. Maybe the term "Romantic" can be applied if you are thinking of the initial enthusiasm for the French Revolution by some English poets, but there's a strong anti-Enlightenment streak in Romanticism that emerges. Maybe "Romantic-Jacobin" is closer to what you have in mind....

Anyway, not only does Gray amalgamate the gradualist and the revolutionary streaks, he also tends to blur the distinction between Enlightenment and anti-Enlightenment thinkers. He is, in short, a lumper and not a splitter.

You come away from some of Gray's work with the sense that the past 250 years were one big, homogeneous slab of Enlightenment cheese -- with different thinkers cutting slices that look different only to them

Jonathan Dresner - 11/25/2007

Reading the review, I'm struck by Gray's apparent lack of distinction between the "classical" Enlightenment view of progressive improvement and the "romantic" Enlightenment view of revolutionary change. (Yes, I'm making up definitions as I go along, but think of it as a sort of Voltaire v. Rousseau thing)

Hegel tried to mediate between them, positing eras of gradual adjustment punctuated by short periods of dramatic resynthesis; Marx falls more or less into the same pattern but is looking forward to the next resynthesis with anticipation and expects the process to end there.

There's a split in the late 19c between gradualists -- who are the great mainstream of liberals, unionists, temperance activists, etc -- and romantic revolutionaries (anarchists, in particular) who believed that dramatic action could create new consciousness and immediate social disorder (leading to, of course, improvements in the correct direction, which was just around the corner).

Leninism is an heir to the Romantic tradition (ironically, I think I'd call Stalinist an impatient gradualist, though not to his face), but Hayek and his ilk seem to be gradualists more than anything else. A lot of not unreasonable political/social ideas become unreasonable when coupled with romantic/revolutionary methods of achieving them....