Keith Sutherland Straw Men and Diamond Dogs

John Gray, Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and the author of the book under review should not be confused with the John Gray who thinks that men are from Mars and women from Venus. Our man is a political philosopher, best known for a string of books on liberalism and a lot less sanguine about the prospects for humanity than his New Age namesake. In fact, perhaps on account of his earlier affection for Margaret Thatcher, he concludes: ‘ “Humanity” does not exist. There are only humans . . .’ (p.12). If Gray’s reclassification of homo sapiens as homo rapiens and his ecological pessimism are right, humans are unlikely to be around for much longer either. Although his deconstruction of ‘humanity’ closely echoes the Thatcherite account of ‘society’ as a left-liberal fiction, Gray — the gamekeeper turned poacher — is now one of the leading critics of free markets, globalization and the rest of the neo-liberal canon that he helped to spearhead in the early 1980s (Gray, 2002a). In Enlightenment’s Wake (Gray, 1995), he laments the hijacking of liberalism by some distinctly anti-liberal forces and despairs of any attempt to provide a foundational account of liberalism, or for that matter any other political philosophy. Although theorists like Richard Rorty (1980; 1982) and Michael Oakeshott (1933; 1959) have found such a conclusion liberating, or even Liberating, and have enjoyed the resulting state of postmodern playfulness, Gray has decided to take the quest for the foundationalist grail into areas anew. His latest discovery would appear to be science — in particular cognitive science and evolutionary theory. Indeed, in a recent essay in New Scientist (Gray 2002a), he castigates his fellow philosophers for ignoring science, without seeming to realize