Endgames: Questions in Late Modern Political ThoughtISBN: 978-0-7456-1882-1
Paperback
204 pages
May 1997, Polity
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Our inherited stock of political ideas no longer tracks that world.
The crisis of New Right thought is as profound as that of the Left.
Green theorists and communitarian thinkers have not understood the
deep diversity and intractable conflicts of contemporary societies.
And postmodernists, whose thought is ruled by the dated utopias of
the modern period, do not engage with the real conditions of the
world's emerging postmodern societies. Late modern thought occurs
in an interregnum between modern projects that are no longer
credible and postmodern realities that many find intolerable.
John Gray suggests that some Enlightenment hopes of progress must
be extinguished if we are to learn to respect cultural diversity
and accept ecological limits. Respect for the Earth and for other
species and cultures means abandoning the utopian and arcadian
projects that haunt modern thought. We should aim to moderate the
impact of human activity on the Earth while alleviating the
unavoidable evils of human life. Yet the hubris which treats the
Earth as an instrument of human purposes, and which regards other
cultures as approximations to a universal civilization, embodies
ancient and powerful traditions. John Gray's aim is to question
these traditions and thereby to prepare our thinking for a time of
beginnings.