TY  - BOOK
AU  - Gray,John
TI  - Enlightenment's wake: politics and culture at the close of the modern age 
SN  - 0415124751
AV  - HM276 .G79 1995
U1  - 320.5/1 20
PY  - 1995///
CY  - New York
PB  - Routledge
KW  - Liberalism
KW  - Cultural pluralism
KW  - Toleration
KW  - Conservatism
KW  - Post-communism
KW  - Right and left (Political science)
N1  - Includes bibliographical references and index; 1; Against the new liberalism --; 2; Notes toward a definition of the political thought of Tlon --; 3; Toleration: a post-liberal perspective --; 4; Enlightenment, illusion and the fall of the Soviet state --; 5; The post-communist societies in transition --; 6; Agnostic liberalism --; 7; The undoing of conservatism --; 8; After the new liberalism --; 9; From post-liberalism to pluralism --; 10; Enlightenment's wake
N2  - John Gray argues that all the intellectual traditions of modernity are applications of the Enlightenment project, which has proved to be self-undermining. This effect was due to the project's extension of rational self-criticism and demystification to its own foundational commitments which ultimately dissolved them; 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, the author contends, is that of securing peaceful co-existence for incommensurable world-views in an intellectual and cultural context that is at once post-rational and post-traditional. While it is crucial to resist the re-enchantment of the world by new forms of fundamentalism, neither the Left nor the Right in any of their traditional forms are able, according to Gray, to offer a viable alternative
ER  -