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John Gray

John Gray is Emeritus Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics. His book Seven Types of Atheism was published last year. (December 2019)

IN THE REVIEW

Getting Better All the Time?

Saul Steinberg: Biography, 1965

The Evolution of Moral Progress: A Biocultural Theory

by Allen Buchanan and Russell Powell
Theories that link evolution with moral progress claim to illuminate changes in values in many different cultures over long stretches of time. In some such theories, the evolution of ethics is taken to be part of a cosmic process that encompasses the formation of galaxies and the emergence of life.

Circling the Square

‘The Kings’ Cake, Cut at the Congress of Vienna,’ 1815; from Niall Ferguson’s The Square and the Tower, in which he argues that ‘the “cake of kings” could only be cut up with the help of the Rothschilds’ financial network’

The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

by Niall Ferguson
The Square and the Tower claims to present “a new historical narrative, in which major changes—dating back to the Age of Discovery and the Reformation, if not earlier—can be understood, in essence, as disruptive challenges to established hierarchies by networks.” Social networks “have always been much more important in history …

Blowing Bubbles

Peter Sloterdijk

Bubbles: Spheres, Volume 1: Microspherology

by Peter Sloterdijk, translated from the German by Wieland Hoban

Globes: Spheres, Volume 2: Macrospherology

by Peter Sloterdijk, translated from the German by Wieland Hoban
In “The Plunge and the Turn,” the first chapter of Not Saved: Essays After Heidegger, the German philosopher, polemicist, and sometime television host Peter Sloterdijk recalls walking around the campus of Bard College, “one of the academic institutions in the state of New York favored by students from the upper-middle …

They Won’t Rest in Peace

La Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2002

The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains

by Thomas W. Laqueur

Farewell to the World: A History of Suicide

by Marzio Barbagli, translated from the Italian by Lucinda Byatt
A large part of Thomas Laqueur’s inquiry into modern attitudes toward the dead has to do with “a vast enterprise on a small stage: the work of the dead in western Europe since the eighteenth century.” Among other subjects, he aims to show how the cemetery replaced the churchyard as …

How & How Not to Be Good

Peter Singer at Farm Sanctuary, a shelter for rescued farm animals, Watkins Glen, New York, 2006

The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically

by Peter Singer
For Peter Singer, “effective altruism” is “an emerging movement” with the potential of spreading to a point when “people all over the world” may be ready to commit themselves to “a new ethical ideal: to do the most good they can.” Singer is clear that applying this ideal will involve …

The Dangers of Democracy

Children demonstrating in favor of a referendum backing the Good Friday peace agreement, Belfast, Northern Ireland, 1998

The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present

by David Runciman
“For most of us,” writes David Runciman, “democracy is still the only game in town.” A professor of politics at Cambridge who is noted for showing how apparently contradictory propositions can make sense in politics, Runciman argues that democracies survive crises without having any clear insight into how they manage …

The Real Karl Marx

Karl Marx and his daughter Jenny, a left-wing journalist and her father’s secretary, in 1869. ‘The cross she is wearing,’ Jonathan Sperber writes, ‘was not a sign of religious affiliation but the symbol of the Polish uprising of 1863.’

Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life

by Jonathan Sperber
Today Marx is inseparable from the idea of communism, but he was not always wedded to it. Lamenting that “our once blossoming commercial cities are no longer flourishing,” he once declared that the spread of Communist ideas would “defeat our intelligence, conquer our sentiments,” an insidious process with no obvious remedy. In contrast, any attempt to realize communism could easily be cut short by force of arms: “practical attempts [to introduce communism], even attempts en masse, can be answered with cannons.”

The Violent Visions of Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek at his apartment in Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2010

Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

by Slavoj Žižek

Living in the End Times

by Slavoj Žižek
Few thinkers illustrate the contradictions of contemporary capitalism better than the Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek. The financial and economic crisis has demonstrated the fragility of the free market system that its defenders believed had triumphed in the cold war; but there is no sign of anything resembling the socialist project that in the past was seen by many as embodying capitalism’s successor. Žižek’s work, which reflects this paradoxical situation in a number of ways, has made him one of the world’s best-known public intellectuals.