False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism.

• Author: Lindsey, Brink
• Position: Review

by John Gray, New York: The New Press, 234 pages, $25.00 In False Dawn, John Gray attempts to attack global capitalism at its intellectual roots. In other words, he portrays the worldwide spread of markets as the manifestation of deeply flawed ideas about how the world works. The attack, a sloppy jumble of internal contradictions and factual distortions, fails spectacularly. Nevertheless, the book does achieve something: It articulates, quite boldly and with rhetorical verve, a relatively sophisticated version of reactionary globalphobia. It's not a pretty sight, but it merits our attention all the same.

Gray is a professor at the London School of Economics and a fairly prominent public intellectual in Britain. Like America's Pat Buchanan, Gray opposes globalization from the right; also like Buchanan, Gray is a repentant ex-free-trader. Gray's intellectual about-face, though, goes far beyond international economics. He is a former classical liberal whose earlier books include intelligent and admiring analyses of J.S. Mill and F.A. Hayek. Now he rejects not just free trade, not just liberalism, but the whole "Enlightenment project" - or at least his caricature thereof. (In The Future and Its Enemies, Virginia Postrel identifies Gray as a leading voice of what she calls "reactionary stasis.")

Indeed, at the bottom of Gray's hostility to the world economy is its supposed Enlightenment pedigree. "A single global market," he writes, "is the Enlightenment's project of a universal civilization in what is likely to be its final form." In an invidious and oft-repeated comparison, he portrays global capitalism and the now-defunct ideal of collectivism as two sides of the same rationalist coin: "Even though a global free market cannot be reconciled with any kind of planned economy, what these Utopias have in common is more fundamental than their differences. In their cult of reason and efficiency, their ignorance of history and their contempt for the ways of life they consign to poverty or extinction, they embody the same rationalist hubris and cultural imperialism that have marked the central traditions of Enlightenment thinking throughout its history."

Gray does not dispute (at least not consistently) that, unlike socialism, free markets deliver the goods. "The argument against unrestricted global freedom in trade and capital movements," he concedes, "is not primarily an economic one. It is, rather, that the economy should serve the needs of society, not society the imperatives of the market." In particular, Gray argues that free markets undermine the "needs of society" by fomenting incessant and unsettling change. "The permanent revolution of the free market denies any authority to the past," he writes. "It nullifies...