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False Dawn offers no hope, suggests
no immediate reforms and predicts a very dark future. It
is a refreshingly honest book.
The Anglo-American-style free market --
supported by every Western leader from Tony Blair to Bill
Clinton, in every country from Sweden to New Zealand --
now rules our daily lives. Gray argues that the attempt
to impose it on the world will create a disaster on the
scale of Soviet Communism. It will cause wars, worsen ethnic
conflicts and impoverish millions. Not everything can be
traded, or should be.
America, the supposed flagship of the new
civilization, is doomed to moral and social disintegration
as it loses ground to other cultures which have never forgotten
that the market works best when it is embedded in society.
The free market is undermining the values of bourgeois civilization
in the heartland of capitalism.
John Gray, a former supporter of the New
Right, believes that the conventional political solutions
of conservatism and social democracy are no longer viable.
He has written one of the most passionate polemics against
the utopia of the free market since Carlyle and Marx.
John Gray is Professor of Politics at
Oxford University and a Fellow of Jesus College. He is a
regular contributor to the Guardian and the Times
Literary Supplement, and his books include Isaiah
Berlin and Enlightenment's Wake.
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