A gray world - economist John Gray's book 'False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism'

Reason, July, 1999 by Brink Lindsey

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 precedent, it snaps the threads of memory and scatters local knowledge. By privileging individual choice over any common good it tends to make relationships revocable and provisional."

At this point Gray sounds like a full-fledged neo-Luddite, rejecting the rat race of economic and technological progress in favor of some lost bucolic wonderland of cheerful, ruddy peasants and a wise and kindly nobility. But Gray's views are more complicated, and less coherent, than they first appear. Gray distinguishes between the "global free market," a utopian fantasy he harshly condemns, and globalization more generally, whose inevitability he recognizes and accepts.

"A global single market is very much a late-twentieth-century political project," he argues. "It is good to remind ourselves of this, and to make an important distinction. This political project is far more transient than the globalization of economic and cultural life that began in Europe in the early modern period from the fifteenth century onwards, and is set to advance for centuries. For humankind at the close of the modern period globalization is an historical fate. Its basic mechanism is the swift and inexorable spawning of new technologies throughout the world. That technology-driven modernization of the world's economic life will go ahead regardless of the fate of a worldwide free market."

It appears, then, that John Gray is highly selective in his railings against the "Enlightenment project." The "universal civilization" of science and technology, after all, has its own "cult of reason and efficiency," heaps "contempt" on traditional superstitions and folkways, and spreads its own "cultural imperialism." Even more so than do free markets, the "permanent revolution" of scientific and technological advance "denies any authority to the past," "nullifies precedent," and "snaps the threads of memory." Yet while free markets are dismissed as a dangerous pipe dream, technological progress is a "historical fate."

The muddle gets deeper. Gray explicitly acknowledges that free markets and technological developments are pushing the world in the same direction. In fact, he actually argues that technology's push is the ultimately stronger and decisive one, writing, "The dislocations of social and economic life today are not caused solely by free markets. Ultimately they arise from the banalization of technology. Technological innovations made in advanced western countries are soon copied everywhere. Even without free-market policies the managed economies of the post-war period could not have survived - technological advance would have made them unsustainable."