Philosophical Slut

John Gray, the former Hayek booster turned deep ecologist, is back with two new books that are reviewed in The Nation. From Danny Postel's review, which discusses the long and winding road Gray has traveled:

It could have something to do with what his old friend Norman Barry calls Gray's "philosophical promiscuity." Barry, a fellow traveler of Gray's from the Thatcher years, told Lingua Franca magazine in 2001 that even in his days as an anarcho-capitalist, Gray "was always flitting from person to person, philosopher to philosopher…. He couldn't form a steady relationship with any thinker."

This is a long and complicated review, but worth a read in full. After running through Gray's embrace of many left-wing themes (especially extreme environmentalism and insistence on cultural and political "difference"), Postel eventually condemns Gray in the harshest terms available to a Nation scribe: "As far as he has traveled, and as frequently as he has changed lanes, he's still conservative after all these years." In a move that's all too rare among leftys these days, Postel eschews cultural relativism and indentity politics and sticks up for Enlightenment-dervied notions of "universalism" (alas, what that means is all in the details).

Link via Arts & Letters Daily