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False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism

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John Gray, professor of European thought at the London School of
Economics, describes and analyzes the contemporary trend toward a
global free market in this an exceptionally provocative book. Unlike
Thomas L. Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree and A Future
Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization by John
Micklethwait & Adrian Wooldridge (both of which I reviewed here in
July), this book is highly critical of the unrestricted expansion of
the international economy and integration of its markets. Indeed,
Gray begins by warning: "The Utopia of the global free market has
not incurred a human cost in the way that communism did. Yet over
time it may come to rival it in the suffering that it inflicts."
That is a very harsh indictment!

One of the great intellectual
debates of the coming decades may revolve around this question: Does
the global economy meet human needs? According to Gray, the answer is
"No." For instance, he writes: "In the United States
free markets have contributed to social breakdown on a scale unknown
to any other developed country. Families are weaker in America than
in any other country. At the same time, social order has been propped
up by a policy of mass incarceration." Gray acknowledges that,
"[t]he world-historical movement we call globalization has
momentum that is inexorable," but inexorability is not
desirability. Globalization may not be desirable because, according
to Gray: "The late-twentieth-century free market experiment is an
attempt to legitimate through democratic institutions severe limits on
the scope and content of democratic control over economic life."
Gray then asserts: "The free market is not...a gift of social
evolution. It is the end-product of social engineering and unyielding
political will." If Gray is correct, what is globalization's
political objective? I do not believe he ever makes that
clear. According to Gray: "Free marketeers tell us that the
unprecedented productivity of a rational economic system will remove
the causes of social conflict and war." But Gray counters:
"Throughout nearly all of human history, wars have arisen from
territorial and dynastic conflicts, from religious and ethnic
enmities, and from the divergent economic interests pursued by
sovereign states." Contrary to many predictions following the
collapse of the Soviet Union, according to Gray: "The threat to
peace has not disappeared with the end of the Cold War. The nature of
war has merely mutated. One consequence of an anarchic global economy
has proved to be a world awash with weapons." Gray asserts that
there is a risk "that sovereign states will be drawn into a
struggle for control of the earth's dwindling natural resources. In
the coming century ideological rivalries between states may well be
succeeded by Malthusian wars of scarcity." Gray is especially
concerned about the expansion of the global free market and threats to
the environment. In both Russia and China, according to Gray,
"partly as an inheritance of central economic planning and partly
as a consequence of market reforms, environmental degradation is
cataclysmic." Furthermore, Gray asserts: "If advanced
societies are able to protect their environments...it will be partly
because they are able to export pollution by moving production to
Third World countries where environmental standards are looser."
Some of the most interesting and provocative passages in this book
concern Russia and China. One chapter is entitled title:
"Anarcho-capitalism in post-communist Russia." In it, Gray
writes: "The anarchic capitalism which replaced Soviet central
planning is surely a developmental phase, not an endpoint in Russian
economic development." According to Gray: "In less than a
decade Russia has moved from a functioning totalitarian regime to near
anarchy....The species of capitalism that is emerging in Russia today
is deeply marked by its Soviet antecedents. The criminalized markets
that flourished in the recesses and interstices of the Soviet state
thrive now in its ruins." Gray also is concerned about
globalization's impact on international political stability.
According to Gray: "In a world in which market forces are subject
to no overall constraint or regulation, peace is continually at risk.
Slash-and-burn capitalism...kindles conflict over natural resources.
The practical consequence of policies promoting minimal government
intervention in the economy is that, in expanding regions of the
world, sovereign states are locked in competition not only for markets
but for survival. The global market as it is presently organized does
not allow the world's peoples to coexist harmoniously." Gray
frequently compares the first two decades of the 20th century, in
which fierce competition for markets and colonies led to two world
wars, to our own time. Although I find this comparison somewhat
extreme, it is a chilling thought. Some readers will find this book
unfair in its extended attack on American economic, political, and
cultural values. Gray asserts that the "global free market is an
American project," and he predicts that is "destined to
fail. In this, as in much else, it resembles that other twentieth
century experiment in utopian social engineering, Marxian
socialism.... Each was ready to exact a large price in suffering from
humanity in order to impose its single vision on the world. Each has
run aground on vital human needs." Gray quotes Lee Kuan Yew,
formerly Prime Minister of Singapore and now that country's Senior
Minister: "Americans believe their ideas are universal - the
supremacy of the individual and free, unfettered expression. But they
are not - never were." Without agreeing with Gray, I believe his
larger point is that the people of the U.S. may be too optimistic
about the long-term, far-reaching effects of globalization, and this
point should be well taken.

In summary, Gray's critique of
globalization asserts that the global free market contributes to
international economic inequality; that increased international
economic competition is likely to result in serious environmental
degradation; and that international tensions, especially those arising
from divergent economic interests, could result in war. If Gray is
correct, the next two decades could be very unpleasant. Readers may
not agree with Gray, but all of us should give careful thought to the
concerns which he articulates here.

The book isn't entirely convincing, having been written by a political scientist rather than an economist it has been criticised as being polemical.

But having said that the author does raise some interesting points. The book is a real eye-opener, especially to those Americans who think that nations all want to be more like the USA. Read it.

From the book:

"The perception that countries which subscribe to none of the tenets of `the American creed' are surpassing the United States is too painful to enter into public consciousness. To accept that countries can achieve modernity without revering the folkways of individualism, bowing to the cult of human rights or sharing the Enlightenment superstition of progress towards a world civilisation, is to admit that America's civil religion has been falsified.

For most Americans such a perception is intolerable. Instead, evidence of the superior economic growth, savings rates, educational standards and family stability of other countries that have repudiated the American model will be repressed, denied and resisted indefatigably. To admit this evidence would be to confront the social costs of the American free market. The free market works to weaken social cohesion. Its productivity is prodigious; but so are its human costs. At present the costs of the free market are taboo subjects in American discourse; they are voiced only by a handful of sceptical liberals. If the fact that free markets and social stability are at odds could be admitted, the conflict between them would not thereby disappear, but it could perhaps be moderated."

John Gray argues convincingly in this book that a single global market is largely a political project, while economic globalization is the result of the spread of new technologies throughout the world and it can go on without a free market. An unexpected consequence of globalization is that it accentuates uneven economic development within countries and between countries. This causes high structural unemployment, the fall of real wages for certain working groups and the need of two-income families. The author concludes that global capitalism is inherently unstable because a world-wide free market can not be self-regulated. Without radical reform it will fall apart as trade wars, competitive currency devaluations, economic collapses and political upheavals are bound to happen. This is an excallent analysis of the current state of global capitalism as we approach a new millennium.

As far as skeptics of globalization go, John Gray has to rank high. Formerly a Thatcher conservative and now a market skeptic, Mr. Gray's credentials alone take him a long way. It is no wonder, then, that what he has to write about globalization should be worth reading.

All the same, "False Dawn" is likely to produce mixed feelings. Its eight-fold argument is hard to keep track of, rendering interesting observations seem like unnecessary transgressions. Mr. Gray's fluid writing style that consists of short paragraphs makes for an enjoyable read, but at times, speed and brevity come at the expense of depth; all too often, the reader is likely to demand more from the book.

Still, the argument itself has merits, particularly in showing how free markets need a strong government to engineer them (as opposed to them springing naturally). Mr. Gray's continuous dialectic between the economic imperatives of a capitalist system and its social consequences is surely to excite skeptics of liberalism and trouble its supporters. From the perspective of political theory, Mr. Gray's contribution is invaluable.

But as with the arguments of many skeptics, Mr. Gray's overlooks certain uncomfortable realities. At the heart of Mr. Gray's thesis is the tradeoff between the flexibility of markets and the human need for economic security. For Mr. Gray, capitalism's very dynamism is likely to lead to its fall. At the same time, Mr. Gray pays scant reference either to the need for security itself or to the political shortfalls of providing security and social cohesion. After all, the engineering of markets came to save failing economies. It is not at all clear where Mr. Gray would have us go if not towards free markets.

As the argument moves from political theory to economics, its appeal lessens. The economics of globalization (bad capitalism driving out good capitalism) are at the center of Mr. Gray's thesis. What is absent, however, is a comprehensive review of the economic literature which takes issue with this position. Absent such a refutation of the opposite side of the argument, Mr. Gray invites his readers to dismiss his arguments all too easily.

In the end, Mr. Gray makes a (stretched) comparison between Marxism and liberalism. It is true that they are both products of the Enlightenment whose belief in reason and progress is paramount; and it is true that both need strong governments to work. But the scope of government is different under them. What is also different is the benefits that each system gives to its people-both might bring dislocation, but liberalism has many merits, while Marxism had few.

In fact, Mr. Gray's unwillingness to recognize how markets increase human agency more so than political participation surfaces as the primary drawback of his argument. And, Mr. Gray's overlooking of how the market too can provide for economic security might displease some forward-looking economic thinkers.

But for all its shortcomings, "False Dawn" is as good a book as one can find about the potential drawbacks of the global economic system. Whether Mr. Gray's prediction that anarchy is the next stage in human development comes true is another matter; but, if anarchy comes, Mr. Gray will have told us why.

Author John Gray makes some astute and prescient points alongside others which are overwhelmingly brainless, in this wandering attack on global free trade ideologues which degenerates, at its low points, into a tiredly familiar attack on Western culture itself.

Among the astute points is that classical free market economic theory presupposed immobility of capital, while today's global free trade ideologues, who invoke classical economics as a foundation for their "anything goes" trade policy, hardly comprehend how instantaneous, unregulated capital flow between countries not only violates the very theory upon which their free trade ideology sits, but brings disruptive havoc to developing nations not culturally armored with rugged Anglo-American conceptions of individual rights, property rights and entrepreneurial exuberance. Gray also remarks on how, in contradiction to the official government line, the rich are getting richer, the poor poorer and the middle-class more exhausted, in the many Western nations who've aggressively embraced the deregulation and free trade politics born, in their most contemporary incarnation, in the Thatcher-Reagan era. If he stopped here, and built his book around a sober exploration of these central ideas, the book would be a commanding and valuable contribution to global discourse.

Instead, Mr. Gray, a Professor of what is called "European Thought" at the London School of Economics, mars the book with a rambling undisguised contempt, in that exhuasted European intellectual tradition, for all things American. Its divorce rate, its incarceration rate, its broken families, its crime, its dispossessed underclass become proof of the hopeless cruelty of its laissez-faire economic system. Yes, America does have serious problems. Our incarceration policy, in particular, is a national disgrace. But in his zeal to find fault, Mr. Gray doesn't make a convincing case that these problems result directly from the laissez-faire economic policies he attacks. Instead, by book's end, the two remain, like the sunrise and the rooster's crow, linked, but without any persuasive proof that the latter causes the former. Technological change, which he admits is global and independent of political economy, has been a huge factor in eviscerating industries, dislocating workers and by extension, families. The cultural changes of the 1960s and 1970s, in particular the large scale migration of women into the workforce, still play far and deep into the patterns of our economic and cultural life. American's hard-core individualism, which certainly contributes to our social challenges, arose long before any notion of a global free market. Nor does Mr. Gray acknowledge our successes--our rapidly declining crime rate, our relatively clean environment (by global standards), our multi-racial (I'd argue "uni-cultural") society which, unlike the sorry 3rd world tribal states which are now imploding around the globe, exists peacefully as one nation under God, indivisible. Nor does he admit that the U.S. with it's constitutional and political philosophies, and despite its flaws, still stands as a beacon of hope and freedom for much of mankind, amply proven by the millions who risk their lives each year to get to our shores, legally and illegally, in hopes of finding some sanctuary from the hell of their third world despotic gangster ruled homelands where justice is, in Plato's immortal phrase, simply "the advantage of the stronger," and opportunity is defined by having enough money to mount an escape.

There's a lot of improving that needs to be done to the financial and legal mechanisms which lubricate global trade. Mr. Gray is right about that. And he rightly points to Russia as a disaster of misguided Western economic advice. But global free trade is a big tent, not a monolith. It has many critics and would be reformists of its past excesses, even amongst its own ranks and practitioners, who see it's shortcomings, and are hard at work on the messy business of making it work better for all nations. A little ink on their efforts and ideas would have been a welcome addition to this book.

This is a very well written book that brings out a political perspective on Globalization, Free Trade and its impact/consequences.

Unlike most books which run into conspiracy theories of Capitalism running amok and corporations driving covert agendas, this book instead takes a look at the political scenarios existing in various key countries & the complex interplay between the political history of the state & the impact of capitalism & hence the very role of the State. After dissecting Britain & the US, the author goes on to give very well researched examples from Russia and East Asian States - he covers the political history of each of these places & clearly outlines how Capitalism morphs into a regional variant under different political systems and the consequences of this morphing.

The author powerfully argues how Capitalism & Globalization are not delinked from the role of the State ... and debunks the myth of a single universal culture. The book ends on a dark note where it raises serious questions about the presence & effectiveness of a Global governing body to handle the inadequacies of capitalism, driven by technological globalization.

Its not an easy book to read, and requires a good knowledge of political history (US/UK/Russia/Singapore/China/Japan) & basic economics; but once finished, it is a definitive eye opener from a political perspective, on how the situation today has developed and what the future holds out.

August 9, 2010

John Gray, who has studied politics, economics and philosophy at Oxford and was a Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics until his retirement in 2008, has won praise from some unlikely places, such as Bloomberg News and from two mainstays of the Economist magazine, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. These globalization celebrators devoted several pages to Gray's career in their 2000 book A Future Perfect, tracing his path from the 1980's when he was "a member of Margaret Thatcher's informal brain trust. As the Conservative party collapsed in the 1990's however, so did Gray's faith in free markets, and he embraced a succession of alternatives, ranging from communitarianism to environmentalism and culminating in antiglobalism." Nonetheless, he remains "one of globalization's most searching critics."

We're pleased to say we've "field tested" this book in Maryland when we led a discussion in a progressive book club in Montgomery County. This was during those dark days when Democrats had their heads down, when they weren't scratching it in puzzlement, after the 2004 election. The consensus on the book was that it was not an easy read, but worth it, because people felt that they hadn't seen anything quite like it. Grey writes in a very direct style, some would say blunt, for a philosopher, in a declarative, assertive manner, stating in a paragraph of propositions what it might take another author a whole book to work up to. So the reader will still be digesting the last assertion when Grey moves on, in the very next paragraph, if not the very next sentence, to serve the next dish on his political economy menu.

As we were thinking about our own selection process for this summer's little reading list, about what the books actually shared in common, it struck us that aside from three of them being directly about "political economy," they all took a historical approach to their subject matter, reaching far back in time to eras and centuries which preceded ours, but which help to illuminate a new rise of utopian thinking which has come to represent the Right's universal free market project of the 1975-2008 period. With Gray in particular, it is his philosophical training that gives his writing its bold insights, adding further depth to the historical perspective he adopts. To an American audience accustomed to a short, tightly drawn news-cycle and tweeting, the book's almost other-worldly grounding in the long flow of the Western intellectual tradition is enormously refreshing. Yet it will be disorienting to some, especially those who believe that America has been exempted from previous patterns in history, or that all utopian visions occur on the left. In some ways, he reminds us of a much milder centrist version of William F. Buckley Jr., although those who remember the late star of the TV series Firing Line will see a much lower key John Grey in this interview with Australian public television, from 2008, at [...], which is 54 minutes in length.

If the Economist's placement of Gray on the political spectrum was not exactly precise, we think you'll understand why that's the case, since Gray was a student and admirer of the late Isaiah Berlin, who was hard to place, but whom he reminds us was in turn a "Rooseveltian Liberal." We believe you will both appreciate and benefit from the way Gray leads his readers out of the narrow policy boxes that both major parties in America have constructed for their members and the general public. Here are some examples to whet your appetites.

First, Gray makes an important distinction about globalization, separating out two distinct streams of influence, one recent, and one much older: "Much current debate confuses globalization...a trend that can be dated back to the projection of European power into other parts of the world in imperialist policies from the sixteenth century onwards...with the ephemeral political project of a worldwide free market."(Page 215.) And then we have this startling, out-of-the-blue comparison, which American audiences never hear or read. It gets its power from the fact that America's identity is at least partly based on its belief that it has a special mission and a unique way of life, which Presidential office seekers are required to swear allegiance to, our "American Exceptionalism." Gray sees it as reinforcing something else though, a continuation of the 18th century Enlightenment's "project of a universal civilization," one marked, however, with its late 20th, early 21st Century stamp as the quest for "a single global market...in what is likely to be its final form." And now comes the shocker: "it is not the only variant of that project to have been attempted in a century that is littered with false Utopias. The former Soviet Union embodied a rival Enlightenment Utopia, that of a universal civilization in which markets were replaced by central authority. The human costs of that defunct Utopia were incalculable." (Page 3). And now for the further shock waves.

Not the Perfect Marriage: Free Markets and Social Stability
Without in any way suggesting that the costs of our current Utopian quest approach or mirror those so cruelly inflicted on the peoples of the old USSR, Gray nonetheless reminds his readers of the costs of the Right's attempts at "social engineering," a term heretofore held under patent by the Right, and hurled against liberals, and indeed which is still being hurled about in revisionist histories of the New Deal. We have mentioned in other essays the Right's success at using wedge issues to try to break apart what remains of the Democrats old New Deal coalition (not much), and it's commonly thought that they have had a permanent lock on "law and order" and "family values" issues, to mention two of their most familiar "monopolies." Listen now to Gray's assertions about what has been going on inside the US and Britain under the influence of the conservative revolution: "The innermost contradiction of the free market is that it works to weaken the traditional social institutions on which it has depended in the past - the family is a key example. The fragility and decline of the traditional family increased throughout the Thatcherite period...Birth's outside marriage more than doubled during the 1980's. One-parent families increased from 12 percent in 1979 to 21 percent in 1992...By 1991 there was one divorce for every two marriages in Britain - the highest divorce rate of any EU Country....Is it coincidental that no EU country apart from Britain has imposed American-style deregulation on its labour market? In those British cities in which Thatcherite policies of labour market deregulation were most successful in lowering rates of unemployment, rates of divorce and family breakdown were correspondingly highest." (Pages 29-30.)

That's some, but not complete preparation for this take on what has been happening inside the US. Can you imagine the reaction to a scholar going before any number of America's family value religious organizations and making the following findings:

In the United States free markets have contributed to social breakdown on a scale unknown in any other developed country. Families are weaker in America than in any other country. At the same time, social order has been propped up by a policy of mass incarceration. No other advanced industrial country, aside from post-communist Russia, uses imprisonment as a means of social control on the scale of the United States. Free markets, the desolation of families and communities and the use of the sanctions of criminal law as a last recourse against social collapse go in tandem. (Page 2).

The Great Incarceration
And prior to this, you thought that all those criminals in American jails were there because, even four decades later, of the value devastations the sixties had wrought, the spread of terrible work habits amidst the American urban underclass, those lousy liberal-union dominated public schools, especially the urban ones, and, in the eyes of much of the religious Right, the fact that we had just raised a lot of "bad" individuals under all that liberal "permissiveness." But this is a charge, and a line of reasoning which has grown less and less convincing as decade by decade the 1960's recede, replaced in turn by Nixonland, the Reagans and the Bushes, by the law and order touting, welfare abolishing, end-of-big-government proclaiming Bill Clinton, and decades of conservative judges who have indeed set records for incarceration, locking "them" up and throwing away the key, even as crime rates peaked in 1992, and then steadily declined.

(Editor's Note: Readers who don't want to take Grey's word for it, might enjoy any of the following, starting with James A. Morone's Hellfire Nation, which is reviewed later in this essay - just a taste now: "The most startling neo-Puritan product is the army of Americans in jail;" the 86 page essay by Glenn C. Loury, with commentary by others, Race, Incarceration and American Values, 2008; Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics by Katherine Beckett, 1997; The Great Disruption by Francis Fukuyama (2000);The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Thomas J. Sugrue, 1996; and last, but not least, a winner of the Bancroft Prize in American History, Roger Lane's Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860-1900, 1986.)

Grey's work threatens the very categories which define American politics in 2010; in his view, the carte blanche written to free market capitalism and its embrace by American "conservatives" is actually a project in the inversion of their proclaimed values:

Free markets are the most potent solvents of tradition at work in the world today. They set a premium on novelty and a discount on the past...the free market is most recklessly short-termist in its demolition of the virtues that it once relied upon. These virtues - saving, civic pride, respectability, `family values' - are now profitless museum pieces. They are bits of bric-a-brac, dusted off for public display from time to time by the Right-wing media, but having few uses in an economy founded on ephemera. The most enduring icon of the free market in the late twentieth century will not be Margaret Thatcher. It may well turn out to be Madonna. (Page 38, from the Chapter "Engineering Free Markets.")

Grey on Target, Before the Crisis of 2008-2009
Pretty outrageous sounding, isn't it? Now who is John Gray to dispute with the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, William Bennett and the voices from thousands of pulpits equating conservatism - and the current neoliberal economic system - with the preservation of conservative values? Well, consider these brief insights, published in 1998, so formulated a year or two earlier - on the trends in the world economy - and remember, John Gray is not a professional economist:

* "This virtual financial economy has a terrible potential for disrupting the underlying real economy, as seen in the collapse in 1995 of Barings, Britain's oldest bank. Together with the accelerating development of global capital markets on which it stands, the virtual economy is a phenomenon unknown in the world's economic history. Nothing like it existed pre-1914." (Page 62.)

* "Ricardo (Editors Note: David Ricardo, that is; English "classical" economist who lived 1772-1823) recognized that technological innovation could be job-destroying. He did not share the modern faith that new employment will always arise automatically from the side-effects of new technologies." (Page 86.)

* "Global laissez-faire may break down in an unmanageable crisis of the world's stock markets and financial institutions. The enormous, practically unknowable virtual economy of financial derivatives enhances the risks of a systemic crash. How would America's fractured society cope with a collapse in the stock market such as occurred in Japan in the early 1990's?" (Page 198.)


We'll close our brief on behalf of Gray's False Dawn by visiting with his "Postscript" thoughts, on some themes we've been writing about since January of this year, especially about our economy's failure to pursue, much less achieve, anything even approximating "full employment." He also directly addresses two other values which are often thought to be old "conservative" ones. Here's how Gray goes about it:

Amongst the human needs that free markets neglect are the needs for security and social identity that used to be met by the vocational structures of bourgeois societies...A contradiction has emerged...the chronic insecurities of late modern capitalism...corrode some of the central institutions and values of bourgeois life. The most notable of these social institutions may be that of the career...Few can now harbour any such hope. The deeper effect of economic insecurity is not to multiply the number of jobs each of us has in a working lifetime. It is to make the very idea of a career redundant... The post-war trend to embourgeisment is being reversed, and working people are being in some degree re-proletarianized. (Page 217, our emphasis.)


William R. Neil
Rockville, MD
August, 2010

Two writers who interest me because of the quality of their writings and the arguments which they put forward are Michael Prowse and John Gray. Both of these men have at one time been associated with what is known as the New Right, a term generally taken to mean, a heterogenous group of academics, intellectuals, scholars, journalists and sundry others who contributed to the resurgence of classical liberal, whig and similar ideas associated with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Both of these authors have since turned away from those ideas and developed their thinking in other directions.

When I began to read this book I was reminded on Hayek's reason for not reviewing Keynes' General Theory: that he did not need to do so as he believed that Keynes would once again change his mind. However, as I proceeded to immerse myself in the material I began to gain some insight into the direction that Gray has gone.

I am sure that there are many who would simply dismiss these ideas as not worthy of serious consideration given that Gray is considered a turncoat in some quarters, and there are some who would merely denounce them from a simplistic neo-liberal point of view but I believe that such attitudes are seriously misguided. As Peter Wynarczyk once pointed out to me, we must all put our theories in the public domain so that they may be tested against competing theories. We can build walls against attack but then what use is a theory which is merely conditional. Gray recognises that many who swear allegiance to the neo-liberal doctrines have not fully thought through the implications of those theories and similarly also recognises the political ramifications of those policies when implemented by politicians and others.

After reading this book I am not coninced that Gray himself is anti-market. He seems to articulate a view of markets which are set within a social context, indeed he postulates competing capitalisms which to my mind is fully compatible within a classical liberal framework.

The target of his attack appears to be what he views as a programme, a political programme, of a world order based on a contemporary American conception of what a free market ought to be. Whereas Gray argues that the emergence of the phenomenon of globalisation is driven by the spread of new technologies as opposed to the breaking down of barriers against open or laissez faire economics, he develops the notion of a particular type of capitalism hell bent on world domination. False Dawn assesses the damage to other capitalisms and the implications thereof, and foresees a time when the general applicability of American capitalism will ultimately lead to it's demise and at a great cost. He believes that this juggernaut cannot be stopped easily due to the damage done to the power of the state through the past twenty or so years of it's extension to the global economy.

False Dawn also places this attempt to global economic domination within a context of the grand ideas of the Enlightenment and argues that as such it is doomed to failure. Gray writes comprehensively, providing examples from different capitalisms to support his theory and cleverly finds common results which support his findings. I found myself in disagreement with the notion that technology is an impetus for globalisation as I believe that the development and spread of technology is the result of an economic process rather than an instigator. Neither was I convinced of the fatality of his work. Even were I convinced of the disasterous consequences of the spread of one particular type of capitalism, I believe that the market process, through the creation of competitive forces will cause other capitalisms to fight for domination. Gray quotes Schumpeter's view on the nature of laissez faire in destroying and rebuilding to mourn the changes within societies but this is a double edged sword. Who is to say what was swept away is not worse than what is built?

Overall I think that this work is excellent and that it deserves serious attention rather than casual dismissal. False Dawn has some important arguements which policy makers, academics and intellectuals would do well to consider. The strength of ideas lies in their capacity to deal with attacks because it is only through those attacks that weakenesses, if not fatal flaws, can be detected. If we are confident in our belief in those ideas we should welcome attacks like Gray's for in the end we will find improvement.

The Economist is quoted on the cover of my copy as saying: "This book is teeming with arguments and ideas...it is hard to put down, and economic liberals would do well to test their ideas against it." But I think that when the basic premises are misleading, how can the tests be valid?

The so-called "laissez-faire globalisation" model that Gray rails against is about as laissez-faire as Stalinism. As an ex-neo-conservative, he wants the celebrity of Nixon going to China in his attack on globalisation. But he advocates the same incorrect assumption he originally held as a neo-con, that liberalisation occurred at all levels. He fails to note, despite bringing up frequent relevant examples, that top-to-bottom laissez-faire is not the cause of the social and financial dislocations attributed (rightly) to globalisation. It does not exist. What is being globalised is a corrupt collusion between big business and statist governments. Big business is disposing of the vast economic assets and power gathered by statists for their own benefit. Hence the concentrations of wealth and the inequalities the author cites. Big business is being given privileged access to human and governmental resources, at fire-sale rates, under the disguise of a "laissez faire" that does not apply to themselves.

Gray makes the valid point that any kind of market, socialized or free, depends on strong government intervention. But unlike the author, I would argue that REAL fair play, choices and opportunities are not uniquely Western desires. What is now being (rightly) resisted by other cultures is not fair play or free choice, but just the opposite. It is laissez-faire for workers and small business, and a comfortable US-centred corporate welfare for the guys in charge. Free roads, cheap land and resources, the IMF bailouts, and defence spending are concentrating wealth and power as never before. This is the author's laissez-faire?

I'd at least respect his argument as a stimulant of debate, but he confuses billions with millions (once even with thousands!) that I wonder why I should bother debating in my mind with such a sloppy thinker.

Gray argues that the attempt of global hegemons to bring about a single global market is largely the political project of a few planners. Gray asserts that power-based free-marketeers have a compelling interest in concealing the particular social vision they are promoting within their discourse. It is this "vision" that Gray points out as the central "lie" of "free market' ideology. Gray argues that free market ideology relies heavily on a strong state with the aim of eliminating those vestiges of civil society which still exist that have the power to check the ambition of corporate capital. He states that it is intolerable for the West to entertain the thought that "countries can achieve modernity without revering the folkways of individualism, bowing to the cult of human rights or sharing the Enlightenment superstition of progress towards a world civilization."

Gray very pointedly asserts, "Global laissez-faire is an American project," that in reality is "a mere nationalization of American corporate interests." Gray's deepest concern is over the long-term impact of this American action on international political stability. Even so, Gray asserts that, because of the power-based manner in which America wields its project upon others, it is "destined to fail," though not without costs. He states that, "In this, as in much else, it resembles that other twentieth century experiment in utopian social engineering, Marxian socialism [...]. Each was ready to exact a large price in suffering from humanity in order to impose its single vision on the world. In line with this argument, Gray further contends that the attempt to impose the Anglo-American-style free market on the world will create a disaster on the scale of Soviet communism. Even America, Gray asserts, the supposed flagship of "the new civilization," is doomed to moral and social disintegration as it loses ground to other cultures that have never forgotten that the market works best when it is embedded in the roots of their societies.

And Gray is no jello-head. He was an operative in the Thatcher Administration who is now Professor of Economics and European Thought at the London School of Economics. Strong and timely words from a man with the perspective to back them up.