False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism

Front Cover
New Press, 1998 - Business & Economics - 262 pages

Hailed by Kirkus Reviews as both "a convincing analysis of an international economy headed for disaster" and a "powerful challenge to economic orthodoxy," False Dawn shows that the attempt to impose the Anglo-American-style free market on the world will create a disaster, possibly on the scale of Soviet communism. Even America, the supposed flagship of the new civilization, risks 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 society. John Gray, well known in the 1980s as an important conservative political thinker, whose writings were relied upon by Margaret Thatcher and the New Right in Britain, has concluded that the conservative agenda is no longer viable. In his examination of the ripple effects of the economic turmoil in Russia and Asia on our collective future, Gray provides one of the most passionate polemics against the utopia of the free market since Carlyle and Marx.


About the author (1998)

John Gray was born on April 17, 1948 in South Shields, England. He received a B.A., M.Phil., and D.Phil. from Exeter College, Oxford. He taught at several universities including the University of Essex, Jesus College, Oxford, and the University of Oxford. He retired as Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2008. He contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman, where he is the lead book reviewer. He is the author of several books including False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and The Death of Utopia, and The Immortalisation Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death.