Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Tallis in Wonderland

Fifty Shades of Black

Raymond Tallis berates the malign pessimism of John Gray.

Just over twenty years ago, I published Enemies of Hope, a critique of the anti-humanist trends that were increasingly being espoused by academics in the humanities. Two dimensions of anti-humanism particularly exercised me. The first was its denial of the very idea of a human subject capable of true agency. The second was disbelief in the reality or even the possibility of human progress through well-intentioned rational action.

Just how little impact Enemies of Hope made on fashionable pessimism was revealed five years later by the runaway success of a polemic by political philosopher John Gray.

…