Gray Dawn: The new tack of an ur-conservative.(Lingua Franca opinion that intellectuals are drifting to the political left)

The current edition of Lingua Franca, an academic magazine of more than academic interest, contains an article on the drift of intellectuals away from the Right towards a position hostile to the supposedly unregulated capitalism of the post-Cold War world. It is entitled "Ex- Cons." And it concentrates on the political transformation of two intellectuals in particular, namely John Gray, Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, and Edward Luttwak, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic & International Studies and author of Turbo-Capitalism.

The subject is certainly an absorbing and significant one. A flight of intellectuals rightwards from the Left between 1968 and 1980 created neoconservatism and heralded the decade-long hegemony of Reaganism and Thatcherism in Anglo-America. If Messrs. Gray and Luttwak represent a similar flight in the opposite direction, then we might conceivably be on the verge of an upsurge in left-wing thought and activism. Nor are signs lacking of such a trend-the rolling anti-WTO riots that began in Seattle, the rise of Naderism in the 2000 campaign, the plurality for Al Gore in the popular vote, and so on. The only problem with Lingua Franca's argument is that neither Luttwak nor Gray can be reasonably cited as evidence of such a trend since neither of them can be fairly described as an ex-conservative.

Luttwak has never been a conservative-except perhaps in the banal and uninformative sense of not being a liberal. He is not a devotee of the free market, which he regards as an atavistic myth holding back America from a sensible policy of competitive mercantilism vis-a-vis Japan. He is not a supporter of moral traditionalism, which he regretfully dismisses as hopeless nostalgia in the age of MTV and Temptation Island. And he has no time for such conservative reforms as education vouchers, which he sees as tiresome distractions from the urgent business of National Efficiency. From the days when I knew him in London, he has consistently been a Machiavellian analyst of power. His first book was a dryly witty set of instructions on how to carry out a coup d'etat (subsequently made into an entertaining film with Peter O'Toole in the Luttwak fantasy role). And his current criticism of conservatism merely repeats his longstanding irritation with any doctrine that obstructs the development of a strong state dedicated to national greatness-and not The Weekly Standard's feeble "national greatness" with its stress on statues and libraries either, but the real McCoy, with added Blood and Iron. In Prussia, Luttwak might well be classified as a conservative; in modern America, like James Burnham before him, he is a political oddity. (I write that, dispassionately, as an admirer of both Luttwak and Burnham.)

John Gray is a different matter entirely. He cannot be described as an ex-conservative because his recent intellectual progress has been a burrowing deeper into conservatism rather than a retreat from it. This truth has been obscured because in the arena of British party politics, he has sought to advance his conservatism through the mechanism of the "New" Labour party-without success, as I shall argue, but with a curious intellectual consistency. It was, after all, the great libertarian sociologist Herbert Spencer who pointed out in the 1880s that Socialism was "the New Toryism." Under cover of its progressive rhetoric, it used the state to halt or retard social and economic changes that undermined the settled ways of working-class life exactly as the Tories had sought to stop the industrialization that overturned the dominance of Rural England. In staking out a similar position today, Gray outdistances any mere neo- or even paleo-conservative. He reaches indeed the level of an ur-conservative.

Let us begin, however, by briefly examining the conventional account of Gray's political odyssey. In the 1970s, when Thatcherism was beginning to take off, Gray was on the principled libertarian wing of the Right. During the period of High Thatcherism in the 1980s, he gave it philosophical aid and comfort in a series of books celebrating classical liberalism, notably a study of Hayek, as well as via journalistic articles on New Right themes. After Thatcher's fall, he was briefly the sole intellectual supporter of John Major before rejecting Majorism contemptuously as "Thatcherism on auto-pilot." He gradually became more critical of classical liberalism when the collapse of Communism gave rise to a global free market, and he switched in the mid '90s to New Labour as a result. But when Tony Blair failed to amend economic Thatcherism at all significantly, Gray became disillusioned in turn with New Labour. And by the late '90s, with the publication of False Dawn-an attack on globalization written with the dash and recklessness of a Polish cavalryman-he was warning of the imminent collapse of the international system and finding himself in the company of George Soros, the left-wing Guardian newspaper, and various neo-socialist intellectuals who in America would probably vote for Ralph Nader.

What this conventional account leaves out or implicitly conceals, however, is the grounds on which Gray rejected classical liberalism and embraced a series of interventionist policies. In effect, there were two grounds-both of them deeply conservative.

The first was that he concluded that all varieties of liberalism, including Hayek's revival of classical liberalism, were irredeemably flawed. Several of Gray's theoretical works were republished in the mid '90s with "postscripts" in which he severely amended or even repudiated his earlier conclusions. His reconsideration of Hayek, for instance, continued to elevate Hayek as a profound critic of socialism but dismissed his defense of classical liberalism as based on two incompatible foundations-social traditions and the unregulated free market that undermines them.