“Terror and the Western Tradition” – John GRAY

 The figure of the lonely metaphysical terrorist who blew himself up with his bomb appeared in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century … The real genesis of al-Qaeda violence has more to do with a Western tradition of individual and pessimistic revolt for an elusive ideal world than with the Koranic conception of…

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“Apocalyptic Politics” – John GRAY

The religious roots of modern revolutionary movements were first systematically uncovered in Norman Cohn’s seminal study The Pursuit of the Millennium. It has often been noted that for its followers communism had many of the functions of a religion – a fact reflected in the title of a famous collection of essays by disillusioned ex-communists,…

Modern Political Religion and its Demons – John GRAY

As I have already indicated, early Christianity was an eschatological cult: Jesus and his first disciples believed that the world was destined for imminent destruction so that a new and perfect one could come into being. Eschatology does not always have this positive character – in some pagan traditions the end of the world is…

“The Death of Utopia” – John GRAY

Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion. The greatest of the revolutionary upheavals that have shaped so much of the history of the past two centuries were episodes in the history of faith – moments in the long dissolution of Christianity and the rise of modern political religion. The world in which…

Is Government the New God? – The Religion of Totalitarianism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhNJJmmCkqY Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion. The greatest of the revolutionary upheavals that have shaped so much of the history of the past two centuries were episodes in the history of faith – moments in the long dissolution of Christianity and the rise of modern political religion. The world in…