For argument’s sake let’s grant that secular, liberal politics is utopian in that it rests on a set of principles that may never be achieved in totality for any country at any point of time. But, really, so what? It is these principles that have given such things as universal suffrage, rule of law, institutional accountability, and abolition of absolute monarchy, slave labour, segregation and untouchability, to name but a few things not an inconsiderable number of people in not a few countries now take for granted. Yes, nowhere is it perfect. But, wow, Professor Gray are you telling us all of this and more really means nothing? There’s a difference between madmen in power who ask for total submission in the name of some utopia — Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot — and relatively decent politicians working within a liberal constitutional framework. I am better off, as a citizen in a political context, than a guy in Somalia and Professor Gray, in a Western liberal democracy, is probably better off than I am. No amount of philosophy can change that fact.

Two more points. First, Gray never makes it clear when he dismisses ‘progress’ whether he does or doesn’t include material advances. Liberal politics is not separable from material progress.

Second, it is clear less than halfway through the book that Gray thinks George Bush is nuts. That’s his view, and he will find these days a large number of people on his side. But most of those other people, including those who can get books published, won’t use their anger about the Iraq war to construct an intellectual Ponzi scheme. The Iraq war was not an inevitable outcome of modern politics. It was a war of choice by a particular US administration and most likely it was informed as much by let’s-export-democracy zeal as by oil realpolitik. Not even John Gray can claim there’s anything utopian about oil politics.