John Gray

(England, 1948) is a political scientist and a philosopher. In his work he is pessimistic about the future. Thus in Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia he slashes the 'neoconservative project' which, through invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan, tries to estasblish a new world order: a dangerous cocktail of apocalyptic religion and utopias, inspired by the Enlightenment. In Strawdogs, Thoughts on Humans and other Animals he argues that people are strawdogs, who will cause their own ruin by new technologies and by exhausting the earth. In Al Qaida and What it Means to be Modern Gray warns that wars can be more dangerous than ever by the lethal mix of ethnic and religious enmity, the growth of the world population, growing scarcity and continuing industrialisation in the non-Western world. Gray was a professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics. He publishes in The Guardian, New Statesman and The Times Literary Supplement.