[3] Gray has written several influential books, including False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (1998), which argues that free market globalisation is an unstable Enlightenment project currently in the process of disintegration; Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002), which attacks philosophical humanism, a worldview which Gray sees as originating in religions; and Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007), a critique of utopian thinking in the modern world.

Gray sees volition, and hence morality, as an illusion, and portrays humanity as a ravenous species engaged in wiping out other forms of life.

He attended South Shields Grammar-Technical School for Boys from 1959 until 1967,[5] then studied at Exeter College, Oxford, reading philosophy, politics and economics (PPE), completing his B.A., M.Phil.

Defunct Among philosophers, he is known for a thoroughgoing rejection of Rawlsianism[further explanation needed] and for exploration of the uneasy relationship between value pluralism and liberalism in the work of Isaiah Berlin.

[9] More recently, he has criticised neoliberalism, the global free market and some of the central currents in Western thinking, such as humanism, while moving towards aspects of green thought, drawing on the Gaia theory of James Lovelock.

[10] He identifies the Enlightenment as the point at which the Christian doctrine of salvation was taken over by secular idealism and became a political religion with universal emancipation as its aim.

In Gray's view, many contemporary liberal theorists would fall into this category, for instance John Rawls and Karl Popper.

[citation needed] Gray's work has been praised by, amongst others, the novelists J. G. Ballard, Will Self and John Banville, the theologian Don Cupitt, the journalist Bryan Appleyard, the political scientist David Runciman, historian and cultural critic Morris Berman, investor and philanthropist George Soros, the environmental scientist James Lovelock and the author Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

"[14][23] In 2002 Straw Dogs was named a book of the year by J. G. Ballard in The Daily Telegraph; by George Walden in The Sunday Telegraph; by Will Self, Joan Bakewell, Jason Cowley and David Marquand in the New Statesman; by Andrew Marr in The Observer; by Jim Crace in The Times; by Hugh Lawson Tancred in The Spectator; by Richard Holloway in the Glasgow Herald; and by Sue Cook in The Sunday Express.

[citation needed] Nassim Nicholas Taleb has written that John Gray is the modern thinker for whom he has the most respect, calling him "prophetic".

"[26] Postel also claimed that too much of Straw Dogs rested on "blanket assertion", and criticised Gray's use of the term "plague of people" as an outdated "neo-Malthusian persiflage about overpopulation".

In his 2004 book, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World, the British journalist, writer and broadcaster, Francis Wheen, wrote:"Conservatives, Marxists, post-modernists and pre-modernists have queued up to take a kick at the bruised ideas of the eighteenth century.

The most vicious of these boot-boys is John Gray, professor of European thought at the London School of Economics, who has published dozens of increasingly apocalyptic books and articles on the need to end the Enlightenment project forthwith.