John Gray: ‘Americanism’ and the Perversion of Post‐liberalism

Abstract This article will make the case for John Gray's inclusion in the canon of post‐liberals despite his protests to the contrary, and will argue that his peculiar post‐liberalism is important for its challenges to the dominance of liberalism as both a political culture and way of theorising the ends of politics based on the model of the American constitutional culture. Gray's post‐liberalism, developed over a number of decades, amounts to a rejection of the error of ‘Americanism’. The consequences of this dominance have perverted the ambitions of post‐liberalism as a theory and corrupted the rethinking of the left and right in British politics through the importing of alien debates. The paper argues that reincorporating Gray's voice saves the post‐liberal project from itself and opens an alternative renewal of British political thinking, as the normativity of American legal liberalism becomes ever more difficult to justify.