Since the publication of his seminal Straw Dogs (2002), John Gray – a New Statesman reviewer and essayist – has defended a distinctive, and pleasingly subversive, philosophy of humans and their history. It is difficult to encapsulate this philosophy in a single sentence, let alone a word, but anti-directionalism comes close.
Anti-directionalism is a multifaceted view. One form it takes is scepticism about historical progress. The idea that history has a direction, and that one can be on the right or wrong side of it, is a conceit shared by those on the political left and right. Inspiration for the left was provided by Hegel, who thought history came to an end when he added the full stop to the final sentence of his book, The Phenomenology of Spirit: “History is the process whereby the spirit discovers itself and its own concept.” This is what Hegel, modestly, thought he had achieved. Marx and his followers took up this idea, recasting it in materialist form, and understanding the end of history as the emergence of a perfect – ie communist – society. On the right, Francis Fukuyama adopted a similar approach, except he took the most perfect form of society to be modern liberal democracy. History, it must be said, has not been kind to these declarations of its demise.
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