Las dos caras del liberalismo

In this book, John Gray argues that liberal thought has always harbored two incompatible philosophies. For one of them, liberalism is a theory of a universal rational consensus, which allows to achieve the best way of life for all humanity. For the other, said liberalism is the project of searching for the terms of peaceful coexistence between different regimes and ways of life. According to the author, rational consensus liberalism is anachronistic at a time when, in most late modern societies, diverse ways of life that extol different goods and virtues coexist, and in which many people ascribe to more than one of those ways of life. For Gray, the future of liberalism lies in a project of modus vivendi, first outlined in the writings of Thomas Hobbes. In the course of his argument, Gray offers a new interpretation of liberal tolerance and argues that the pluralism of values ??in the field of ethics can underpin a revised conception of universal human rights.