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Gray's Progress: From Liberalisms to Enlightenment's Wake

I HAVE KNOWN JOHN Gray for quite a few years, and have long admired his work. We were among the (very few) political theorists in the U.K. who, in the early 1970s, had an interest in the work of Hayek, and more generally in issues relating to classical liberalism. During the 1980s, he emerged as the most powerful and effective theorist of classical liberalism in the U.K., notably through his reinterpretations of John Stuart Mill in Mill on Liberty (1983a), his Hayek and Liberty (1984), and his overview and critical assessment of the liberal tradition, Liberalism (1986). We had, over the years, various discussions about Hayek and liberalism—as Gray mentions in his Hayek on Liberty—and in that connection we shared many intellectual concerns; notably, with problems about how classical liberalism related to particular traditional cultures, and about the value of lives that did not involve autonomy in any significant sense. Our discussions about these and related matters were occasional, and typically by telephone or at Liberty Fund conferences. In the course of one of these conversations, I suggested to Gray that he might consider collecting some of his essays on liberalism into a volume, as he kindly