6 POST-APOCALYPSE
1. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, London, J. M. Dent, 1914, Chapter 5, p. 20.
2. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1953, p.317.
3. For an analysis of Spinoza as a decisive thinker of the early modern Enlightenment, see Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001.
4. I discuss Spinoza in my ‘Reply to Critics’ in John Horton and Glen Newey (eds.), The Political Theory of John Gray, London, Routledge, 2006. For an illuminating recent interpretation of Spinoza’s philosophy, see Stuart Hampshire, Spinoza and Spinozism, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2005.
5. See Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, London, Bantam, 2006, and Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, London, Allen Lane, 2006.
6. I leave aside atheism in Islamic cultures, though the same analysis applies.
7. Tzvetan Todorov, Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 2003, pp. 236–7.
8. Hedley Bull, The Control of the Arms Race, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1961, p. 212.
9. For canonical statements of the realist position, see Hans J. Morgenthau, Scientific Man versus Power Politics, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1974; Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, London, Continuum, 2005; Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002; and Martin Wright, Power Politics, London, Continuum, 1995.
10. A
text of Kennan’s telegram setting out the policy of containment can
be read at www.learner.org/channel/workshops/primarysources/coldwar/docs/
tele.html
11. Isaiah Berlin, Political Ideas in the Romantic Age, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 2006, pp. 54–5.
12. For authoritative analyses of the scale and speed of climate shift, see James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia, London, Allen Lane, 2006; Fred Pearce, The Last Generation: How Nature Will Take Her Revenge for Climate Change, London, Transworld Publishers, 2006; and Jim Hansen, ‘The threat to the planet’, New York Review of Books, vol. 53, no. 12, 13 July 2006. A seminal discussion of global oil peaking can be found in C. J. Campbell, The Coming Oil Crisis, Brentwood, Essex, Multi-Science Publishing Company, 1997. An authoritative analysis of the peaking of oil reserves in Saudi Arabia can be found in Matthew R. Simmons, Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the Global Economy, London, Wiley, 2005.
13. The report, authored by Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, can be downloaded at http://www.environmentaldefense.org/3566–AbruptClimateChange.pdf
14. For an argument in favour of zero-emission fossil fuels as a sustainable alternative, see Mark Jaccard, Sustainable Fossil Fuels: The Unusual Suspect in the Search for Clean and Enduring Energy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005.
15. See Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia, p. 154.
16. Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, London, Allen Lane, 2005, p.521.
17. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1967, p.123.
18. Marcel Proust, The Way by Swann’s, London, Allen Lane, 2002, p. 47.
19. Adam Phillips, Side Effects, London, Hamish Hamilton, 2006, p. 99.
20. I develop the idea of modus vivendi more fully in Two Faces of Liberalism, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2000, Chapter 4.