Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race, and Empire

A large-ranging, controversial assortment of important essays on the political mania plaguing the West by one of the necessary public intellectuals of our time.

In America and in England, faltering economies at residence and failed wars overseas have generated a political and mental hysteria. It’s a derangement manifested in quite a few methods: nostalgia for imperialism, xenophobic paranoia, and denunciations of an allegedly illiberal left. These signs might be discovered even among the many most knowledgeable of Anglo-America.

In Bland Fanatics, Pankaj Mishra examines the politics and tradition of this hysteria, difficult the dominant institution discourses of our instances. In essays that grapple with the that means and content material of Anglo-American liberalism and its relations with colonialism, the worldwide South, Islam, and “humanitarian” warfare, Mishra confronts writers resembling Jordan Peterson, Niall Ferguson, and Salman Rushdie. He describes the doubling down of an intelligentsia towards a background of weakening Anglo-American hegemony, and he explores the commitments of Ta-Nehisi Coates and the ideological determinations of The Economist. These essays present a vantage level from which to grasp the present disaster and its deep origins.