Bland Fanatics Liberals, Race, and Empire

Pankaj Mishra — 2020

A wide-ranging, controversial collection of critical essays on the political mania plaguing the West by one of the most important public intellectuals of our time. Decades of violence and chaos have produced a political and intellectual hysteria ranging from imperial atavism to paranoia about an Islamic threat to Western civilization that has affected even the most liberal of American and British writers. In Bland Fanatics, Pankaj Mishra examines this hysteria and its fantasists, taking on its arguments and the atmosphere in which it has festered and become influential. In essays that grapple with colonialism, human rights, and the doubling down of liberalism against a background of faltering economies and weakening Anglo-American hegemony, Mishra confronts writers from Jordan Peterson to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Featuring a newly written introduction, these essays provide a vantage point from which to look seriously at the current crisis.

Reviews

Nicholas Hanemann@nick_h

Dec 20, 2021

Review has been expanded in response to Michael's criticism, with the original review posted below the updated one here (10/26/20): Despite Mishra's skill at identifying points of rupture in cultural conceptions of empire, this collection leaves a lot to be desired. Mishra did an absolutely stellar job in "Age of Anger" in portraying extremism as an outgrowth of the foreclosure of possibility, based in his reading of the conflict between Rousseau and Voltaire over the project of "The Enlightenment". That volume has left a lasting impression on my thought regarding rhetoric around "civilization" and "modernization", and has made Rousseau a figure of continued interest for me since then. Even in "From the Ruins of Empire", which I thought was a weaker book due to the prose being less polished and the arguments being less provocative than in "Age of Anger", did a great job tying together the burgeoning anticolonial movements at the turn of the 20th century, with his point of ingress being the Japanese defeat of Russia during the Battle of Tsushima. The issue with this volume is tied directly to the fact that it doesn't set out a cohesive long-form argument towards a new way of considering the world, but rather just collects his writings for publications such as the London Review of Books and The Guardian over the past decade. Some of them are very good, such as the reviews for Erez Manela's "The Wilsonian Moment" (which ties into his writing in "From the Ruins of Empire"), Mark Greif's "The Age of the Crisis of Man", and Aileen Kelly's "The Discovery of Chance". The issue is that the other essays are more miss than hit for me, since it's not exactly a revelation that Niall Ferguson will jump at the chance to justify British Imperialism, nor that Jordan Peterson is heavily suspect for his implicit alignment with fascist ideology (particularly important is his insistence on biological determinism, which Mishra fails to highlight). All in all, I feel like "Bland Fanatics" doesn't amount to anything more than the sum of its parts, which is disappointing from a writer of Mishra's talent. It wasn't a "bad" book, just underwhelming. Original review (10/21/20): Despite Mishra's skill at identifying points of rupture in cultural conceptions of empire, this collection leaves a lot to be desired.