Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race, and Empire

by Pankaj Mishra

Overview

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.

In America and in England, faltering economies at home and failed wars abroad have generated a political and intellectual hysteria. It is a derangement manifested in a number of ways: nostalgia for imperialism, xenophobic paranoia, and denunciations of an allegedly intolerant left. These symptoms can be found even among the most informed of Anglo-America.

In Bland Fanatics, Pankaj Mishra examines the politics and culture of this hysteria, challenging the dominant establishment discourses of our times. In essays that grapple with the meaning and content of Anglo-American liberalism and its relations with colonialism, the global South, Islam, and “humanitarian” war, Mishra confronts writers such as Jordan Peterson, Niall Ferguson, and Salman Rushdie. He describes the doubling down of an intelligentsia against 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 provide a vantage point from which to understand the current crisis and its deep origins.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250800183
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	10/05/2021
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	658,485
Product dimensions:	4.80(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Pankaj Mishra is the author of From the Ruins of Empire, Age of Anger, and several other books. He is a columnist at Bloomberg View and writes regularly for The Guardian, the London Review of Books, and The New Yorker. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he lives in London.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 Watch This Man 16

2 The Culture of Fear 32

3 The Religion of Whiteness 45

4 The Personal as Political 61

5 The Man of Fourteen Points 72

6 Bland Fanatics 87

7 The Age of the Crisis of Man 102

8 Free Markets and Social Darwinism in Mumbai 114

9 The Lure of Fascist Mysticism 121

10 What Is Great About Ourselves 128

11 Why Do White People Like What I Write? 141

12 The Mask It Wears 158

13 The Final Religion 173

14 Bumbling Chumocrats 181

15 The Economist and Liberalism 186

16 England's Last Roar 200

Index 212

Editorial Reviews

06/29/2020

In this insightful, persuasive essay collection, London Review of Books contributor Mishra (The Age of Anger) blames contradictions inherent within liberalism for recent social and political upheavals in Europe and the U.S. In pieces written between 2008 and 2020 and covering events including the Iraq War, Brexit, and the election of Donald Trump, Mishra faults Western leaders for continuing to claim that “liberalism is the only thing that can save civilization from chaos,” even as their policies bring about “devastation” abroad and “terrorism” at home. He argues that “liberalism’s complicity in Western imperialism” has been obvious for decades to intellectuals in exploited African and Asian countries, and laments the popularity of Niall Ferguson, Jordan Peterson, and other “unnerved” Western elites who “conflate their own relative diminution with a more general disintegration.” Well-informed reviews of books by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Mark Greif, and Samuel Moyn identify some lights in an otherwise dim intellectual landscape, though Mishra stops short of advancing an alternative political and cultural ideology. Still, this erudite and dryly witty collection will help readers to make sense of the current age of discontent. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

The greatest contribution of Mishra’s work is its indefatigable insistence that places long considered marginal belong in the foreground of modern political history . . . No other writer in the English language can offer such a bracing, global understanding of the specious conceits of our times.”
—Kanishk Tharoor, The New Republic

“Well before Brexit, Trump, or COVID-19, [Mishra] sounded the siren. Anglophone leaders, inhabiting a hall of mirrors, were becoming dangerously detached from the actual world. The problem was not partisan but general, and it was reaching a crisis. Mishra has been beating this drum for more than a decade . . . Reading Bland Fanatics now, while trapped in an apartment surrounded by strategic reserves of canned food and toilet paper, it’s hard not to think: You know, he might have had a point.”
—Daniel Immerwahr, Foreign Policy

“Mishra has reached the point where his summary judgments can be treated as authoritative by a Western audience. Yet the basis of those judgments was established long before his name began to carry weight. Over the course of an exceptional career, he has continually picked at the knot joining ambitious fancies in the global center to the peripheral, bloody business that enables them—the dialectic of great expectations.”
—Frank Guan, Bookforum

“A useful corrective to the Grand Narrative that still maintains a firm grip on the imagination of many in the West . . . As a goad to liberal self-criticism, Mishra is well worth reading.”
—Damon Linker, New York Times

“Mishra excels at calling out intellectual vapidities, what he calls “pseudo-scholarship” . . . This is a writer with a clearer sense of what he is up against, who veers into the personal only to draw a larger political point. In a post-truth world, you read Mishra to clear the air, to make sense of our bewildering moment.”
—Abhrajyoti Chakraborty, The Guardian

“A dazzling display of what close analysis and precise polemic can achieve . . . this collection does a whole lot more than simply kick against the pricks. It’s an extraordinarily powerful argument, by a writer of powerful and perhaps even remorseless conviction, for the case that we need first to rethink our past in order to reshape our future. And never more so than in the times of present stress.”
—Mark Rappolt, Art Review

“Bland Fanatics points to the tragic irony in how the very same cheerleaders of Western civilisation may have in fact engineered their own decline . . . Mishra has managed to break beyond the burden of representation and has spent the past few years examining the politicians, pundits, and ‘thought leaders’ who champion a romantic vision of Western civilization.”
—Rebecca Liu, The White Review

“This erudite and dryly witty collection will help readers to make sense of the current age of discontent.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Mishra offers a sharp rebuke of Western neoliberalism. In this wide-ranging and eviscerating collection of essays, Mishra pillories the imperialistic dogmas that are still alive and well and having a ruinous impact on domestic and foreign policy. Tactics once exclusively used on colonial populations have been brought home and the West’s relationship with the global south is still dictated by imperialist interventionism and massive resource transfer."
—Powell's Books Best Nonfiction of 2020

From the Publisher

10/23/2020

Mishra's latest work, after Age of Anger, is a collection of essays written between 2009 and 2018 that detail how the American cultural belief in free-market liberalism as the achievement of Western civilization endures, despite evidence that the advantages of unregulated markets are hardly clear. Some pieces focus on how Cold War narratives about American exceptionalism remain at the heart of mainstream historical and political interpretations of our world, while others treat the way entrenched imperialist beliefs are bolstered by racism and cultural bias. Mishra's best essays treat figures in literature, from Salman Rushdie to Alexander Herzen, through whose work and reception he unveils, in another way, the perspectives we miss as long as the narrative of Western liberalism persists. The essays often leave readers with these welcome outlooks. Considering the collection as a whole, readers may wonder less about the evidence of neo-liberalism—which is ample enough—than the reasons behind it. The blandness of the neoliberal fanatics, whose views often warrant less analytical attention than given, at times overshadows the real merit of the essays, which bring into focus the blindness that persists in this long-discussed but still ubiquitous belief in the unmitigated benefits of free-market capital. VERDICT A sometimes dense, sometimes proactive collection of essays on current political ideologies. An optional purchase.—Jennifer Flaherty, Univ. of California, Berkeley

Library Journal