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Pankaj Mishra’s is a strong and occasionally angry voice from the resurgent left. Deeply anchored in western history and political philosophy, he robustly challenges the West’s self-serving mythologies of progress and achievement founded on liberal values, and exposes the rampant racism, intolerance and violence that have defined its history over the past two centuries.
This book, a collection of 16 essays, draws its title from an observation of American theologian and political commentator, Reinhold Niebuhr, who, in 1957, spoke of the “bland fanatics of western civilisation” who see “the highly contingent achievements of our culture as the final form and
