Bland Fanatics
Liberals, The West, and the Afterlives of Empire

If I had to pick a contemporary writer whose work has been most intellectually helpful to me Pankaj Mishra would be at the top of the list. This book is a collection of his essays over the past decade on the subject of global liberalism, criticism of which happens to be the subtext of much of his wr......more

An excellent first book of 2022! I've been reading a bit about American liberalism lately (in the works of Chris Hedges and Thomas Frank), but this is the first book I've read to critique that august institution from the perspective of the global south. And as much as I admire the service that Hedges......more

A rare non-fiction book I could not put down, "Bland Fanatics" takes its title from a Reinhold Niebuhr quote, wherein he discusses the exponents of modern liberalism who exhort what they peddle--namely Western democracy--as the final form and telos of human society. In discussing the backslapping An......more

This is a collection of sixteen essays published over a recent twelve year period (2008-2020) by an Indian-British writer named Pankaj Mishra. Mishra was not a familiar figure to me, though many of his ilk are quite familiar. They often frequent elite faculty lounges or exclusive intellectual or art......more

This collection of articles gives a highly articulate series of critiques on “liberalism” and its many contradictions, from an enormously well-read columnist. Mishra considers the global legacy of liberalism as a force for personal liberty, free-market fundamentalism, crass materialism, crusades for......more