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Pankaj Mishra’s insights are often valuable, but these essays on the arrogance of the west omit some key arguments
“What is it,” the Austro-Hungarian novelist Joseph Roth asked rhetorically in 1927, in a preface to his book The Wandering Jews, “that allows European states to go spreading civilisation and ethics in foreign parts but not at home?” Forty years later, as American cities burned while American bombs rained down on Vietnam, James Baldwin made a similar point, though reversing Roth’s formulation. “A racist society,” he wrote, “can’t but fight a racist war – this is the bitter truth. The assumptions acted on at home are also acted on abroad.”
The relationship between the internal and the external policies of western liberal democracies lies also at the heart of Pankaj Mishra’s work. The Indian-born novelist and essayist has, over the past decade, become an important and illuminating critic of liberalism and globalisation. Continue reading...