With the advantage of hindsight, four recent books bring to bear diverse perspectives on the West’s current populist moment. Taken together, they help us to understand what that moment is and how it arrived, while reminding us that history is contingent, not inevitable.
- Heinrich Geiselberger (Editor), The Great Regression, Polity, 2017
- Mark Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reason, New York Review of Books, 2016
- Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present, Penguin, 2017
- Jan-Werner Mueller, What is Populism?, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016
BERLIN – How can we make sense of a world that, over the past decade, has defied the widespread assumption among policymakers and intellectuals that an immutable global order, however imperfect, had emerged in the aftermath of the Cold War? The four books under review represent four approaches to answering that question. But all of them begin from the premise that answering it persuasively requires understanding the West’s loss of unity and coherence. And each, despite bringing to bear distinct perspectives, wrestles with three common issues at the center of the West’s current political malaise.
BERLIN – How can we make sense of a world that, over the past decade, has defied the widespread assumption among policymakers and intellectuals that an immutable global order, however imperfect, had emerged in the aftermath of the Cold War? The four books under review represent four approaches to answering that question. But all of them begin from the premise that answering it persuasively requires understanding the West’s loss of unity and coherence. And each, despite bringing to bear distinct perspectives, wrestles with three common issues at the center of the West’s current political malaise.