The Islamist, by Ed Husain
Critiques of Hizb ut-Tahrir focus less on its dodgy politics than on its intellectualism. But what’s wrong with a devotion to the debate of ideas? Continue reading “In defence of ‘radicalisation’”
Category: Book reviews
The Threat to Reason: How the Enlightenment was hijacked and how we can reclaim it, by Dan Hind (Verso 2007)
The politics of belief in the 21st century
Why? What happens when people give reasons… and why, by Charles Tilly (Princeton University Press 2006)
Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain, by Stefan Collini (Oxford University Press 2006) Continue reading “Intellectuals: alive and well and going nowhere”
In a documentary made a couple of years before his death, the celebrated philosopher Jacques Derrida was asked whether he had read all the books in his library. Continue reading “Thinking outside the text”
What Good Are the Arts?, by John Carey (Faber 2005)
In Identity, a short book based on an email exchange between Zygmunt Bauman and Italian journalist Benedetto Vecchi, the sociologist discusses the question of identity in the context of what he calls ‘liquid modernity’. Bauman’s thesis, set out in his book of that name (2000), is that we have moved from a solid to a fluid phase of modernity, in which nothing keeps its shape, and social forms are constantly changing at great speed, radically transforming the experience of being human.
Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy, by Susan Neiman, Princeton University Press 2003 Continue reading “Why is life so unfair?”
Dolan Cummings 