Yet for a book that claims to be aimed at "modern thought", it draws its examples mainly from hearsay, inflammatory newspaper articles and received opinion.įor a book that rightly praises the Enlightenment, and seeks to maintain its legacy, it veers a long way from its values. Pascal Bruckner's The Tyranny of Guilt is a bombastic, badly annotated and ill-supported book of opinion and rhetoric that does little to advance or clarify any debate on these issues.īruckner argues that from "existentialism to deconstructionism, all of modern thought can be reduced to a mechanical denunciation of the West, emphasising the latter's hypocrisy, violence and abomination". It ought to be handled delicately and with care, especially in a book from a scholarly press, eschewing undue and unnecessary polemic and seeking detail, evidence and fine distinctions to make its case. The relationship between "the West" (or what used to be called the First World) and "the Rest", including the heterogeneous internal populations of Europe, is a complex matter of the very utmost importance.
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