Bland Fanatics has its pleasures ... Every sentence is assembled with meticulous thought. The words stand at attention, fixed in place by an unsparing moral gravity ... [Mishra's] careful discipline shows him to stand clear of the crisis of the Anglo intellectual that he narrates.
[Bland Fanatics] lays out the case in essays dating back to 2008. Reading them now, while trapped in an apartment surrounded by strategic reserves of canned food and toilet paper, it’s hard not to think: You know, he might have had a point.
With chapters telling different aspects of this story across numerous regions and historical eras, Mishra supplies readers with material to construct an alternative to the liberal Grand Narrative ... There’s enough truth in Mishra’s alternative history for it to stand as a useful corrective to the Grand Narrative that still maintains a firm grip on the imagination of many in the West. But that doesn’t mean Mishra’s counternarrative is anything close to sufficient ... Mishra detests liberalism and capitalism. That much is obvious from his unremittingly polemical prose. What is much less clear is what, specifically, he thinks would be preferable ... As a goad to liberal self-criticism, Mishra is well worth reading. But when it comes to a positive program, he has little to offer beyond airy talk of the need for greater justice and equality.
Bland Fanatics is a collection of essays published over that time that range from excoriations of Niall Ferguson and Salman Rushdie, to a study of US president Woodrow Wilson’s hypocrisy over his support for national self-determination, to an unpacking of the irrationality of western attitudes to Islam. It was a provocative thesis, exhilarating in parts but infuriating, too, in its flattening of historical nuance ... What is missing in Bland Fanatics is any attempt to analyse liberalism in the round ... There is much that is valuable in Mishra’s writings, opening up as they do new perspectives in the debate about liberalism and about the relationship between the west and the global south. It’s a pity that there is also much that obscures even as it illuminates.
Bland Fanatics points to the tragic irony in how the very same cheerleaders of Western civilisation may have in fact engineered their own decline ... Mishra’s analysis of Anglo-American barbarism is cutting ...
The greatest contribution of Mishra’s work is its indefatigable insistence that places long considered marginal belong in the foreground of modern political history. He isn’t just interested in righting the balance between the West and the rest; he questions whether one can even separate the two. What distinguishes Mishra’s energetic and often pugilistic writing is not necessarily the point of its attack—the withering, if familiar, broadsides against the callous actions of Western powers and postcolonial states—but rather its angle. Mishra sees the present as a historian; the tremors on the surface reveal deep currents ... what Mishra’s essays lack in granularity they make up in vigor and scope. He challenges his readers to broaden their frames of reference, to see their worlds as inextricable from those of others. No other writer in the English language can offer such a bracing, global understanding of the specious conceits of our times.
Mishra’s best essays treat figures in literature, from Salman Rushdie to Alexander Herzen, through whose work and reception he unveils, in another way, the perspectives we miss as long as the narrative of Western liberalism persists. The essays often leave readers with these welcome outlooks. Considering the collection as a whole, readers may wonder less about the evidence of neo-liberalism—which is ample enough—than the reasons behind it. The blandness of the neoliberal fanatics, whose views often warrant less analytical attention than given, at times overshadows the real merit of the essays, which bring into focus the blindness that persists in this long-discussed but still ubiquitous belief in the unmitigated benefits of free-market capital ... A sometimes dense, sometimes proactive collection of essays on current political ideologies. An optional purchase.
