‘Islamophobia’ is a term that has existed since the nineteenth century. But in recent decades, argues Pascal Bruckner in his controversial new book, it has become a weapon used to silence criticism of Islam. The term allows those who brandish it in the name of Islam to ‘freeze’ the latter, making reform difficult. Whereas Christianity and Judaism have been rejuvenated over the centuries by external criticism, Islam has been shielded from critical examination and has remained impervious to ...

Fascism, communism, genocide, slavery, racism, imperialism--the West has no shortage of reasons for guilt. And, indeed, since the Holocaust and the end of World War II, Europeans in particular have been consumed by remorse. But Pascal Bruckner argues that guilt has now gone too far. It has become a pathology, and even an obstacle to fighting today's atrocities. Bruckner, one of France's leading writers and public intellectuals, argues that obsessive guilt has obscured important realities. ...

In the West today, suffering has become a new sacred cow. Once a common feature of the human condition, it is now a special trait you can use to impress your contemporaries. It provides you with a borrowed identity, transforming you into an exceptional being who can show off on the public stage at little cost. Everyone flaunts their certificate of affliction, positioning themselves above their peers. Even those who are well-off and powerful seek to find a place in the aristocracy of the ma...

Since the beginning of the 21st century, global warming, terrorism, the pandemic and now the war in Ukraine have created a widespread feeling that the world is an increasingly dangerous place. In response to this situation, it is understandable that many people are inclined to retreat to the safety of their home – the last refuge and safeguard against the savagery of the outside world. But the home is not just a shelter: it is a space that supplants and replaces the world, a wired cocoon t...

The planet is sick. Human beings are guilty of damaging it. We have to pay. Today, that is the orthodoxy throughout the Western world. Distrust of progress and science, calls for individual and collective self-sacrifice to ‘save the planet’ and cultivation of fear: behind the carbon commissars, a dangerous and counterproductive ecological catastrophism is gaining ground.Modern society’s susceptibility to this kind of thinking derives from what Bruckner calls “the seductive attracti...

Pascal Bruckner's memoir reads like a novel, a Bildungsroman which charts his journey from pious Catholic child to leading philosopher and writer on French culture.The key figure in Bruckner's life is his father, a virulent anti-Semite, who voluntarily went to work in Germany during the Second World War. He is a violent man who beats his wife. The young Bruckner soon reacts against his father and his revenge is to become his polar opposite, even to the point of being happy to be cal...

Leon shrinks every time he fathers a child with his Amazonian wife until he is the size of a thimble and at the mercy of his own children and the cat.

The diminutive Leon is the envy of all Paris when he becomes engaged to the successful stomatologist and ravishing 6ft beauty Solange, who leaves no man unstirred - including the priest who weds them. The dutiful husband happily ignores jealous remarks about the union of 'giraffe and zebra' as he sires one beautiful baby after another. But as his domestic bliss with Solange continues and their brood grows, Leon's body begins to shrink - with the exception of one vital organ - until the med...

Today we like to think that marriage is a free choice based on love: that we freely choose whom to marry and that we do so, not so much for survival or social advantage, but for love. The invention of marriage for love inverted the old relationship between love and marriage. In the past, marriage was sacred, and love, if it existed at all, was a consequence of marriage; today, love is sacred and marriage is secondary. But now marriage appears to be becoming increasingly superfluous. For th...

There is one fundamental thing that has changed in our societies since 1950: life has got longer. Over the last few generations, 20 or 30 years have been added to the duration of our lives. But after the age of 50, human beings experience a kind of suspension: no longer young, not really old, they are, as it were, weightless. It is a reprieve that leaves life open like a swinging door. The increase in life expectancy is a tremendous step forward that upsets everything: relations between ge...

Money is an evil that does good, and a good that does evil. It inspires hymns to the prosperity it enables, manifestos about the poor it leaves behind, and diatribes for its corrosion of morality. In The Wisdom of Money, one of the world’s great essayists guides us through the rich commentary that money has generated since ancient times—both the passions and the resentments—as he builds an unfashionable defense of the worldly wisdom of the bourgeoisie.Bruckner begins with ...

A provocative reflection on the dilemmas of modern loveThe sexual revolution is justly celebrated for the freedoms it brought—birth control, the decriminalization of abortion, the liberalization of divorce, greater equality between the sexes, women's massive entry into the workforce, and more tolerance of homosexuality. But as Pascal Bruckner, one of France's leading writers, argues in this lively and provocative reflection on the contradictions of modern love, our...