The great majority of books on politics published in the past two years have, in one way or another, dealt with a single topic: the attack on expertise and established institutions by populists in America and Europe. Donald Trump, Brexit, Eastern European nationalism: Each is an expression of contempt for institutions thought by educated elites to be authoritative, even sacred—the news media, the universities, the scientific community, foreign-policy establishments, transnational organizations. Conservative commentators pin the blame on the elites for their arrogance and dishonesty; liberals blame Trump voters and European nationalists for their stupidity and backwardness. There is a little crossover—but only a little: David Goodhart's “The Road to Somewhere” (2017) is a powerful critique of liberal privilege from a writer of the left.
In “Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason” (Norton, 252 pages, $27.95),William Davies, a political economist at the University of London, attempts to diagnose our present ills by reaching back four centuries to the work of René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes and the development of the modern rationalist outlook. “The modern world was founded upon two fundamental distinctions,” Mr. Davies writes, “both inaugurated in the mid-seventeenth century: between mind and body, and between war and peace.” In Mr. Davies's telling, the rise of Freudian outlooks in the 19th century blurred the distinction between mind and body, making it more difficult for the modern citizen to think in dispassionate, rational ways about society and politics; new forms of warfare in the early 20th century melded war and peace, making citizens of democracies increasingly unsure what the differences between wartime and peacetime even are. Finding themselves in states of “nervousness,” many citizens of Western democracies turn to various forms of nationalism, “through which feelings of meaning and personal control can be briefly achieved.”
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