The Liberal Platitudes of Michael Ignatieff

Raymond Williams once witheringly described Christopher Caudwell, an English Marxist critic who died fighting in the Spanish Civil War, as “not even specific enough to be wrong”. Reading Michael Ignatieff’s On Consolation, the phrase kept coming to mind, or rather my botched, inferior version of it: “not specific enough to be true”. This is only partly true of On Consolation, meaning not somewhat true throughout, but entirely true of parts of the book. A chronological suite of “portraits of particular men and women in history struggling to find consolation” – Western men and women (mostly men), from Job to Boethius, Montaigne to Abraham Lincoln, Marx to Primo Levi – On Consolation has two rhetorical modes: sprightly biographical narrative (thankfully predominant) and sententious philosophising, particulars and platitudes.