Terry Eagleton's Blog

Hip-hop, Bowie and I Love Dick are among the cultural artefacts covered in this splendidly readable survey

For the past half-century, postmodernist thinkers have been trying to discredit truth, identity and reality. Identity is a straitjacket, and truth is just some middle-aged academic’s opinion. As for reality, it has become as obsolete as dressing for dinner. Objectivity is a myth in the service of the ruling powers. If only we could shed these illusions, we could revel in a world of infinite possibility. Instead of waking up to the same tedious old self each morning, we could flit from one identity to another as easily as David Bowie. The final liberation is that anything can mean anything else. Once you kick away fixed meanings and firm foundations, you are free to enjoy yourself. Postmodernism is meant to be fun, even if a current of nihilism runs steadily beneath it. As Stuart Jeffries suggests in this splendidly readable survey, there is something vacuous at the heart of its exuberance.

Even so, postmodernism is intended to be subversive. Since civilisation works by order and authority, challenging these things is bound to seem disruptive. The trouble is that neoliberalism challenges them too. Nothing is more fluid and flexible than the marketplace. Nobody on Wall Street believes in absolute truth. The true anarchists are the free marketeers. So is postmodernism a critique of the status quo or a capitulation to it?

Christ without the supernatural ... reflections on a divisive preacher who speaks to our times but was no personal therapist

Not all Christians believe in God. Back in the 1960s, a cult of so-called religionless Christianity briefly thrived, along with people who called themselves Christian atheists. This meant that they accepted the moral teachings of Jesus, but rejected what they saw as the theological baggage with which he had been lumbered.

Christian atheism leaves Jesus as a dispenser of moral maxims, in a long tradition from Confucius to Billy Graham. Yet as Julian Baggini recognises, not much of what he said was original. The injunction to love your neighbour as yourself goes back to the Old Testament. Jesus was a Jewish prophet who taught that the kingdom of justice and comradeship was at hand, and that a sign of its arrival would be the poor coming to power and the rich being sent away.

Baggini highlights how Jesus had almost nothing to say about sex, even though his followers can talk of little else

At times Baggini makes Jesus sound like a modern therapist, concerned with 'personal growth' and 'moral health'

The pragmatist philosopher becomes exemplary of the power of positive thinking in this flawed study, full of cracker-barrel wisdom

From Plato to Heidegger, philosophers have taken a dim view of the common people. That, however, began to change when the common people turned into a mass-reading public hungry for a little philosophy, under the delusion that the subject has something interesting to say about the meaning of life. A number of pop philosophers emerged to meet this demand, some of them admirable such as Simon Blackburn, others more like the slightly sozzled character you bump into in a bar who thinks the stars spell out some momentous statement. The line between the pop and the pub philosopher is easy to cross.

One way of making things easier on your audience is to avoid a philosopher’s ideas and talk about his or her life instead. Very few readers understand the synthetic a priori or the law of the excluded middle, but a lot of them know about falling in love or what it feels like to be miserable. It helps, however, if the life of the thinker in question is reasonably exciting. This was certainly the case with Ludwig Wittgenstein, who fought in the first world war, had a number of illegal gay relationships, lived in a hut on a Norwegian fiord and had to do a runner as a village schoolmaster when he struck a pupil across the face.

'Rigorous' is the last adjective one would use to characterise this book

It's no accident that Henry James is among the finest stylists of English language, given William’s supple, graceful prose

In these isolating times, are you enjoying solitude or, very different, are you suffering from loneliness?

Solitude is not the same as loneliness. Lonely people feel the need for company, while solitary types seek to escape it. The neatest definition of loneliness, David Vincent writes in his superb new study, is “failed solitude”. Another difference between the two groups is that hermits, anglers, Trappist monks and Romantic poets choose to be alone, whereas nobody chooses to feel abandoned and bereft. Calling yourself “self-partnering”, meaning that you sit in the cinema (should they be open) holding your own hand, may be either a genuine desire for solitude or a way of rationalising the stigma of isolation. The greatest difference of all, however, is that solitude has rarely killed anyone, whereas loneliness can drive you to the grave. As the coronavirus rampages, some of us might now face a choice between physical infection and mental breakdown.

For the 18th-century Enlightenment, being on your own was a deviation from the true nature of humanity, which was sociable to its core. It was with the Romantics that this began to change. Isolation was now what we shared in common. Frankenstein’s monster is one of the first great loners of English literature, spurned and vilified by humanity. Yet though loneliness was a symptom of the modern era, solitude could be a critique of it. It was one of the few ways in which you could get in touch with the transcendent, thus revealing what was lacking in an increasingly materialistic society. When Wordsworth writes that he wandered lonely as a cloud, he may mean simply that he was by himself, or that he lacked companionship, or that being alone allowed him space for self-knowledge and spiritual meditation.

An absorbing survey of Christianity’s subversive origins and enduring influence is filled with vivid portraits, gruesome deaths and moral debates

Tom Holland’s Dominion recounts the history and impact of Christianity from the crucifixion of Jesus to the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love”. He describes crucifixion as one of the most terrible deaths one can suffer, which must be true in general but if Jesus really did only spend six hours on the cross, as the New Testament reports, he was luckier than most victims, who thrashed around for days. If you really have to be nailed to a cross, the best thing to do is lose a lot of blood beforehand, so by scourging Jesus the Romans unwittingly helped him on his way.

Holland might also have pointed out that the ancient Romans reserved crucifixion mostly for political rebels. Jesus may not have been a Lenin, but it might have suited the Jewish leaders to persuade Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, that he was. He would certainly have knocked around with Zealots, the anticolonial revolutionaries of the day. A few of his disciples were probably paid-up members of the group, as (probably) were the two so-called thieves between whom he hung on the cross. Pilate wouldn’t have needed much convincing to reach for the hammer and nails. Contrary to the gospels’ portrait of him as a kind of Guardian-reading liberal, reluctant to use his power and bemusedly in search of truth, the historical Pilate was a moral monster who would have crucified his own grandmother, and who was finally dismissed from the imperial service for corruption.

From terrorists to Groucho-Marxists ... the story of one of the most daring political currents of the age

The first suicide bomber in English literature is a crazed anarchist professor in Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent who stalks around London wired up with explosives. Entranced by a vision of pure nothingness, he has only to squeeze a rubber ball in his pocket to annihilate the present and clear a space for a utopian future. His political comrades are a bunch of sinister continental freaks who succeed in blowing up a young boy with learning difficulties.

Anarchism, in short, has something of an image problem. Even Ruth Kinna, in this sympathetic, impressively well-informed history of the movement, has to admit that it has had its fair share of bombers and assassins. Yet she also illustrates its extraordinary creativity. Born in the 19th century, a brainchild of the Unholy Trinity of French libertarian socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Russian revolutionaries Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, anarchism rejected what it saw as Karl Marx’s narrow economic and proletarian viewpoint. Nevertheless, the two creeds have a lot in common. Both believe in class struggle, the abolition of private property and the overthrow of the state. Both see the role of the state as defending private property, a view that you can also find in Cicero. Marx thinks that the state will eventually wither away, while anarchists believe in helping it on its way as soon as they can.

Not many histories of philosophy begin with Hamlet. Jonathan Rée, however, starts his new book in this unconventional way, largely because he is bored by what he calls the “well-worn plots and set-piece battles” of orthodox accounts of the subject. Philosophy, he believes, contains far more variety, invention, originality and oddity than we give it credit for. Showing this means stretching the definition of “philosopher” beyond the usual suspects (Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Bertrand Russell) to include such authors as Cervantes, Coleridge, Adam Smith, Tom Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), along with a rich assortment of academic oddballs and minor eccentrics.

There is the 18th-century Irishman John Toland, for example, rumoured to be the illegitimate offspring of a priest and a prostitute, who started life as an Irish-speaking shepherd in Donegal and ended up as a renowned European intellectual admired by Leibniz and Voltaire. Born a Catholic, Toland became a militant Presbyterian in Glasgow, a free thinker in Holland (he might even have invented the term “free thinker”, along with “pantheism”) and an intellectual bruiser in the coffee houses of Oxford. He dabbled in occultism, mastered nine languages and roamed a London underworld of religious heretics, shady political operators and radical republicans. He may also have seduced the Electress Sophia of Brandenburg – not bad going for a Donegal shepherd. You won’t find his name in many philosophy textbooks, however, since unlike the modern Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle he showed not the slightest interest in the logical difference between the phrases “nothing chatters” and “nothing matters”. Ryle claimed to have used this distinction to talk a student out of suicide, an example of the tutorial system at its most effective.

Rather than whisking us from one philosophical peak to another, Witcraft wanders in the fertile valleys between

The difference between them is clear from their writing. Rée is enter­taining and stylish, Grayling is lucid but lifeless

An an impressively erudite work, ranging from St Augustine to Joseph Conrad, embraces an atheism that finds enough mystery in the material world

There has been a rash of books in recent years by thinkers for whom the human race is getting nicer and nicer. Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley and Sam Harris are rational humanists who believe in progress, however many famines and genocides may disfigure the planet. We are en route to a vastly improved future. Perhaps this return to the values of the western Enlightenment is not unrelated to the threat of radical Islam. The philosopher John Gray’s role has been to act as a Jeremiah among these Pollyannas, insisting that we are every bit as nasty as we ever were. If there is anything he detests, it is schemes of visionary transformation. He is a card-carrying misanthrope for whom human life has no unique importance, and for whom history has been little more than the sound of hacking and gouging. One might note that Christianity is as pessimistic as Gray but a lot more hopeful as well.

The answer to the question of whether history has been improving is surely a decisive yes and no. For Marx, the modern age was both an enthralling emancipation and one long nightmare. The wide-eyed optimism of Pinker or Ridley is just as one-sided as the prophets of doom who refuse to concede that there is something to be said for such modern inventions as feminism, spin-dryers and antibiotics. The truth is that everyone believes in progress, but only a dwindling band of Victorian relics such as Dawkins believe in Progress. So this book is really hammering at an open door. How many champions of a vastly improved future are there in a postmodern culture?

Gray belongs to a group of thinkers who turn to transcendence without content, epitomised by Hollywood spirituality

Related: What scares the new atheists | John Gray

‘For the Posh and Powerful, Not For Riff-Raff Like You’ … the critic deconstructs the party promises

The title of the Conservative party manifesto is “Forward, Together”, presumably because “Backward, Apart” isn’t much of a vote catcher. The prime minister’s mind-numbing mantra, “strong and stable government” (anyone for the weak and turbulent kind?) crops up twice in consecutive lines on the first page, suggesting that the authors have a rather dim-witted audience in mind. Less blandly, Labour calls its manifesto “For the Many, Not the Few”, cunningly calculating that this might have a wider appeal than “For the Posh and Powerful, Not For Riff-Raff Like You”.

Writing these things can’t be easy. You need to talk about the British Coal superannuation scheme surplus while still managing to sound a high moral tone. Party manifestos are part sermon, part technical guide. They must be morally uplifting but down to earth, confident but not complacent, inspirational yet briskly practical. The luckless hacks who write them must also resign themselves to the fact that, apart from journalists and political nerds, they probably attract a smaller readership than War and Peace.

Theresa May is so eager to shaft George Osborne that she is prepared to sound like Ken Loach

Related: What do the election manifestos mean for women?

One has grown used to reading the kind of revisionist history in which the Renaissance was a myth, the Reformation never happened and the great Irish famine was a spot of food shortage. Britain blundered into ruling India by a series of unfortunate oversights, and Attila the Hun was by no means as bad as he has been painted.

Related: Have we got Machiavelli all wrong?

Hardly a word of rebuke passes Benner’s lips – this is revisionism with a vengeance