Book - The Crisis of Culture by Olivier Roy — a remarkable achievement : Ivan Krastev / Financial Times

Book review shared by John Skoda

A singular book on identity politics that neither condemns nor embraces it but brings order to a world not at ease with itself

Click here for the review in the Financial Times

Excerpts:

"If home is a place that you understand and where you feel understood, we are today living in a homeless world. The cosmopolitan’s utopia in which one feels at home everywhere has been supplanted by a fear that nobody is actually at home or native to their own land. Roy’s core argument is that what we are now witnessing is not the replacement of one dominant culture with another — as, say, during the expansion of Christianity or Islam, or during the Renaissance or Enlightenment — but a progressive erosion of culture both as an anthropological reality and as a national canon. "

"The Crisis of Culture is proof that truly singular books do not scream their originality; they hide it because originality no longer shocks. It brings order to a world that is not at ease with itself. Culture was once our traditional weapon against human mortality and we have every reason to fear that, as Roy asserts, “deculturation thus ends with dehumanisation”. 

The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms by Olivier Roy, translated Cynthia Schoch and Trista Selous, Hurst £20, 232 pages.

The Crisis of Culture is available on Amazon