For at least a decade now, various cultural critics have denounced the excesses of the modern world. Railing against rampant individualism, moral relativism and uncritical acceptance of the values of the market, these critics lay the blame for the wretched state of society mostly at the feet of postmodernism and yearn for a time when moral absolutes provided universal cultural meaning. These modern-day prophets, however, disagree about where to find such absolute values. Cutting through such disagreements, Guillebaud (The Tyranny of Pleasure) confidently contends that the foundations of Western culture clearly derive from Judaism, Christianity and Greek thought. To recognize our culture’s origins in central ideas from these cultures offers us a way of re-founding our world on these principles. From the Jewish idea of time, he says, comes our idea of progress. While the Greeks emphasized reason as the superior way of knowing reality, both the Greeks and the Christians formulated an image of the universal that animated the material universe. According to Guillebaud, Christianity invented the idea of the individual, as well as the notion of equality, and both Judaism and Christianity teach the primacy of social justice. Through a dazzling narrative, Guillebaud traces the history of the development of these ideas from their origins to their expressions in contemporary culture. He argues that the greatest threats to these principles in our culture are inequality, the "waning of the future," scientism, globalization, communitarianism and litigiousness. Guillebaud attempts an encyclopedic approach to knowledge, [inviting comparison to]...Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Zizek and Christian philosophers such as Max Stackhouse.

Guillebaud synthesizes and popularizes the debate over postmodernity and its discontents. Much of the book is devoted to the by-now-familiar contention that the "Western" heritage as a universal foundation for ethical and political action has disintegrated. Unlike some other critics, Guillebaud isn’t simply nostalgic, and he isn’t oriented exclusively toward some past golden age. He argues that such an orientation is part of the problem of a diminishing past – we are nostalgic, he says, for a past that moves ever closer to the present – and an almost absent future. He associates that problem with the instrumental reason of the global market and with a scientism that, in the name of reason, undermines rationality. In conclusion, he asserts that "the world that awaits us is not one that we have to conquer, but that we have to found." Many may think that an interesting proposition, even if they are unconvinced by Guillebaud’s argument that that future foundation will be Judeo-Christian, a "paradoxical humanism" in opposition to resurgent barbarism.

This stimulating essay analyzes the sad misadventures of an era dominated by the sacrosanct “Market,” which is destroying our heritage and the very foundation of civilization, and proposes that we re-invent the future.