Krishnan Nayar’s big history exemplifies our general willingness to take positions on national histories and political arrangements without bothering to study them first. This quasi-Marxist polemic brushes over history and leaves the reader unfulfilled. 

The God that Failed 

The book’s cover features a charging bull, possibly referencing the iconic statue in Manhattan’s financial district, which would be incongruous given the book’s argument. Even less considered, however, is the title. The idea of a god that fails is not straightforward since omniscience and omnipotence should deal with most of the obstacles. Of course, it would make more sense in non-monotheistic traditions. Cronus, for example, failed to prevent his children from deposing him despite taking the precaution of eating them.  

“The God That Failed” is the tenth track of Metallica’s 1991 self-titled album and, as lead singer James Hetfield relates in an interview on YouTube, it grows out of the disappointing results of the Christian Science in which he was raised.  

Less known is Jerry Muller’s The Other God That Failed (1988), a study of Hans Freyer, the National Socialist. Muller nods to the “God that failed” paradigm in which he might be said to be working, originating with the 1949 book The God That Failed. It was a collection of autobiographical essays that recounted a common pattern of apostasy from communism by western intellectuals, edited by Richard Crossman and featuring an opening essay by Arthur Koestler. The title indicated the religious nature of communist belief and the purpose that it gave to adherents. Muller’s claim, in other words, is that fascism did something similar for the right.  

Unlike these authors, and Metallica’s lead vocalist, Krishnan Nayar seems not to understand the meaning of his title. For “liberal capitalist democracy” is not like Hetfield’s Christian god, and nor is it like communism in being a political creed that can be studied with reference to its texts, the manner in which they were read, and what people then did in their name. Instead, “liberal capitalist democracy” conjures a polemical topos, similar to “identity politics” or “political correctness,” except that this expression is rarely used, and never to name a god.  

History and Politics 

It is possible to study political systems, their histories, and the patterns of political thought that they produce. But it requires back-breaking labour. Consider what it would take to comprehend just English political thought in relation to parliament from, say, 1650-1850: a working knowledge of Anglican and Dissenting theology, natural law, common law, the rise of stadial theory and utilitarianism, and then, at the end of this period, the beginnings of liberal thought as it began to refashion these intellectual materials in universal terms. 

An alternative is to synthesize reliable research on the topic, which also requires wide and deep reading but at least you don’t have to learn the languages of theology or jus naturae et gentium. Yet another option is taken by Nayar, which avoids this trouble by transforming all of this complexity into “liberal capitalist democracy.”  

Two theses are developed in relation to this object using similarly ectoplasmic terms such as “autocracy,” “capitalism,” “democracy,” and “liberalism.” One is that the so-called “bourgeois revolutions” of the nineteenth century did not lead to democracy but took the natural path for capitalism: right-wing autocracy. The second is that the amiable version of capitalism that emerged after World War II was a response to competition from the Soviet Union, transmitted by left-wing parties inside western nations.  

The book’s finale is Nayar’s “Epilogue,” in which we learn that Donald Trump is the symptom of “deregulated Thatcherite-Reaganite capitalism.” Fortunately, Nayar has the solution: a soft socialism of capital controls, taxing the rich, welfare, and so on.  

As this gloss suggests, this is not a work of historiography but a quasi-Marxist polemic projected onto 300 years of history. One of the most entertaining sections of the book is the first, under the title “Why This Book Was Written”: 

Columbus set out to discover a route to India. Instead, he found America. Karl Marx’s fate, and the Communist movement’s, was like that. They failed to set up a Communist economy successfully in the long run. Everyone’s seen how the USSR finally flopped. Yet Communists did achieve something of extreme importance. It governs all our lives to this day. They unleashed forces that compelled the fundamental reform of capitalism. A big theme of this book is how this process, so little realised, happened […] No-one’s telling the story of the modern world as it is told here. 

The last sentence makes a fair claim. The book is, however, worth pondering in relation to Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy – The God That Failed from 2018. This is an “axiomatic-deductive” approach to civilization, monarchy, and democracy via the economic concept of time preference and the more general conceptual armoury of Austrian economics.  

In other words, Nayar and Hoppe are the left- and right-wing versions of political polemics that elect history as their terrain. That Hurst (Nayar) and Routledge (Hoppe) are publishing them is noteworthy. Catharine Macaulay’s Catalogue of Tracts (1790) listed some 5 000 primary sources that underwrote her 8-volume History of England (1763-1783). Even in her lifetime, Macaulay’s document-based approach to history was being swamped by the competition, the conjectural histories of Scotland and France, a dialectical version of which was developed by Hegel and Marx, and now we swim in the backwash.   

Ryan Walter is Associate Professor in the history of political thought at the University of Queensland. 

This review article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.