Michael Ignatieff

New book out / November 9, 2021

On Consolation

When we lose someone we love, when we suffer loss or defeat, when catastrophe strikes—war, famine, pandemic—we go in search of consolation. Once the province of priests and philosophers, the language of consolation has largely vanished from our modern vocabulary, and the places where it was offered, houses of religion, are often empty. Rejecting the solace of ancient religious texts, humanity since the sixteenth century has increasingly placed its faith in science, ideology, and the therapeutic.

How do we console each other and ourselves in an age of unbelief? In a series of portraits of writers, artists and musicians searching for consolation—from the books of Job and Psalms to Albert Camus, Anna Akhmatova, and Primo Levi—writer and historian Michael Ignatieff shows how men and women in extremity have looked to each other across time to recover hope and resilience. Recreating the moments when great figures found the courage to confront their fate and the determination to continue unafraid, On Consolation takes those stories into the present, contending that we can revive these traditions of consolation to meet the anguish and uncertainties of the twenty-first century.

Writer

Michael Ignatieff’s major publications are:

• The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World (2017)
• Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics (2013)
• The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (2004)
• Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (2001)
• The Rights Revolution (2000)
• Isaiah Berlin: A Life (1998)
• Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (1995)
• Scar Tissue (1992)
• The Needs of Strangers (1984)