Books

Michael Ignatieff : Books

As a writer and historian, I’ve been publishing work since the mid-1970’s. I’ve written fiction and non-fiction, screenplays, reviews and essays – altogether translated into 20 languages.

My 20 books keep returning to a few recurrent themes: human rights and the fate of moral universalism in a world of clashing and competing values; liberalism as a political theory, as a practice and as a way of life; and our struggle to maintain democratic freedoms.

My most recent work—especially On Consolation—has taken me in a new direction: to thinking about the history of our attempts to console ourselves for the timeless ordeals of life– death, loss and tragedy—and how we manage, despite everything, to live in hope.

Michael Ignatieff - Isaiah Berlin - 2023

Isaiah Berlin: A Life

Pushkin Press
May 25, 2023

Isaiah Berlin was one of the great public intellectuals of his time. A magnetic speaker and beacon of liberal philosophy, he gained first-hand experience of some of the pivotal events of the twentieth century and crossed paths with luminaries from Virginia Woolf to Sigmund Freud. Declining to write an autobiography, Berlin instead agreed to give extensive interviews to acclaimed writer Michael Ignatieff in the final decade of his life. The result is a magisterial biography that penetrates deeply into Berlin’s life and thought while capturing his vivid style of conversation. Reissued in this updated edition, it traces Berlin’s journey to become one of his era’s most vigorous defenders of liberty and individuality in the face of tyranny and dogma.

I just finished reading “Isaiah Berlin” and must say that it is one of the finest books I have ever read. The story of Mr. Berlin’s life if fascinating, from his childhoon in Russia and England, to his education, his service in the Foreign Office during WWII, his meetings with Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova, his career as an Oxford don, etc. Mr. Ignatieff tells the story, interspersed with the substance of his developing philosophical views, with warmth and insight. Even if you care not for philosophy (and I generally do not), this book deserves attention simply because it is a wonderful life and well told.
★★★★★ — Richard F. Jackson (Amazon Germany review)

The Russian Album

Pushkin Press
May 25, 2023

Poring over his grandparents’ memoirs, grainy photographs of his distinguished ancestors and relating family lore passed from father to son, Michael Ignatieff begins a moving journey to come to terms with his inheritance that is bound up with the violent tumult of Russian history. With great care and complexity, Ignatieff reconstructs a vanished way of life. Beginning in the opulent court of Catherine the Great, he traces his family’s rise to great influence in the imperial regime of Tsar Nicholas II before the country is swept up in revolution, civil war and exile. A profound meditation on rootlessness and belonging, The Russian Album explores both how we are formed by our pasts, but also how we must write our own stories in the present.

Russian Album is an excellent book for anyone who is first generation or second generation coming into a new country. The book provides a solid grasp of the challenges that face those tranistioning to a new country and culture. There is always the issue of what to retain from the country and culture of origin and what to release. Equally important is how to capture and maintain the family’s historical identity and pass that legacy on to future generations. This is a very rich story about real people who were swept by the currents of history into new and strange surroudnngs and how the family history was not lost but given value and passed on to subsequent generations.
★★★★★ — Amazon Germany review

Michael Ignatieff - The Russian Album - 2023
On-Consolation-colage

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.

The Ordinary Virtues:
Moral Order in a Divided World

Harvard University Press
September 18, 2017

What moral values do human beings hold in common? As globalization draws us together economically, are our values converging or diverging? In particular, are human rights becoming a global ethic? These were the questions that led Michael Ignatieff to embark on a three-year, eight-nation journey in search of answers. The Ordinary Virtues presents Ignatieff’s discoveries and his interpretation of what globalization―and resistance to it―is doing to our conscience and our moral understanding. 

Ordinary virtues, he concludes, are antitheoretical and anti-ideological. They can be cheerfully inconsistent. When order breaks down and conflicts break out, they are easily exploited for a politics of fear and exclusion―reserved for one’s own group and denied to others. But they are also the key to healing, reconciliation, and solidarity on both a local and a global scale.

“Ignatieff long has been seen as one of the principal theoreticians of human rights, a task to which he has devoted his career since reporting on the Bosnian Civil War in the late 1990. He deserves praise for wrestling with the devolution of our moral worlds over recent decades. [In] The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World, Ignatieff betrays an admirable recognition of the poverty of our moral politics today.”
— Patrick William Kelly (Los Angeles Review of Books)

Michael Ignatieff - The Ordinary Virtues - 2017
Michael Ignatieff - Fire and Ashes - 2013

Fire and Ashes:
Success and Failure in Politics

Harvard University Press
November 19, 2013

In 2005 Michael Ignatieff left his life as a writer and professor at Harvard University to enter the combative world of politics back home in Canada. By 2008, he was leader of the country’s Liberal Party and poised–should the governing Conservatives falter–to become Canada’s next Prime Minister. It never happened. Today, after a bruising electoral defeat, Ignatieff is back where he started, writing and teaching what he learned.

What did he take away from this crash course in political success and failure? Did a life of thinking about politics prepare him for the real thing? How did he handle it when his own history as a longtime expatriate became a major political issue? Are cynics right to despair about democratic politics? Are idealists right to hope? Ignatieff blends reflection and analysis to portray today’s democratic politics as ruthless, unpredictable, unforgiving, and hyper-adversarial.

“A distinguished intellectual, writer, journalist, and academic gives up his library and his chair at Harvard to pursue a political career at the highest level and for six years he experiences the passion and the fever, the enthusiasm and the intrigue, the failure and the success of party politics in the vast Canadian scene. Six years after that immersion in political life, he goes back to his library, he does some thinking, and he offers us an exceptionally insightful and honest account of that adventure. This book is a compass that will help the reader find his or her way in the dizzying maze that politics has become in the great modern democracies.”
— Mario Vargas Llosa

The Lesser Evil:
Political Ethics in an Age of Terror

Princeton University Press
September 4, 2005

Must we fight terrorism with terror, match assassination with assassination, and torture with torture? Must we sacrifice civil liberty to protect public safety?

In the age of terrorism, the temptations of ruthlessness can be overwhelming. But we are pulled in the other direction too by the anxiety that a violent response to violence makes us morally indistinguishable from our enemies. There is perhaps no greater political challenge today than trying to win the war against terror without losing our democratic souls. Michael Ignatieff confronts this challenge head-on, with the combination of hard-headed idealism, historical sensitivity, and political judgment that has made him one of the most influential voices in international affairs today.

“In The Lesser Evil, Michael Ignatieff addresses the ethical problems faced by liberal democracies. [H]e soberly deals with permanent problems of American foreign policy, not only those specifically provoked by the Bush administration’s war on terror: the problems of attempting to rule without demonstrated legitimacy, the prudential problem of choosing the lesser evil, the expedient choice of deliberative abuse or suspension of rights considered defining qualities of democracy, the limits of acceptable violence and coercion, and the problems of arbitrary detention, torture, assassinationand disregard of the rule of law–all the subject of policy choices made in Washington since September 2001.”
— William Pfaff (Los Angeles Times)

Michael Ignatieff - The Lesser Evil - 2004
Michael Ignatieff - Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry - 2001

Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry

Princeton University Press
February 16, 2003

Michael Ignatieff draws on his extensive experience as a writer and commentator on world affairs to present a penetrating account of the successes, failures, and prospects of the human rights revolution. Since the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, this revolution has brought the world moral progress and broken the nation-state’s monopoly on the conduct of international affairs. But it has also faced challenges. Ignatieff argues that human rights activists have rightly drawn criticism from Asia, the Islamic world, and within the West itself for being overambitious and unwilling to accept limits. It is now time, he writes, for activists to embrace a more modest agenda and to reestablish the balance between the rights of states and the rights of citizens.

“One of the most pleasing aspects of Michael Ignatieff’s frequent contributions to the human rights debate is the clarity with which he writes about a subject beset as never before by uncertainty and disagreement. Not least of the achievements of Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry […] is the simplicity and common sense Ignatieff introduces. And at a time when it has become fashionable to deride the gains made by the human rights movement over the years, his cautious optimism is refreshing.”
— Caroline Moorehead (The Spectator)

The Rights Revolution

House of Anansi Press
September 1, 2000

Since the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, rights have become the dominant language of the public good around the globe. This revolution is being watched around the world. Are group rights to land and language jeopardizing individual rights? When everyone asserts their rights, what happens to responsibilities?

Michael Ignatieff confronts these questions head-on in The Rights Revolution, defending the supposed individualism of rights language against all.

Michael Ignatieff - The Rights Revolution - 2000
Michael Ignatieff - Isaiah Berlin - 1998

Isaiah Berlin: A Life

Metropolitan Books
September 1, 2000

Isaiah Berlin was witness to a century. Born in Riga in the twilight of the Czarist empire, he lived long enough to see the Soviet state collapse. The son of a Jewish timber merchant, he became a presiding judge of Western intellectual life on both sides of the Atlantic: historian of the Russian intelligentsia, biographer of Marx, scholar of the Romantic movement, and defender of the liberal idea of freedom against Soviet tyranny. When he died in 1997, he was hailed as the most important liberal philosopher of his time.

But Berlin’s life was not only a life of the mind. Present at the crucial events of our age, he was in Washington during World War II, in Moscow at the dawn of the Cold War, and dining with President John F. Kennedy on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis. From Albert Einstein to Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill to Anna Akhmatova, his circle of friends constitutes a veritable who’s who of twentieth century art, politics, and philosophy.

Ideas are “what human beings live for and by” — “Ignatieff combines presentation of Berlin’s personal life with his public life. He connects the internal struggle with his Jewish, Russian and English worlds, to his writing and speaking. Well done. […] Even though Berlin is now recognized as a public intellectual, Ignatieff presents his life the way Berlin lived it. His Jewish family in pre Soviet Russia, learning German from the merchants, running away from Lenin and the Bolsheviks, all play a key role in the man to come. His connection to the serious Russian writers, Tolstoy, Turgenev, etc., never leave him. His Jewish tradition colors his connection to the gentile world, always preventing him from a feeling of acceptance. His English environment, which he loved, never completely smothered the Russian and Jewish influence. Produced a complex man and a facinating book. […] Written with a light touch, easy to absorb and enjoyable to learn.”
★★★★★ — Clay Garner (Amazon US review)

Blood and Belonging:
Journeys into the New Nationalism

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
September 30, 1995

Until the end of the Cold War, the politics of national identity was confined to isolated incidents of ethnics strife and civil war in distant countries. Now, with the collapse of Communist regimes across Europe and the loosening of the Cold War’s clamp on East-West relations, a surge of nationalism has swept the world stage.

In Blood and Belonging, Ignatieff makes a thorough examination of why blood ties–in places as diverse as Yugoslavia, Kurdistan, Northern Ireland, Quebec, Germany, and the former Soviet republics–may be the definitive factor in international relations today. He asks how ethnic pride turned into ethnic cleansing, whether modern citizens can lay the ghosts of a warring past, why–and whether–a people need a state of their own, and why armed struggle might be justified. Blood and Belonging is a profound and searching look at one of the most complex issues of our time.

A revealing and relevant work! — “Michael Ignatieff’s work focuses on nationalism in the post-Cold War world and identifies a crucial trend that is still encompassing every continent: where new nation-states are being forged and born, nationalism is the driving force, the backbone of this trend. It is far from being outdated or irrelevant in any way, and although nationalism brings identity and belonging, Ignatieff argues, it also is a harbinger of bloodshed. To demonstrate, he has taken a personal journey throughout the world and homed in on six separate nations in which nationalism is an issue, perhaps a rampant one. Each of these six case studies is a detailed chapter, a portrait of nationalism in practice. […] A revealing and rewarding book for everyone, it remains as relevant in this global village as it was when first written.”
★★★★★ — P. Bjel (Amazon US review)

Michael Ignatieff - Blood and Belonging - 1995
Michael Ignatieff - Scar Tissue - 1992

Scar Tissue

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
October 1, 1994

Chronicles one woman’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease and her sons’ painful witness to the tragedy, which is enhanced by their careers in philosophy and neurology and by strengthened family bonds.

The Way of All Minds — “Although Michael Ignatieff is primarily known as a writer of intelligent books of accessible political theory, his short novel, “Scar Tissue” is a beautifully observed, emotionally precise account of the fraying of minds, flesh, and relationships. It’s one the earliest of several good books about the loss of a parent through Alzheimer’s disease — Ignatieff’s novel is comparable to John Bayley’s memoir of his wife, Iris Murdoch — but it’s more than that. […] Again and again, I was struck, and moved by, the psychological accuracy of the book, and the writer’s courage in facing up to not only a lot of the “big questions,” but to the cost of one’s own self-deceptions.”
★★★★★ — Stan Persky (Amazon US review)

The Needs of Strangers

Viking Adult
March 28, 1985

What do we need in order to survive?
Whose needs do we have a right to speak for?
Which needs can be satisfied through political actions, and which cannot?

To answer these vital questions, Michael Ignatieff returns to the ancient languages of religion, art, and tragedy—and to important texts by Shakespeare, St. Augustine, and the great writers of the Enlightenment.

Drawing on these sources, he has written an incisive, moving interpretation of community and democracy in a work that not only examines the breakdown of human solidarity but shows how it might be re-created. The Needs of Strangers restores philosophy to its proper place as a guide to the art of being human.

A brilliant essay about modern humanism — “In this slender volume, Michael Ignatieff argues beautifully and eloquently for a modern humanism based on the awareness of what makes us human: our ability to express our needs and our ability to remember and reflect our history. It is also a short history of ideas in the field of political philosophy, ranging from the Stoics to Rousseau. […] “The Needs of Strangers” returns philosophy to its proper place, as a guide to the art of being human.”
★★★★★ — Boris Bangemann (Amazon US review)

Michael Ignatieff - The Needs of Strangers - 1984

A Just Measure of Pain

Pantheon Books
January 1, 1978

Subtitled “The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution 1750-1850”, A Just Measure of Pain describes the moment in 18th century England when the modern penitentiary and its ambiguous legacy were born. In depicting how the whip, the brand and the gallows – public punishments once meant to cow the unruly poor into passivity – came to be replaced by the “moral management” of the prison and the notion that the criminal poor should be involved in their own rehabilitation. Michael Ignatieff documents the rise of a new conception of class relations and with it a new philosophy of punishment, one directed not at the body but at the mind. A Just Measure of Pain is a highly atmospheric and compellingly written work of social history, which has already become a classic study of its subject. For the Penguin edition the author will provide an afterword concerning the polemics which followed the book’s first publication in 1978.