With his eye firmly on either a spiritual reward in the afterlife, or a material reward from aiding society's drive towards utopian perfection, man previously could accept hierarchy or inequality, tribulation or hardship as the necessary price of these transcendent ends.

And this observation has allowed her to produce a keenly perceptive and deeply insightful dissection of the problems that assail modern man.ĭelsol's interpretation is masterful: she outlines how contemporary society has lost its faith in both the religious structures and progressive ideologies that previously provided cohesion and meaning to man's existence on this earth and offered compelling reasons for the trials and sacrifices that he was forced to make on a daily basis. Within this tragic unfolding, Western society gingerly began to lay the paths that have led to this contemporary stage at which Delsol bemusedly stares. Despairingly he became aware of the fact that evil remained in the world, that economics, religion, morality, and politics-far from having been banished as was once promised and believed-asserted their influence with a vengeance. Having had the wax that gripped his feathers melted by the furious heat of total war, death camps, gulags, mass starvation and economic collapse, man plunged back to the terra firma from whence he departed, but this time shorn of his fervent belief in the perfectibility of humanity, historical inevitability, fraternal equality, and the continuous transformation of society into something pure and transcendent. Icarus Fallen should establish her as one of the most insightful social and cultural writers working on either side of the Atlantic.Ĭhantal Delsol states at the outset that she set out to write this book as a response to the astonishment I felt as I contemplated Western society to what appeared as a culture reeling in the winds of modernity, Icarus once again lost within the labyrinth after having plummeted from his hubristic striving for the sun of utopian ideology.

She explains how we have come simultaneously to embrace the 'good' but reject the 'true' how we have sacralized rights and democracy and how we have lost our sense of the tragic and embraced the idea of 'zero risk.' Already a well-known political thinker in her native France, this is Delsol's first book to appear in English.

But the ideas he once held so dear-inevitable progress, the possibility of limitless social and self-transformation-are no longer believable, and he has, for the most part, long since rejected the religious tradition that might now have provided an anchor. Having been burned, he is now groping for a way to orient himself. During the twentieth century, Delsol argues, man flew too closely to the sun of utopian ideology. With style and lucidity, Delsol likens contemporary Western man to the mythical figure Icarus, fallen back to earth after trying to reach the sun, alive but badly shaken and confused. It would be difficult to find a more perceptive description of Western man and the world he now inhabits than that provided by Chantal Delsol in Icarus Fallen: The Search for Meaning in an Uncertain World.

Icarus falling