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The Frontman: Bono (In The Name of Power) by Harry Browne – review

Bono the philanthropist is nothing but a crony of bankers and neocons, argues Terry Eagleton

It is no surprise that Bono and Bob Geldof, the two leading celebrity philanthropists of our time, are both Irish. The Ireland into which they were born in the 1960s was caught between third and first worlds, and so was more likely to sympathise with the wretched of the earth than were the natives of Hampstead. As a devoutly Christian nation, it also had a long missionary tradition. Black babies were a familiar object of charity in Ireland long before Hollywood movie stars began snapping them up. Bono himself was a member of a prayer group in the 1970s, before he stumbled on leather trousers and wrap-around shades. Scattered across the globe by hunger and turmoil at home, the Irish have long been a cosmopolitan people, far less parochial than their former proprietors. Small nations cannot afford the insularity of the great.

Besides, if you were born into this remote margin of Europe and yearned for the limelight, it helped to have an eye-catching cause and a mania for self-promotion. Rather as the Irish in general were forced by internal circumstance to become an international people, so men like Bono and Geldof could use their nationality to leap on to the world stage.

Bono belongs to the new, cool, post-political Ireland; but by turning back to the old, hungry, strife-torn nation, now rebaptised as Africa, he could bridge the gap between the two. Even so, he has not been greatly honoured in his own notoriously begrudging country, or elsewhere. Harry Browne recounts the (perhaps apocryphal) tale of the singer standing on stage clapping while declaring: "Every time I clap my hands, a child dies." "Then stop fucking doing it!" yelled a voice from the crowd.

Paul David Hewson's rise to fame also coincides with the postmodern decline of politics into spectacle. What more suitable politician than a rock star in an age of manufactured sentiments and manipulated images? Having strayed in from showbusiness, Bono can present himself as outside the political arena, speaking simply from the heart; but his fame as a musician also means that he has a constituency of millions, which means in turn that the political establishment are eager to have him on the inside. For all his carefully crafted self-irony (how ridiculous for me, an overpaid rock star from working-class Dublin, to be saving the world!), the inside is a place he has never betrayed any great reluctance to occupy. Since an outsider is unlikely to know much about global economics, he is likely to take his cue from the conventional wisdom of the insiders, which is why Bono is both maverick and conservative.

One result of his campaigning has been a kind of starvation chic. In this impressively well-researched polemic, Browne recounts how Ali Hewson, Bono's wife, praised the work of her company's Paris-based clothes designer for being influenced by dusty African landscapes. She admired "the way some of the clothes look like they've been worn before and sort of restitched … to incorporate the continent, in a sense". Hewson's Messianic husband, or "the little twat with the big heart", as Viz magazine once dubbed him, has been trying to incorporate Africa into his image for a good few decades now. Like Geldof, he inherited the social conscience of the 1960s without its political radicalism, which is why he has proved so convenient a front man for the neo-liberals.

In fact, as Browne points out, he has cosied up to racists such as Jesse Helms, whitewashed architects of the Iraqi adventure such as Tony Blair and Paul Wolfowitz, and discovered a soulmate in the shock-doctrine economist Jeffrey Sachs. He has also brownnosed the Queen, sucked up to the Israelis, grovelled at the feet of corporate bullies and allied himself with rightwing anti-condom US evangelicals in Africa. The man who seems to flash a peace sign every four seconds apparently has no problem with the sponsorship of the arms corporation BAE. His consistent mistake has been to regard these powers as essentially benign, and to see no fundamental conflict of interests between their own priorities and the needs of the poor. They just need to be sweet-talked by a charmingly bestubbled Celt. Though he has undoubtedly done some good in the world, as this book readily acknowledges, a fair bit of it has been as much pro-Bono as pro bono republico.

If Bono really knew the history of his own people, he would be aware that the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s was not the result of a food shortage. Famines rarely are. There were plenty of crops in the country, but they had to be exported to pay the landlords' rents. There was also enough food in Britain at the time to feed Ireland several times over. What turned a crisis into a catastrophe was the free market doctrine for which the U2 front man is so ardent an apologist. Widespread hunger is the result of predatory social systems, a fact that Bono's depoliticising language of humanitarianism serves to conceal.

Browne's case is simple but devastating. As a multimillionaire investor, world-class tax avoider, pal of Bush and Blair and crony of the bankers and neo-cons, Bono has lent credence to the global forces that wreak much of the havoc he is eager to mop up. His technocratic, west-centred, corporation-friendly campaigns have driven him into one false solution, unsavoury alliance and embarrassing debacle after another. The poor for him, Browne claims, exist largely as objects of the west's charity. They are not seen as capable of the kind of militant mobilisation that might threaten western interests.

Bertolt Brecht tells the tale of a king in the East who was pained by all the suffering in the world. So he called his wise men together and asked them to inquire into its cause. The wise men duly looked into the matter, and returned with the news that the cause of the world's suffering was the king.

• Terry Eagleton's Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America is published by Norton.

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The North (And Almost Everything In it) by Paul Morley – review

Manchester … so much to answer for. Paul Morley's affectionate work of cultural history suffers from an overly rhapsodic tone

One of the many fascinating chunks of information to be found in Paul Morley's study of northern England is that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who once worked as an aeronautical engineer at Manchester University, used to attend concerts at the city's Free Trade Hall and whistle his way through entire symphonies. Twenty or so years later, the 12-year-old Mancunian Anthony Burgess, who would eventually become a composer as well as a renowned novelist, was taken to the same venue by his father to hear the Hallé orchestra perform Wagner.

Morley's book, however, fails to record that this great musical tradition suffered a steep decline. Three decades later, I myself stood on the stage of the Free Trade Hall clad in red blazer and grey shorts, singing shamelessly chauvinistic songs as a member of the school choir on Speech Day. The chauvinism, I now recognise, was an attempt by my Irish immigrant community to ingratiate itself with mainstream English culture. Within a few square miles of my home, a band of Salford men and women en route to stardom revealed their Irish origins in their surnames: Albert Finney, Shelagh Delaney, Steven Morrissey, John Cooper Clarke. Burgess can be an Irish name, and so can Morley.

Another Irish Salfordian, LS Lowry, overshadowed them all. My mother recalled how he was given a wide berth by the local populace, though whether this was because he was an artist or a rent collector was never clear. He in turn shunned the British establishment, turning down a CBE, OBE and knighthood. The Salford of my youth was also secretly breeding Ben Kingsley, Mike Leigh and Peter Maxwell Davis. It had previously given birth to the great folksinger and cultural activist Ewan MacColl, and today is a home to an exiled bunch of BBC producers. Who said cotton mills were inimical to culture?

There's no need to get too misty-eyed about the region, however, a warning Morley would have been wise to heed. This affectionate piece of anthropology is marred by a tiresomely rhapsodic tone. "I found it, my north," he gushes, "smoking and babbling, battling and loving, scattered and glittering, lush and brisk … rickety and plush, conspiring and crackling." Reticence is not this author's strong point. There is a compulsive use of the couplet: "brilliance and persistence, acceptance and slyness, dirt and glamour". There is also a reference to northerners who speak "with a certain sort of tough, scuffed and striven fluency", preferring the "slap, twist and thud" of their own speech to "the slur, sting and snap of near neighbours". There is certainly a glut of scuffing, slapping and thudding in these extravagantly overwritten pages, in which Ian Brady and Myra Hindley become "charred, trapped scraps of frustrated northern will". It makes them sound even worse than serial killers. Liverpool, predictably, provokes Morley to a bout of severe verbal flatulence: "Liverpool, passion. Liverpool, moving, Liverpool, moving cotton, sugar, slaves, invoices, music, ideas here, there and everywhere …"

Writers who wish to avoid hoots of southern derision would do well to avoid sentences like: "There was only one tree in our garden, which never produced any leaves." One can almost hear the cries of "Luxury!" from satirists of the prolier-than-thou syndrome. If you begin a paragraph: "I don't remember my dad making anything other than a pot of tea, eccentrically spreading marge on his Weetabix and dousing his Kellogg's Cornflakes in milk and sugar", you have only yourself to blame if a reader scrawls "before feeding the lot to his whippet" in the margin.

This grab-bag of a book mixes poetry and sociology, history and autobiography. Yet if some of it suffers from a rather slipshod lyricism, the auto-biographical sections are too flatly naturalistic. It is interesting to know that the Beatles were turned away from the restaurant of Manchester's Midland hotel for being inappropriately dressed, and that Les Dawson was able to pull such grotesque faces because he broke his jaw in a boxing match, but not that Morley used to catch the bus at five past eight so as to be at school by a quarter to nine. He grew up in a part of Stockport called Reddish, and the book's obsession with the place is so relentless that one begins to wonder whether it is meant to be self-parody. We are provided with a nerdish list of bus stops, a grim, socialist-realist-type photo of the local 92 bus and a small, Sebald-like map of the terrain. Like many a life-writer, Morley is too ready to assume that things are important simply because they happened to him. Freud once noted the gap between the vividness of our dreams for us and the tedium we inflict in telling them to others, and much the same can be true of recounting your life history.

Even so, the book partly redeems itself by its passion and chutzpah. It is a great baggy monster of a love letter to its author's provincial origins, ranging all the way from ice age Cheshire to the invention of the eccles cake. There are times when it seems to mistake northern England for the streets around Stockport Viaduct (the Geordies don't get much of a look in), but there is some impressively erudite stuff on the hat-making industry, the Lancashire genius for comedy and a good deal more.

We learn that a Liverpool man invented the crossword, and that Beatles manager Brian Epstein grew up on the same street of the city as Gladstone. Sheffield produced the jelly baby as well as knives and forks, and Stockport, not Tokyo, came up with the first karaoke machine. It's just that it would have been nice to make these discoveries without all the romantic froth.

• Terry Eagleton's How To Read Literature is published by Yale University Press

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Woolwich murder: we must use reason to beat terrorists | Terry Eagleton

To deny the Woolwich attackers any shred of rationality is to come perilously close to excusing them

Why did the Woolwich killing happen? Less than a week on, the debate has swiftly moved on to the issue of "preventative measures", with Theresa May proposing new internet controls and the banning of groups preaching hate.

Yet anyone who dares to use the words "western foreign policy" in this context is bound to be speedily shut up by the likes of Paxman and co. This isn't because they have never heard of drones and Guantánamo. They are surely aware of the countless thousands of innocent civilians dispatched to their graves by western operations in the Arab world, for whom there are no floral tributes piled on the London pavements. It is rather because they imagine, in their muddled way, that to explain an event is to excuse it. Those who point to the dead of Iraq and Afghanistan are surely doing so as a devious way of justifying the slaughter of a young soldier outside his barracks.

Do they also think this about the crimes of Hitler or Stalin? Are they really suggesting that historians who delve into the origins of fascism are secret Nazi sympathisers, or that to lay bare the causes of the Gulag is to exonerate its architects? The problem for these commentators is that if an event can be explained, it must be rationally motivated, and that sounds uncomfortably close to endorsing it. To call an action rational, however, is by no means to justify it. Bringing western economies to their knees a few years ago was part of a perfectly rational project on the part of the banks. It sprang from a drive to increase their profits, a motive about which there is nothing in the least insane or impenetrable.

On this logic, the best way not to sound as though you are in favour of murdering soldiers on the streets of London is to see such events as utterly without rhyme or reason, like some baffling Dadaist happening. To concede that they have a motive, however malign, is to invest them with a dignity one feels the need to deny them. British intelligence, one assumes, was well aware some years ago that the IRA had rational grounds for its actions, however reprehensible it may have judged them. They weren't just killing out of boredom or bloodlust. The popular press, however, preferred to present guerrillas as gorillas – as psychopaths and wild beasts whose actions were simply unintelligible.

There are at least two problems with this strategy. For one thing, if you deny your enemy any shred of rationality, you come perilously close to excusing him. To be bereft of reason, like a baby or a squirrel, is to be morally innocent. This is why barristers do not usually accuse those they are prosecuting of being dangerous lunatics. For another thing, you can kiss goodbye to any hope of victory over your foes. If they do things for no reason at all, it is hard to see how you can defeat them.

After the Boston bombing a few weeks ago, a CNN anchorman asked a so-called expert whether there was anything in the background of the alleged bombers that might help to explain their actions. Unsurprisingly, the expert didn't reply: "Yes, there is, actually, it's called western foreign policy." Instead, he jawed on about the possibility of early childhood trauma. If political motives are inadmissible then psychological ones will have to do instead. Maybe these two young Chechnyans were dropped on their heads as infants, or rudely yanked from the breast.

It is not true, as 19th-century liberals such as George Eliot and John Stuart Mill tended to believe, that to understand all is to forgive all. On the contrary, to place an action in its context may be to deepen the guilt of its perpetrators. Appeals to context are not always ways of letting people off the hook, a fact of which those who ritually protest that their racist or sexist words were taken out of context seem unaware. Invoking the injustice and humiliation inflicted by the west on the Muslim world will not do as grounds for murder. But neither will invoking the necessities of the so-called war on terror do as a justification for massacring the innocent.

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Derrida: A Biography by Benoît Peeters - review

Terry Eagleton enjoys a superb biography of an original thinker

In May 1992, the dons of Cambridge University filed into their parliament to vote on whether to award an honorary degree to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, founder of so-called deconstruction. Despite a deftly managed smear campaign by the opposition, Derrida's supporters carried the day. It would be interesting to know how many of those who tried to block him in the name of rigorous scholarship had read a single book of his, or even a couple of articles.

The truth is that they did not need to. The word was abroad that this purveyor of fashionable French gobbledegook was a charlatan and a nihilist, a man who believed that anything could mean anything and that there was nothing in the world but writing. He was a corrupter of youth who had to be stopped in his tracks. As a teenager, Derrida had fantasised with some of his friends about blowing up their school with some explosives they had acquired. There were those in Cambridge who thought he was planning to do the same to western civilisation. He did, however, have an unlikely sympathiser. When the Duke of Edinburgh, chancellor of Cambridge University, presented Derrida with his degree in the year in which Charles and Diana separated, he murmured to him that deconstruction had begun to affect his own family too.

Deconstruction holds that nothing is ever entirely itself. There is a certain otherness lurking within every assured identity. It seizes on the out-of-place element in a system, and uses it to show how the system is never quite as stable as it imagines. There is something within any structure that is part of it but also escapes its logic. It comes as no surprise that the author of these ideas was a Sephardic Jew from colonial Algeria, half in and half out of French society. If his language was French, he could also speak the patois of working-class Arabs. He would later return to his home country as a conscript in the French army, a classic instance of divided identity.

At the age of 12, Derrida was excluded from his lycee when the Algerian government, anxious to outdo the Vichy regime in its antisemitic zeal, decided to lower the quota of Jewish pupils. Paradoxically, the effect of this brutal rejection on a "little black and very Arab Jew", as he described himself, was not only to make him feel an outsider, but to breed in him a lifelong aversion to communities. He was taken in by a Jewish school, and hated the idea of being defined by his Jewish identity. Identity and homogeneity were what he would later seek to deconstruct. Yet the experience also gave him a deep suspicion of solidarity.

If he was always a man of the left, he had an outsider's distaste for orthodoxy and organisation. His role was that of the gadfly, the professional dissident, the joker in the pack. In the end, he was writing of the "absolute singularity" of every human being, and was always a dedicated non-joiner. Norms, doctrines and mass movements were likely to be oppressive, whereas margins and deviations were potentially subversive. Yet the English Defence League is marginal. And it took a mass movement to topple Gaddafi. Respecting freedom of speech is an orthodoxy, and the right to strike is a doctrine.

From a modest background in Algiers, Derrida moved to the most prestigious lycee in France, and from there to the Ecole Normale Supérieure. It was a heavily Stalinist institution at the time, which confirmed his reluctance to shout with the larger crowd. If Derrida was later to declare himself a communist, it was only in the sense that Kennedy called himself a Berliner. When student revolt erupted around him in May 1968, he stood mostly on the sidelines. Yet the libertarian impulse of the sixty-eighters was also a driving force behind his own work. The previous year had been his annus mirabilis, witnessing the appearance of three of the books that were to make his name revered and reviled across the globe.

Before long, the taciturn, socially gauche young man from the colonies was gracing the dinner tables of a galaxy of French luminaries: Jean Genet, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Maurice Blanchot and others. Even the French government fell under his spell. When François Mitterrand came to power in 1981, Derrida was invited to set up an international college of philosophy in Paris. Deconstruction was now all the rage from Sydney to San Diego, while Derrida himself was feted as an intellectual superstar. Soon, there was an American comic book featuring a sinister Doctor Deconstructo, and magazines on home decor were inviting their readers to deconstruct the concept of a garden.

I suspect that one reason Derrida enjoyed travelling the world so much was because it allowed him some respite from the bitchy, sectarian, backstabbing, backscratching climate of Parisian intellectual life, which this superb biography faithfully records. What the book fails to underline quite as heavily is how waspish the maitre himself could be.

Two dramatic moments stand out in Derrida's subsequent career. Travelling to communist Prague in 1981 to address a secretly organised philosophy seminar, he was arrested and charged with drug smuggling. It seems the authorities saw the dismantling of binary oppositions as a threat to the state. The police officer who had planted the drugs in Derrida's suitcase was himself later arrested for drug trafficking.

Six years later, Derrida's life was again disrupted, this time by the revelation that his recently dead friend, the critic Paul de Man, had contributed antisemitic articles to the pro-German Belgian press during the second world war. Shattered by the news, Derrida wrote a long essay in De Man's defence – which must rank among the most shamelessly disingenuous texts of modern times.

Benoît Peeters has ransacked the voluminous Derrida archives and interviewed scores of his friends and colleagues. The result is a marvellously compelling account, lucidly translated by Andrew Brown. The man who emerges from this portrait is an agonised soul with sudden outbreaks of gaiety, an astonishingly original thinker with more than a dash of vanity who nevertheless made himself fully available to the humblest student.

In personal conversation he was that most admirable of intellectuals, one visibly relieved not to have to speak of intellectual matters. He was one of the latest in an honourable lineage of anti-philosophers – from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Marx to Freud, Adorno, Wittgenstein and Walter Benjamin – who could say what they had to say only by inventing a new style of writing and philosophising.

Not all of Derrida's writing is to everyone's taste. He had an irritating habit of overusing the rhetorical question, which lends itself easily to parody: "What is it, to speak? How can I even speak of this? Who is this 'I' who speaks of speaking?"

Even so, the Cambridge backwoodsmen were wrong. Derrida, who died of cancer in 2004 urging his friends to affirm life, was no nihilist. Nor did he want to blow up western civilisation with a stick of conceptual dynamite. He simply wished to make us less arrogantly assured that when we speak of truth, love, identity and authority, we know exactly what we mean.

• Terry Eagleton's Why Marx Was Right is published by Yale University Press.

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What would Rousseau make of our selfish age? | Terry Eagleton

300 years after Rousseau's birth, the great Enlightenment philosopher would surely be horrified by modern Europe

Few thinkers have left their fingerprints on the modern age as indelibly as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the tricentenary of whose birth we celebrate on Thursday (28 June).. He was a philosopher who helped shape the destiny of nations, which is more than can be said for Pythagoras or AC Grayling. He was also a political visionary of stunning originality, a potent influence on the French revolution and a source of inspiration for the Romantics. Those who like their fiction drenched in lofty moral sentiment can also claim him as a great novelist.

Much of what one might call the modern sensibility was this thinker's creation. It is in Rousseau's writing above all that history begins to turn from upper-class honour to middle-class humanitarianism. Pity, sympathy and compassion lie at the centre of his moral vision. Values associated with the feminine begin to infiltrate social existence as a whole, rather than being confined to the domestic sphere. Gentlemen begin to weep in public, while children are viewed as human beings in their own right rather than defective adults.

Above all, Rousseau is the explorer of that dark continent, the modern self. It is no surprise that he wrote one of the most magnificent autobiographies of all time, his Confessions. Personal experience starts to take on a significance it never had for Plato or Descartes. What matters now is less objective truth than truth-to-self – a passionate conviction that one's identity is uniquely precious, and that expressing it as freely and richly as possible is a sacred duty. In this belief, Rousseau is a forerunner not only of the Romantics, but of the liberals, existentialists and spiritual individualists of modern times.

It is true that he seems to have held the view that no identity was more uniquely precious than his own. For all his cult of tenderness and affection, Rousseau was not the kind of man with whom one would share one's picnic. He was the worst kind of hypochondriac – one who really is always ill – and that most dangerous of paranoiacs – one who really is persecuted. Even so, at the heart of an 18th-century Enlightenment devoted to reason and civilisation, this maverick intellectual spoke up for sentiment and nature. He was not, to be sure, as besotted by the notion of the noble savage as some have considered. But he was certainly a scourge of the idea of civilisation, which struck him for the most part as exploitative and corrupt.

In this, he was a notable precursor of Karl Marx. Private property, he wrote, brings war, poverty and class conflict in its wake. It converts "clever usurpation into inalienable right". Most social order is a fraud perpetrated by the rich on the poor to protect their privileges. The law, he considered, generally backs the strong over the weak; justice is largely a weapon of violence and domination, while culture, science, the arts and religion are harnessed to the task of preserving the status quo. The institution of the state has "bound new fetters on the poor and given new powers to the rich". For the benefit of a few ambitious men, he comments, "the human race has been subjected to labour, servitude and misery".

He was not, as it happens, opposed to private property as such. His outlook was that of the petty-bourgeois peasant, clinging to his hard-won independence in the face of power and privilege. He sometimes writes as though any form of dependence on others is despicable. Yet he was a radical egalitarian in an age when such thinkers were hard to find. Almost uniquely for his age, he also believed in the absolute sovereignty of the people. To bow to a law one did not have a hand in creating was a recipe for tyranny. Self-determination lay at the root of all ethics and politics. Human beings might misuse their freedom, but they were not truly human without it.

What would this giant of Geneva have thought of Europe 300 years on from his birth? He would no doubt have been appalled by the drastic shrinking of the public sphere. His greatest work, The Social Contract, speaks up for the rights of the citizenry in the teeth of private interests. He would also be struck by the way the democracy he cherished so dearly is under siege from corporate power and a manipulative media. Society, he taught, was a matter of common bonds, not just a commercial transaction. In true republican fashion, it was a place where men and women could flourish as ends in themselves, not as a set of devices for promoting their selfish interests.

The same, he thought, should be true of education. Rousseau ranks among the great educational theorists of the modern era, even if he was the last man to put in charge of a classroom. Young adults, he thought, should be allowed to develop their capabilities in their distinctive way. They should also delight in doing so as an end in itself. In the higher education systems of today's world, this outlandish idea is almost dead on its feet. It is nearly as alien as the notion that the purpose of education is to serve the empire. Universities are no longer educational in any sense of the word that Rousseau would have recognised. Instead, they have become unabashed instruments of capital. Confronted with this squalid betrayal, one imagines he would have felt sick and oppressed. As, indeed, he usually did.

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What would Rousseau make of our selfish age? | Terry Eagleton

300 years after Rousseau's birth, the great Enlightenment philosopher would surely be horrified by modern Europe

Few thinkers have left their fingerprints on the modern age as indelibly as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the tricentenary of whose birth we celebrate on Thursday (28 June).. He was a philosopher who helped shape the destiny of nations, which is more than can be said for Pythagoras or AC Grayling. He was also a political visionary of stunning originality, a potent influence on the French revolution and a source of inspiration for the Romantics. Those who like their fiction drenched in lofty moral sentiment can also claim him as a great novelist.

Much of what one might call the modern sensibility was this thinker's creation. It is in Rousseau's writing above all that history begins to turn from upper-class honour to middle-class humanitarianism. Pity, sympathy and compassion lie at the centre of his moral vision. Values associated with the feminine begin to infiltrate social existence as a whole, rather than being confined to the domestic sphere. Gentlemen begin to weep in public, while children are viewed as human beings in their own right rather than defective adults.

Above all, Rousseau is the explorer of that dark continent, the modern self. It is no surprise that he wrote one of the most magnificent autobiographies of all time, his Confessions. Personal experience starts to take on a significance it never had for Plato or Descartes. What matters now is less objective truth than truth-to-self – a passionate conviction that one's identity is uniquely precious, and that expressing it as freely and richly as possible is a sacred duty. In this belief, Rousseau is a forerunner not only of the Romantics, but of the liberals, existentialists and spiritual individualists of modern times.

It is true that he seems to have held the view that no identity was more uniquely precious than his own. For all his cult of tenderness and affection, Rousseau was not the kind of man with whom one would share one's picnic. He was the worst kind of hypochondriac – one who really is always ill – and that most dangerous of paranoiacs – one who really is persecuted. Even so, at the heart of an 18th-century Enlightenment devoted to reason and civilisation, this maverick intellectual spoke up for sentiment and nature. He was not, to be sure, as besotted by the notion of the noble savage as some have considered. But he was certainly a scourge of the idea of civilisation, which struck him for the most part as exploitative and corrupt.

In this, he was a notable precursor of Karl Marx. Private property, he wrote, brings war, poverty and class conflict in its wake. It converts "clever usurpation into inalienable right". Most social order is a fraud perpetrated by the rich on the poor to protect their privileges. The law, he considered, generally backs the strong over the weak; justice is largely a weapon of violence and domination, while culture, science, the arts and religion are harnessed to the task of preserving the status quo. The institution of the state has "bound new fetters on the poor and given new powers to the rich". For the benefit of a few ambitious men, he comments, "the human race has been subjected to labour, servitude and misery".

He was not, as it happens, opposed to private property as such. His outlook was that of the petty-bourgeois peasant, clinging to his hard-won independence in the face of power and privilege. He sometimes writes as though any form of dependence on others is despicable. Yet he was a radical egalitarian in an age when such thinkers were hard to find. Almost uniquely for his age, he also believed in the absolute sovereignty of the people. To bow to a law one did not have a hand in creating was a recipe for tyranny. Self-determination lay at the root of all ethics and politics. Human beings might misuse their freedom, but they were not truly human without it.

What would this giant of Geneva have thought of Europe 300 years on from his birth? He would no doubt have been appalled by the drastic shrinking of the public sphere. His greatest work, The Social Contract, speaks up for the rights of the citizenry in the teeth of private interests. He would also be struck by the way the democracy he cherished so dearly is under siege from corporate power and a manipulative media. Society, he taught, was a matter of common bonds, not just a commercial transaction. In true republican fashion, it was a place where men and women could flourish as ends in themselves, not as a set of devices for promoting their selfish interests.

The same, he thought, should be true of education. Rousseau ranks among the great educational theorists of the modern era, even if he was the last man to put in charge of a classroom. Young adults, he thought, should be allowed to develop their capabilities in their distinctive way. They should also delight in doing so as an end in itself. In the higher education systems of today's world, this outlandish idea is almost dead on its feet. It is nearly as alien as the notion that the purpose of education is to serve the empire. Universities are no longer educational in any sense of the word that Rousseau would have recognised. Instead, they have become unabashed instruments of capital. Confronted with this squalid betrayal, one imagines he would have felt sick and oppressed. As, indeed, he usually did.

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Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton - review

A banal and impudent argument for the uses of religion

The novels of Graham Greene are full of reluctant Christians, men and women who would like to be rid of God but find themselves stuck with him like some lethal addiction. There are, however, reluctant atheists as well, people who long to dunk themselves in the baptismal font but can't quite bring themselves to believe. George Steiner and Roger Scruton have both been among this company at various stages of their careers. The agnostic philosopher Simon Critchley, who currently has a book in the press entitled The Faith of the Faithless, is one of a whole set of leftist thinkers today (Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben) whose work draws deeply on Christian theology. In this respect, the only thing that distinguishes them from the Pope is that they don't believe in God. It is rather like coming across a banker who doesn't believe in profit.

Such reluctant non-belief goes back a long way. Machiavelli thought religious ideas, however vacuous, were a useful way of terrorising the mob. Voltaire rejected the God of Christianity, but was anxious not to infect his servants with his own scepticism. Atheism was fine for the elite, but might breed dissent among the masses. The 18th-century Irish philosopher John Toland, who was rumoured to be the bastard son of a prostitute and a spoilt priest, clung to a "rational" religion himself, but thought the rabble should stick with their superstitions. There was one God for the rich and another for the poor. Edward Gibbon, one of the most notorious sceptics of all time, held that the religious doctrines he despised could still be socially useful. So does the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas today.

Diderot, a doyen of the French Enlightenment, wrote that the Christian gospel might have been a less gloomy affair if Jesus had fondled the breasts of the bridesmaids at Cana and caressed the buttocks of St John. Yet he, too, believed that religion was essential for social unity. Matthew Arnold feared the spread of godlessness among the Victorian working class. It could be countered, he thought, with a poeticised form of a Christianity in which he himself had long ceased to believe. The 19th-century French philosopher Auguste Comte, an out-and-out materialist, designed an ideal society complete with secular versions of God, priests, sacraments, prayer and feast days.

There is something deeply disingenuous about this whole tradition. "I don't believe myself, but it is politically prudent that you should" is the slogan of thinkers supposedly devoted to the integrity of the intellect. If the Almighty goes out of the window, how are social order and moral self-discipline to be maintained? It took the barefaced audacity of Friedrich Nietzsche to point out that if God was dead, then so was Man – or at least the conception of humanity favoured by the guardians of social order. The problem was not so much that God had inconveniently expired; it was that men and women were cravenly pretending that he was still alive, and thus refusing to revolutionise their idea of themselves.

God may be dead, but Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists is a sign that the tradition from Voltaire to Arnold lives on. The book assumes that religious beliefs are a lot of nonsense, but that they remain indispensible to civilised existence. One wonders how this impeccably liberal author would react to being told that free speech and civil rights were all bunkum, but that they had their social uses and so shouldn't be knocked. Perhaps he might have the faintest sense of being patronised. De Botton claims that one can be an atheist while still finding religion "sporadically useful, interesting and consoling", which makes it sound rather like knocking up a bookcase when you are feeling a bit low. Since Christianity requires one, if need be, to lay down one's life for a stranger, he must have a strange idea of consolation. Like many an atheist, his theology is rather conservative and old-fashioned.

De Botton does not want people literally to believe, but he remains a latter-day Matthew Arnold, as his high Victorian language makes plain. Religion "teaches us to be polite, to honour one another, to be faithful and sober", as well as instructing us in "the charms of community". It all sounds tediously neat and civilised. This is not quite the gospel of a preacher who was tortured and executed for speaking up for justice, and who warned his comrades that if they followed his example they would meet with the same fate. In De Botton's well-manicured hands, this bloody business becomes a soothing form of spiritual therapy, able to "promote morality (and) engender a spirit of community". It is really a version of the Big Society.

Like Comte, De Botton believes in the need for a host of "consoling, subtle or just charming rituals" to restore a sense of community in a fractured society. He even envisages a new kind of restaurant in which strangers would be forced to sit together and open up their hearts to one another. There would be a Book of Agape on hand, which would instruct diners to speak to each other for prescribed lengths of time on prescribed topics. Quite how this will prevent looting and rioting is not entirely clear.

In Comtist style, De Botton also advocates secular versions of such sacred events as the Jewish Day of Atonement, the Catholic Mass and the Zen Buddhist tea ceremony. It is surprising he does not add Celtic versus Rangers. He is also keen on erecting billboards that carry moral or spiritual rather than commercial messages, perhaps (one speculates) in the style of "Leave Young Ladies Alone" or "Tortoises Have Feelings As Well". It is an oddly Orwellian vision for a self-proclaimed libertarian. Religious faith is reduced to a set of banal moral tags. We are invited to contemplate St Joseph in order to learn "how to face the trials of the workplace with a modest and uncomplaining temper". Not even the Walmart management have thought of that one. As a role model for resplendent virtue, we are offered not St Francis of Assisi but Warren Buffett.

What the book does, in short, is hijack other people's beliefs, empty them of content and redeploy them in the name of moral order, social consensus and aesthetic pleasure. It is an astonishingly impudent enterprise. It is also strikingly unoriginal. Liberal-capitalist societies, being by their nature divided, contentious places, are forever in search of a judicious dose of communitarianism to pin themselves together, and a secularised religion has long been one bogus solution on offer. The late Christopher Hitchens, who some people think is now discovering that his broadside God Is Not Great was slightly off the mark, would have scorned any such project. He did not consider that religion was a convenient fiction. He thought it was disgusting. Now there's something believers can get their teeth into …

• Terry Eagleton's Why Marx Was Right is published by Yale.

ReligionTerry Eagleton
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Leveson inquiry: the frontiers of privacy | Terry Eagleton

The hounding of Sienna Miller is a function of capitalism, and this public inquiry won't change that

By spitting in Sienna Miller's face in order to create a suitably sensational image, the paparazzi remind us of an important point. Nothing in human life is inherently private. Certainly not urinating, defecating and copulating, which only a few centuries ago could be performed in public with no sense of shame. Bedrooms were not particularly private places in medieval Europe, and wanting to relieve yourself unobserved might be considered as eccentric as wanting to crack jokes in utter solitude.

The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture. In pre-modern Europe, the three great spiritual or symbolic areas of existence – religion, sexuality and art – were all public affairs. Religion was a mighty political force, in the alliance between throne and altar. Sexuality was a question of dynastic marriage, the union of landed estates and the generation of labour power. The artist was the paid hireling of church, court or state.

All this meant that art, religion and sexuality really counted. They carried vital weight in the public sphere. In fact they carried so much weight that you could be burned at the stake for heresy, have your door broken down by the purity police, or be instructed by the ruling powers what to write, paint or compose. With the advent of modernity, however, some much-needed privacy set in. The privatisation of God was a case in point. Religion for Protestantism became an issue between you and the Almighty. It was no particular concern of the state. As for sexuality, you could now hook up with whoever took your fancy, as the concept of romantic love began to take root.

Yet there was a paradox here. Privatising art, religion and sexuality set them free, but it also sailed dangerously close to trivialising them. Like breeding gerbils or collecting toby jugs, they were now nobody's business but your own. If nobody was burned at the stake any longer, it was partly because spiritual values had less and less force in a materialist society. Few people complained about outrageous experiments in art, since art seemed pretty pointless in any case. If you could leap into bed with whoever you liked, it was partly because sexuality had been stripped of its social and political dimensions. The word "private" is related to "privation", suggesting that whatever is withdrawn from the public realm has no real existence. "Private" meant "hands off", but it also meant "of no great importance". So if the person you slept with was of no great importance, what was wrong with having it broadcast to the world?

The modern age has achieved some balance in this respect. We cherish sexual freedom and privacy while believing with our pre-modern ancestors that sexuality is a public, political affair. The state should not forbid contraception, but that is not to say that it should turn a blind eye to domestic violence.

There is one respect, however, in which the balance between public and private is grotesquely awry. It is a feature of capitalism that the public world of commerce, finance, trade and manufacture falls under the sway of private interests. And this includes the media. So the publicising of the private, as in the hounding of Sienna Miller, is a result of the privatising of the public.

In the end, it is because the media are driven by the power and wealth of private individuals that they turn private lives into public spectacles. If every private life is now potentially public property, it is because private property has undermined public responsibility. It is our respect for human privacy which makes phone hacking so repugnant, and our respect for private profit which allows it to flourish. This is a contradiction it will take more than a parliamentary committee to resolve.

• For legal reasons comments on this article will not be open to comments

Leveson inquirySienna MillerNewspapers & magazinesNational newspapersNewspapersPhone hackingPress intrusionTerry Eagleton
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Leveson inquiry: the frontiers of privacy | Terry Eagleton

The hounding of Sienna Miller is a function of capitalism, and this public inquiry won't change that

By spitting in Sienna Miller's face in order to create a suitably sensational image, the paparazzi remind us of an important point. Nothing in human life is inherently private. Certainly not urinating, defecating and copulating, which only a few centuries ago could be performed in public with no sense of shame. Bedrooms were not particularly private places in medieval Europe, and wanting to relieve yourself unobserved might be considered as eccentric as wanting to crack jokes in utter solitude.

The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture. In pre-modern Europe, the three great spiritual or symbolic areas of existence – religion, sexuality and art – were all public affairs. Religion was a mighty political force, in the alliance between throne and altar. Sexuality was a question of dynastic marriage, the union of landed estates and the generation of labour power. The artist was the paid hireling of church, court or state.

All this meant that art, religion and sexuality really counted. They carried vital weight in the public sphere. In fact they carried so much weight that you could be burned at the stake for heresy, have your door broken down by the purity police, or be instructed by the ruling powers what to write, paint or compose. With the advent of modernity, however, some much-needed privacy set in. The privatisation of God was a case in point. Religion for Protestantism became an issue between you and the Almighty. It was no particular concern of the state. As for sexuality, you could now hook up with whoever took your fancy, as the concept of romantic love began to take root.

Yet there was a paradox here. Privatising art, religion and sexuality set them free, but it also sailed dangerously close to trivialising them. Like breeding gerbils or collecting toby jugs, they were now nobody's business but your own. If nobody was burned at the stake any longer, it was partly because spiritual values had less and less force in a materialist society. Few people complained about outrageous experiments in art, since art seemed pretty pointless in any case. If you could leap into bed with whoever you liked, it was partly because sexuality had been stripped of its social and political dimensions. The word "private" is related to "privation", suggesting that whatever is withdrawn from the public realm has no real existence. "Private" meant "hands off", but it also meant "of no great importance". So if the person you slept with was of no great importance, what was wrong with having it broadcast to the world?

The modern age has achieved some balance in this respect. We cherish sexual freedom and privacy while believing with our pre-modern ancestors that sexuality is a public, political affair. The state should not forbid contraception, but that is not to say that it should turn a blind eye to domestic violence.

There is one respect, however, in which the balance between public and private is grotesquely awry. It is a feature of capitalism that the public world of commerce, finance, trade and manufacture falls under the sway of private interests. And this includes the media. So the publicising of the private, as in the hounding of Sienna Miller, is a result of the privatising of the public.

In the end, it is because the media are driven by the power and wealth of private individuals that they turn private lives into public spectacles. If every private life is now potentially public property, it is because private property has undermined public responsibility. It is our respect for human privacy which makes phone hacking so repugnant, and our respect for private profit which allows it to flourish. This is a contradiction it will take more than a parliamentary committee to resolve.

• For legal reasons this article will not be open to comments

Leveson inquirySienna MillerNewspapers & magazinesNational newspapersNewspapersPhone hackingPress intrusionTerry Eagleton
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Occupy London are true followers of Jesus, even if they may now despise religion | Terry Eagleton

Jesus's fury with the money changers was born of anger with the system itself. Yet unlike the campers, his protest was violent

For the moment at least, the custodians of St Paul's seem to have backed down. In a mildly comic inversion, the dean has carted himself off while the protestors could stay put until 2012. Even so, the cathedral staff can take comfort from the fact that the demonstrators are camped down peacefully outside their sacred building, whereas their own master was far less well behaved. Rather than squat down with a placard outside the Jerusalem temple, he staged his protest within its walls, and it was a violent rather than peaceful one.

The fracas Jesus created in this holiest of places, driving out the money changers and overturning their tables, was probably enough to get him executed. To strike at the temple was to strike at the heart of Judaism. This itinerant upstart with a country-bumpkin background was issuing a direct challenge to the authority of the high priests. Even some of his comrades would probably have seen this astonishing act of defiance as nothing short of sacrilegious.

We are not told whether the riot police (temple guards) dragged him off, but they would surely have felt fully justified in doing so. Some members of the Jewish ruling caste would have been searching for an excuse to shut the mouth of this populist agitator. They were fearful that, in the highly charged atmosphere of Passover, he might trigger an uprising that would bring the full force of Roman imperial power down on the heads of the hapless Jews. If the priests really were looking for an excuse to do away with him, Jesus seems to have handed it to them on a plate. Not long after this piece of political theatre, he was dead. Not only dead, but crucified, and crucifixion was a punishment the Romans reserved mainly for political offences. You were pinned up on public view as a warning to other prospective rebels.

What did Jesus have against money changers? It can't have been that he was opposed to commercial transactions. In fact, he seems to have had a money man, Judas Iscariot, on his own staff, though admittedly not the kind of man to give accountancy a good name. Nor would he have thought that religion should have no truck with such lowly affairs. "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's" is not a declaration that politics is one thing and religion another. Any Jew familiar with scripture would know that the things that are God's include justice, compassion, welcoming the immigrant and protecting the poor from the violence of the rich.

It was the system of which the money changers were part that probably stirred Jesus to such fury. They were there because people came to the temple to make sacrifice, and to do so they might bring a lamb or a couple of doves with them from home. This, however, could mean lugging their animals a fair distance only to find on arrival that they were rejected as acceptable offerings by the temple priests, who might discover some blemish or impurity in them. So it was a safer bet to buy an animal on the spot, and for this you might need to change your local currency into the metropolitan coinage.

There was a view, however, that this made something of a mockery of true sacrifice. The gift you were offering was not really your own, or at least had only been so for a brief time. You needed to give God something that was part of your life, not something off the peg. Like the Pharisees, with whom he had a lot more in common than most Christians care to think, Jesus seems to have been of this opinion. He thought that a gift should be in some way intimately expressive of the giver, and that the temple system broke this vital bond. The whole process had become automated and depersonalised.

In this, Jesus was at one with a later Jewish prophet, Karl Marx, whose concept of alienation involves just such a break between the product and the producer. Under capitalist conditions, Marx thought, men and women cease to see themselves reflected in the work of their own hands. Jesus was not an anti-capitalist, any more than Dante was a Darwinist. But he was ready to risk death in order to defend what he saw as an authentic form of giving against a system that impoverished it. As such, he would probably have understood what those currently shivering outside St Paul's are up to. They have certainly managed to throw the ruling caste of a holy place into an unholy panic, just as he did. And to that extent they are his followers, however much some of them may now understandably despise religion.

Occupy LondonLondonProtestOccupy movementAnglicanismReligionChristianityTerry Eagleton
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