John Ralston Saul’s sprawling intellectual history argues that the modern West did not inherit the Enlightenment’s reason so much as hollow it out.

What began as a tool for resisting superstition and arbitrary power, he claims, hardened into an administrative faith: rule by experts, systems, bureaucracies and professional elites who present political choices as matters of technical necessity. Across government, business, education and culture, rationality becomes less a means of judgment than a language for avoiding responsibility.

The argument is deliberately panoramic, ranging from Voltaire, the Jesuits and nationalism to corporate management and twentieth-century geopolitics. Saul is often sweeping, sometimes theatrical, and his historical connections do not always withstand close pressure. But the book’s attack on managerialism, technocracy and institutional self-protection remains unnervingly recognisable. It is best read not as neutral history but as an ambitious polemic about how systems acquire authority by pretending they have escaped ideology. For readers interested in political thought, institutional power and critiques of the modern administrative state.

Penguin Books, 1993, second printing paperback. Light edge wear and creasing; pages mildly age-toned.