The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West. Michael Walsh.
Encounter Books. (2017 paperback edition.) 232 pages.

Our civilization seems to be in the grip of a trance begging to be broken. Many in Europe and North America have asked how such a prosperous and free culture could become so radically transformed. How could a civilization once so rich in faith, innovation, goodwill, and appreciation for truth and beauty come to celebrate secularist compulsion, collectivism, identity politics, and vulgarity?

This theme of false illusion is central to Michael Walsh’s extraordinary book The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West, first published in 2015 and just released in a new paperback edition. It is a powerful story of how harmful ideas cross the transatlantic sphere.

The neo-Marxist thinkers who invented critical theory coalesced at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt after World War I. The core idea was to foment radical social change and undermine “repressive” Western culture by advancing roughly the premise that all ideas – except theirs, of course – should be criticized and challenged. The attacks on the institutions that make...