Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe is the best non-fiction book published in 2009. It is also a very reliable Rorshach test. Consider the reviews from Michelle Goldberg, prominent feminist critic of the evangelical right, and Perry Anderson, a brilliant, idiosyncratic left-wing historian, to the frankly embarrassing reviews by NYU law professor Stephen Holmes and Berlin-based author Gal Beckerman. One gets the impression that Beckerman didn’t actually read Caldwell’s book — I’m sure this isn’t literally true, but that’s the impression one gets from lines that accuse the book of lacking nuance or that maintain, bizarrely, that Caldwell’s analysis “drips with disgust” for Europe.

And Holmes’s review is simply tiresome: he objects to Caldwell’s (clever) title, and he claims that views embraced by many in the European center and left are “fringe-conservative.” Oddly, Holmes doesn’t seem to understand that the Christian tradition is diverse and in many respects contradictory:

Readers may be forgiven for feeling lost at this point. Isn’t Christianity one of the cultural sources of humanitarian universalism? After all, Christ allegedly died for all mankind. That is obviously what a secular philosopher such as Jürgen Habermas has in mind when he writes, in a passage cited by Caldwell, that “Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization.” So how can Caldwell apotheosize Christianity for its contribution to European culture and then go on to unmask the moral decay and self-loathing that motivates the universalism that is said, in his own book, to be Christianity’s most inspiring legacy?

Actually, readers can’t be forgiven for feeling lost at this point. Like the Islamic tradition, Christianity isn’t monolithic, and its influence manifests itself in essentially post-Christian societies in lots of different ways. Caldwell explains this in impressively lucid language.

Holmes mischaracterizes Caldwell’s arguments throughout the essay, not least on the subject of the role of women. Goldberg, an authority on the subject of women’s freedom, sees things differently.

Still, he makes a convincing if disturbing case when he argues that immigration is exacting “a steep price in freedom. The multiculturalism that has been Europe’s main way of managing mass immigration requires the sacrifice of liberties that natives had come to think of as rights.” This is in some ways an overly broad generalization, but it deserves more than a knee-jerk response. It is certainly unsettling, for example, to learn that the British Department for Work and Pensions is now giving benefits and recognition to the additional spouses in polygamous marriages. And there is no question that the fear of offending Muslim pieties has impeded freedom of speech in many European countries.

Moreover, Caldwell offers a highly sympathetic take on European social democracy and the anxieties and anger of Europe’s young Muslims, something Holmes fails to appreciate in his rather crude reading. At times, Holmes seems to make things up out of whole cloth, e.g.,

In addition, America has retained the moral fiber that Europe has lost. It is more Christian and more convinced that Christianity is morally superior to Islam. It is also less squeamish about using force to defend itself abroad (Iraq, Afghanistan) or at home. When Caldwell remarks that “a quarter of the prison inmates in the world are held in the United States,” he means this not as criticism but as praise. Reflecting on U.S. “policies that are distasteful to most Europeans,” such as the death penalty, he observes that such toughness means that “American cities and suburbs are extremely inhospitable places for immigrants who are criminally inclined.” This is one of the principal ways in which America, unlike Europe, “exerts Procrustean pressure on its immigrants to conform.” Most important, the United States believes in itself, while “Europeans are confused about whether they are citizens of the world or citizens of their own nations.” No wonder they can neither defend their borders nor distinguish clearly between members and nonmembers of their community.

Far from praising the American outlook, Caldwell is simply making neutral observations. The truth is that Holmes is smuggling in his own assumptions; Caldwell, like many conservatives ranging from evangelical conservatives like Charles Colson to fairly secular Muslims like myself, believes that mass incarceration is deeply problematic — but that’s not the subject at hand. Anyone who has even passing familiarity with Caldwell’s work should know that he is far from a reflexive champion of the use of force; he is, in fact, a sharp critic of what he sees as neoconservative excess. But this doesn’t fit Holmes’s cartoon view of the world.

The embarrassing extrapolations continue:

Not Christ-like concern for the weak and the marginalized but readiness for organized violence is presumably why America’s culture strikes the editors of the Weekly Standard as less drab than Europe’s. America shares nationalist bellicosity with some parts of the Muslim world, and this is a good thing.

At this point, we’re not talking about Caldwell at all; rather, we’re talking about a collectivity that exists mostly in Holmes’s imagination. Believe it or not, Caldwell doesn’t agree with his fellow editors in every regard.

It’s worth noting that Holmes’s critical limitations extend to his work on left-of-center writers as well. Holmes was widely praised for a lacerating review of Roberto Unger, a daringly unconventional thinker who, alas, writes in an elliptical manner that Holmes evidently found difficult to understand.

Anderson, one of my favorite writers, is also very critical of Caldwell’s Reflections. Yet Anderson has a first-rate intellect, and his essay is well worth your time. Whereas Holmes is engaging an imagined neoconservative mafioso, Anderson is familiar with his subject, presumably because Anderson reads widely.

Christopher Caldwell is a white crow among American journalists today, to use a Russian expression. Not merely is his cultural range perhaps without equal – more than just fluent in the major European languages, he is conversant with what is written in them. But in the cast of his intelligence, he is quite unlike most reporters or commentators. Although his background is in literature, it is a philosophical turn of mind that most distinguishes his writing from his peers. What typically attracts his interest are dilemmas – conceptual, moral, social – obscured or passed over in standard discourse about leading, or even marginal, issues of the day. About these, his conclusions are nearly always unconventional – in one way or another, quizzical or unsettling.

This familiarity allows Anderson to actually land some blows, as in this passage:

His characterization of the general historical contrast between post-war immigration in America and Europe is a tour de force of hard-headed pertinence and trenchancy. It is not exhaustive, since Reflections on the Revolution in Europe says little or nothing about the racist discrimination, harassment and animosity so widely meted out to Muslim or other arrivals from overseas, by officials and natives alike. Caldwell explains that his book focusses on “the difficulties immigration poses to European society”, not “the difficulties faced by immigrants”. The two can hardly be separated, however, as if the objective experience of immigrants at the hands of European society were irrelevant to their subjective attitudes towards it, about which Caldwell writes at length. Tacitly, he is certainly aware of this side of the situation, though choosing not to dwell on it. But there is a much larger dimension to which he appears completely blind.

This is a fair point.

I’m amazed by the contrast between the essays by Holmes and Anderson, and you will be too. Remember that Anderson’s case against the Iraq war, made with characteristic intellectual daring in the London Review of Books, rested on his belief that states like Iraq are entitled to develop chemical and biological weapons as a defense against great powers. As for Holmes, it’s not clear to me that he’s ever said anything interesting at all. That’s not a crime, to be sure. Neither is badly misrepresenting Christopher Caldwell’s book. But you’ll forgive me for being disappointed and even a little peeved.