‘How did We Get Here? Where are We Headed?’

The central aim of Rohit Prasad in The Last Dance of Rationality is to situate the contemporary undoing of the World Order—the ‘great unravelling’ (p. ix)—in the slow but sure demise of the ‘age of rationality’ (p. xvi). According to Prasad, this demise entails that the fundamental precepts of the European Enlightenment, viz., ‘reason, empirical observation, and individuality’ (p. x), are coming undone due to inherent contradictions and are in the phase of being replaced by ‘new cognitive foundations’ (p. x). Prasad contends that while the age inaugurated by Enlightenment precepts led to multi-domain progress in politics, economics, social life and technological advancement, it also brought into being intense contradictions. These contradictions which Prasad dubs as ‘dualities’ (p. x) are a consequence of the very progress which the Enlightenment helped usher in. Consequently, we see an age of abundance paralleling a global debt crisis of an unprecedented magnitude; the project of democracy in the political sphere giving way to electoral autocracies; the coming revolution of AI in the technological domain challenging human freedom and economic prospects; and finally, a new realignment of great powers in the emergent geopolitical landscape potentially upending the interdependent economic growth pattern of the preceding decades. This multi-layered and interconnected unravelling, in Prasad’s framing, represents the final stand of the ‘ideology of rationality’ (p. xi), which has underpinned the dominant worldview since the rise of Europeans on the world stage.