Michael J. Mazarr's book is a bold and passionate attempt to explain holistically the nature of radical Islamism—a topic that, nearly eight years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, continues to receive much attention from a growing number of political scientists. Mazarr's main argument is that radical Islamism is best understood as a “violent, reactionary form of antimodernism” (p. ix)—indeed, as the latest in a series of antimodern political and philosophical rebellions. Unmodern Men in the Modern World sets out to offer a model explaining how these movements emerge, mature, reach power, attract adherents, and formulate ideologies. To that end, the book proceeds to compare radical Islamism with three other “antimodern” movements—German national socialism, Russian Bolshevism, and Japanese imperialist nationalism.

The clash with modernity, Mazarr argues, sets in motion a process of social and psychological upheaval. By imposing alien value systems on societies, modernity creates turbulence in the identities of populations, resentment at the loss of traditions, helplessness, fear, and a sense of an overarching national, moral, and cultural decline: “Suddenly, it's no longer certain what it means to be a member of your people. If everyone is parroting generic global values and habits, what makes your society unique in a globalizing world?” (p. 34). Ultimately, Mazarr argues, the main mechanism at play is psychological—“an angry, desperate leap toward wholeness, toward identity, toward dignity” (60). He finds the roots of the psychological toll of modernity in the philosophical school of existentialism, to which he devotes an entire chapter. He devotes additional chapters to the “identity entrepreneurs” that spearhead the antimodern movement and, in what is the best chapter of the book, to the properties of the ideology they help formulate.

To his credit, Mazarr also offers a number of policy recommendations, weighing in on an important debate regarding the motivations of radical Islamists, and whether or not it is primarily U.S. policies—including America's close alignment with Israel—that provide ideological ammunition to terrorists attacking the United States. That argument has been made most forcefully by Michael Scheuer, the once-anonymous author of two important books on Al Qaeda and U.S. counterterrorism strategy. Mazarr adopts a middle ground in this debate: U.S. policies do matter, he states, but radical Islamists “worry about Muslims abandoning the true path of Islam as much or more than they worry about U.S. troops on the ground in Muslim countries” (p. 225).

The author argues that U.S. national security policy must shift away from traditional military thinking and instead become “more nuanced, anticipatory, and social-psychological in its ends and means” (p. 207). To reach that goal, the United States should abandon the concept of “war on terror” and return terrorism to the domain of crime; focus on the preconditions, rather than on the formal structure, of democratic regimes; engage the Muslim world more broadly in order to rebuild damaged relations; start a dialogue with groups that may condemn the West, and make concessions to them when necessary; and finally, adjust policies in order for the United States to become a more “honest broker,” especially in the context of Israeli-Palestinian relations (p. 227).

The book is grand in its scope, and Mazarr is to be commended for taking on the herculean task of trying to make sense of radical Islamism, an immensely complex movement. Of particular value are the insights into the sociopsychological effects of modernization on human beings confronted with such dislocating alien forces. However, the book also suffers from a number of theoretical and methodological weaknesses that detract from the power of its argument.

The first is the incoherent use of the term “antimodernism” throughout the book. Thus, Mazarr at times explains it as opposition to modernity, at other times as opposition to modernization, and in still other sections as a failure to cope with the effects of modernization—the last being the most convincing of the three definitions. Nowhere is his poor choice of words more apparent than when he writes that these movements are “antimodern and not antimodern at the same time; their ranks are filled with angry, frustrated groups shut out from modernity who badly want to get in” (p. 158). Why, one wonders, if these groups are “both antimodern and not antimodern,” are they labeled simply antimodern? A related problem is that the author seems to employ the terms “modernization” and “Westernization” interchangeably, thus ignoring important differences between the two concepts. Quoted passages from the writings of the radical Islamist theoretician Sayyed Qutb suggest that it is actually Westernization, not modernization, that Salafis and other Islamists really oppose: “‘The West,’” Qutb writes, for example, “‘can no longer provide the values necessary for [the flourishing of humanity]’” (p. 7).

A second set of weaknesses relates to the author's case selection. Mazarr does not specify the universe of antimodern movements beyond the four discussed in the book. As a result, it is impossible for the reader to know the relevance of the findings for other antimodern movements from the four case studies, and, thus, the relevance for this type of movement in general.

Many readers will no doubt also raise objections to Mazarr's substantive discussion of these four cases. His categorization of Russian Bolshevism as an antimodern movement is especially likely to generate strong resistance among historians and political scientists, given that Marxism was and is, by definition, concerned with the future rather than the past.

Despite its weaknesses, Unmodern Men is an interesting read that contributes to our understanding of the challenges of modernization, especially as they play out at the individual level. It also identifies a number of important parallels in the four movements described. Whether these similarities exist because these movements are all antimodern is less clear. An alternative explanation is that the similarities in the four cases are not due to their “antimodern” properties but simply to the fact that they are ideologies—and, as such, possessive of similar qualities at their core.