Pratap Bhanu Mehta on Liberalism, Nihilism, and the Collapse of Sincerity

ELI5/TLDR

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, one of India’s sharpest political thinkers, sits down with Shruti Rajagopalan and says the quiet part loud: liberals spent thirty years tweaking institutions while the actual problem was that politics had quietly turned nihilistic — people willing to burn the house down rather than lose, and a public that no longer agrees on what truth even is. He traces this back to a deeper sickness — the collapse of sincerity in communication, the fusion of public and private, the rise of nationalism as the only ideology left that can give modern life meaning, and the steady hollowing out of professions like law and medicine that used to be the connective tissue of a democracy. He’s not nostalgic and he’s not despairing. He’s diagnosing.

The Full Story

The nihilism that wasn’t on the syllabus

For most of Mehta’s career, the conversation in policy circles was about institutional design. What incentives should judges have. How parliaments should work. Where the global trading order needed repair. Sensible, technical, ameliorative.

Then something happened that the syllabus did not prepare anyone for. The threat to institutions stopped coming from inside — bureaucratic decay, bad incentives, the usual suspects. It started coming from political forces that simply did not care what the institutional design was, and were willing, if they could not win within the rules, to torch the rules themselves.

Mehta reaches for an old Leo Strauss essay on German nihilism for the language. Nihilism here is not “nothing matters.” It is something more specific. It is the willingness to call for radical change without the foggiest idea of what comes next, and to put at risk every gain of the existing order in the process.

“What do you do if there are, in society, forces that have a degree of ruthlessness and a willingness to, as it were, burn the house down rather than merely disagree or let the other side win?”

To this he adds disinhibition — the dropping of restraint, the casual valorization of violence, the upgrading of political opponents from “people I disagree with” into existential enemies. Once you have made that move, everything is permitted.

The historian’s joke he repeats: if you want to understand the lead-up to World War I, don’t read social scientists. Read Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. Cultures have been here before. The fix is not better committee design.

Why good people losing the plot is worse than bad people winning

Rajagopalan brings up an old line from her PhD adviser Peter Boettke. Economists do not say “bad people do bad things.” They say bad institutions produce bad outcomes regardless of who is in the chair.

Mehta agrees, and pushes deeper. The real worry is not the existence of bad actors — that’s been true forever. It is that we no longer agree on what the standards of right and wrong even are, independent of who lives up to them. Critique used to mean: here is the principle I am defending, here is where you have fallen short of it. Now critique is just a stick to beat the other side with. The principle is decorative.

He invokes Montesquieu for the bystanders. Security, Montesquieu warned, breeds timidity. The most comfortable classes in the world’s democracies have become exactly that — timid, conviction-light, courage-free. The red lines that mattered are eroding, and red lines are very hard to put back.

The civilising process is real — and it isn’t enough

Rajagopalan pushes back gently. Look at the data, she says. We are kinder to women, to children, to animals. Vegetarianism is rising. Violence in everyday life is falling. Norms at the micro level have actually progressed. So how do we square that with the macro collapse?

Mehta accepts the observation but reframes it. Sociologist Norbert Elias called this the civilising process — over centuries, societies tame more and more forms of violence. We don’t duel anymore. We don’t do eye-for-an-eye. That long arc is real and probably irreversible.

But two ideologies have triumphed in the modern era, and they pull in opposite directions. One is feminism — the steady push toward moral equality, against patriarchy, toward softer public mores. The other is nationalism.

“It’s the only modern ideology that can consecrate death. It’s an absolutely astonishing psychological fact about nationalism. It is the one ideology that can colonize our sense of meaning.”

Think of it like this. Religion used to be the thing that could justify dying. Nationalism quietly took that job over. It’s the only modern frame that can sanctify violence, and once you’ve said “this is for the nation,” an enormous number of moral barriers fall away. Every contemporary authoritarianism leans on it. Even economic life gets nationalized — your country’s GDP growth rate becomes a personal identity marker.

The civilising process plus nationalism is a strange compound. We are gentler to our pets and crueller in geopolitics, and both are true at the same time.

The collapse of sincerity

Around 2020, Mehta wrote a column called “The Collapse of Sincerity.” The puzzle behind it was small and everyday. If you write anything publicly now, you will be misinterpreted. Not in the philosophical sense that all interpretation is misinterpretation — in the ordinary, painful sense.

Philosopher Paul Grice, decades ago, laid out the basic preconditions for human communication to work at all. You have to attribute sincerity to the speaker. You have to share enough context to know how a word is being used, who it’s aimed at, what it’s doing.

Social media has detonated the context. The same sentence lands in front of a thousand audiences simultaneously, each with a different decoder. Praise gets read as veiled attack. Silence on one topic gets read as a position on another. Mehta puts it dryly:

“In at least a sociological sense Derrida has won out, that all signs have become indeterminate.”

Once sincerity is impossible to attribute and context impossible to reconstruct, language collapses into two functions: pure self-expression, or fighting words. Knowledge is now made “for cutting, not for understanding.”

The companion casualty is the line between public and private. Private conversation used to be a space where you could try out a thought, be wrong, get corrected, and not have it become your permanent identity. That space is gone. A whispered remark can land on X and stamp you for life. The only rational response is to double down. Self-correction, the quiet engine of intellectual life, gets switched off.

He compares the moment to what happened after the printing revolution — a long period where the structures of trust, authority and credibility all melted, and then, slowly, were rebuilt in new forms. We are probably in the melt phase.

From Rawls to Smith, slowly

Mehta has been moving, over the years, from a Rawlsian frame (institutions, design, incentives, fair terms of cooperation) toward a more Smithian one (moral sentiments, the social fabric, the conditions under which any of this works at all). He hasn’t abandoned Rawls — he says he’s grown fonder of Rawls — but the sociological preconditions have moved to the centre of his attention.

You can build any institution you like. If the people inside it don’t share a moral vocabulary, can’t attribute sincerity to each other, and have no professional identity worth defending, the institution will be hollow within a generation.

The vanished professions

This is where the conversation gets quietly devastating. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Durkheim and Weber bet heavily on the professions. A lawyer who really internalizes “I am an officer of the court” carries a moral identity that disciplines them, commits them to defending institutions, and gives them a source of meaning that is not the market and not the state. Tocqueville, looking at America, called the legal profession “the aristocracy American democracy needs.”

The professions were supposed to be a third leg — distinct from capital (which makes more capital) and from the state (which coerces and legitimizes). Their legitimacy came from knowledge.

“The disappointment has not just been the abdication of judges and the absolutely scandalous performance of the Indian Supreme Court. It has been the abdication of the senior bar.”

Mehta names it plainly. The Indian senior bar — historically untouchable, beyond economic threat — has been unwilling to take on politically inconvenient cases. The lawyer Ram Jethmalani used to say with pride, “I will defend anyone.” That sentence has quietly stopped being said.

The same hollowing has hit medicine, academia, civil service. When doctors become shareholders, when academics become entrepreneurs, when the basis of your professional identity slides from knowledge to capital, the third leg of the stool snaps. The state and the market become the only two games in town. Concentration of power follows.

Inclusion on the cheap

Rajagopalan asks whether this is what you get when you democratize education and the professions too fast. Mehta is careful here. He does not want to blame democratization. The alternative — a closed guild — was morally worse and politically unsustainable.

What India actually did, he argues, was worse than either. It democratized formally without doing the work to make the inclusion substantive.

“We did democratize, but democratized under conditions of institutional design that were designed to produce maximum inequality within that framework of inclusion.”

The Indian legal profession became extraordinarily stratified — a tiny senior bar at the top, a vast mass of first-generation lawyers who can never break in. Indian higher education expanded seats by 25% in a single year post-Mandal without expanding budgets or capacity. The Indian business sector formally liberalized while capital concentrated at the very top. Inclusion in name, oligarchy in substance.

The political cost of this is enormous. You don’t get the gains of inclusion — a confident middle class invested in institutions — and you do get all the pathologies of extreme inequality. The worst of both worlds, frozen into the design.

Smith’s answer to the concentration problem

When Rajagopalan pushes on the Smithian critique of capture, Mehta lays out something he thinks is missed by most readings of Adam Smith. The standard reading is: limit the state, and you limit rent-seeking. True, but partial.

Smith had a parallel argument. Capture works both ways. A society with extremely concentrated private power will always get the state to produce rents in its favour, no matter how small you make the state. Mercantilism, in Smith’s own time, was exactly this.

“Honestly, in the Indian context, [welfare-state rent-seeking] completely pales in comparison with what big capital has been able to extract.”

So the liberal sensibility, properly understood, is a presumptive suspicion against concentrations of power anywhere — state, capital, even a single interpretation of “the people.” Rawls’s preferred economic model, often forgotten, was property-owning democracy with very wide distribution. Same instinct. You need social force to counterbalance social force. Limiting the state alone is not enough.

The three braids of vishwas

Mehta turns to a phrase his colleague Neelanjan Sircar coined for contemporary Indian politics — vishwas, faith. Vertical faith in a leader has replaced horizontal trust between citizens. He sees three sources that have braided together into a single rope.

First, elite disenchantment with institutions. Checks and balances and separation of powers used to be the strength of democracy. Now elites — Indian and American — see them as the Gordian knot stopping you from building infrastructure, energy plants, anything. If a strong leader can just cut through, perhaps it’s worth it.

Second, the failure of the developmental state. The good news, Mehta says, would have been: high growth, translated into health, education, capacity. India failed to do this. So the political equilibrium has shifted to what one chief minister told him is the winning formula — “every government needs to do two-and-a-half schemes well.” Cash transfers, gas cylinders, targeted schemes. Easy to measure, easy to deliver, easy to advertise. A patchwork of competitive favours instead of a welfare state.

Third, the specifically Indian version — the sense that Hindus were a victimized majority, and the rise of a political leadership that could embody that grievance and consecrate it.

“I have literally heard very distinguished business leaders in India say that their support for the government is not instrumental… so long as it delivers on the third dimension, they would continue to support.”

What this government has done, with great skill, is braid all three forms of vishwas — institutional impatience, scheme-based welfare, civilizational grievance — into one narrative.

The miscalculation of the centre and the left, he argues, was treating caste as demographic destiny. People vote their caste, the saying went. Mehta takes the inversion seriously — people cast their votes, and their identities are constantly being renegotiated. The right understood this. They were the genuine postmodernists, treating identity as something politics could construct. The centre and left kept reading from a 1990s social science script that “caste will cut Hindu nationalism” — and watched it not happen.

Why Indian cities are not really urban

Rajagopalan presses on a paradox. India has done the structural transformation. Indians trade across caste lines all the time. Yet endogamy in marriage hasn’t budged. Cities are heavily segregated. Where you can live, who will rent to you, who will marry you — these have moved barely at all.

Mehta takes the question seriously. Segregation, he notes, has proven globally stubborn. But on the Indian specifics, he reaches for Ambedkar’s “social endosmosis” — the slow mixing that real democratic citizenship needs. Three mechanisms made caste unbreakable: endogamy in marriage, the link between caste and occupation, and monopoly over education.

On all three, India has barely progressed. Endogamy persists, now apparently extending into queer dating apps. The caste-occupation link has loosened but not broken. And education — formally, school enrollment is finally at 100% after 75 years. But India never built a public education system in the sense that America or England did, as a crucible of citizenship. It built schools. It did not build civic infrastructure.

“India is one of the few countries, or few democracies, where the experiment that most democracies have done with shared public education… we did not create that public education system.”

The dark joke he reports — India will skip the stage of dismantling endogamy entirely; marriage as an institution will simply disappear instead.

He adds one more, harder thought. The reservation debate, important as it is, accidentally killed off the ethical conversation. The question of distribution swallowed the question of how we treat each other. The specificity of the Dalit experience got blurred into “backward castes” as one giant historical blob. And the upper castes got let off the hook — “we gave you reservations, what more do you want?”

Building institutions in a thousand-year frame

When Rajagopalan asks about institution-building — Mehta helped build CPR and was briefly central at Ashoka — he reframes the question.

The great universities of the world are hundreds of years old. They’ve outlived governments and dynasties. The question is not what techniques you use to build one. The question is what produces a generation that even has that ambition — a generation willing to think in thousand-year frames.

For modern institutions to work, four legs have to align: a community of professionals with vocation; a state that values knowledge; capital willing to support without dictating; and a public that demands. He points to Ahmedabad in the 1950s and 60s — Gujarati capital, the state, independent academics, mass movements — as the rare moment when all four briefly aligned.

Michael Walzer called liberalism “the art of separation.” Different spheres, different principles of legitimacy, each leaning on the others without being consumed by any of them. The university leans on capital but cannot be subjected to the logic of profit. The state needs the autonomy of knowledge. Subject any sphere to the logic of another and its core mission collapses.

The current threat, he argues, is the curious individualization of authority. YouTube tutors, AI tutors, influencers — institutions whose function was arbitrage and mediation are everywhere under threat. There is real democratising potential here. But if the residential university, the school as civic crucible, the structured arenas of socialization all disappear, what replaces them is not liberation. It is anomie.

Nonalignment, revisited

Rajagopalan closes by asking about Nonalignment 2.0, the 2012 document Mehta co-authored on Indian grand strategy. That document assumed the international order had enough coherence for India to navigate it. That assumption is now dead.

Mehta defends the underlying principles. Nonalignment was never the nonaligned movement — it was a question. What kind of world order gives us the most room to develop while sustaining basic norms that benefit everyone in the long run? It was an exercise in world-order building, not posturing.

The second principle, which gets most ridiculed: in the long run, what is good for the planet and humanity is almost certainly good for you. Drop that assumption and you start scoring every skirmish on a 10-year tactical horizon. The third principle: strategic autonomy as options, not posturing.

He pushes back on the Indian right’s narrative that India’s moral high-ground period cost it materially. Some of that critique lands — formulaic statements without action did damage. But India also accumulated something rare. The charge that India is a threat to world order has never been levelled. That is a form of capital. The Indo-US nuclear deal, in his telling, was partly cashed in from exactly that reserve.

“Sometimes bullies and bad boys get more attention than good boys in class, but ultimately, it’s the grade at the end of the year that’s going to count.”

The closing note is steady. Go back to first principles. Build options. Don’t confuse the short-term tactical game with the long game. Geopolitics and economic reform have never needed to be more aligned.

Key Takeaways

Nihilism, in Strauss’s sense, is calling for radical change without any idea what comes next, and being willing to torch the gains of the existing order in the process. Pair it with disinhibition — the dropping of restraint — and you get the current political moment.
Bad institutions cause bad outcomes regardless of who is in charge. But the deeper rot is when no one can agree what the standards of right and wrong even are. Critique becomes a weapon, not a discipline.
Two ideologies have unequivocally won the 20th century: nationalism and feminism. They pull in opposite directions — one toward equality, one toward consecrated violence — and that tension defines the present.
Nationalism is the only modern ideology that can consecrate death. It is the substitute religion of modernity. Once “for the nation” is invoked, almost any moral barrier becomes negotiable.
The Paul Grice precondition for communication — attributed sincerity plus shared context — has collapsed under social media. All signs are now indeterminate. Communication shifts from understanding to either pure expression or fighting words.
The collapse of the public-private distinction is its own crisis. Private speech can become public identity overnight, killing the self-correction that intellectual life depends on.
Durkheim and Weber bet on the professions as the moral spine of modernity. A lawyer as officer of the court, a doctor as bearer of knowledge — third pillar between state and capital. That spine has been hollowed out, in India especially.
The Indian senior bar’s abdication is a five-alarm signal. Lawyers used to define themselves by defending unpopular clients. Ram Jethmalani’s “I will defend anyone” has gone silent.
“Inclusion on the cheap” describes India’s failure mode — formal democratization without the institutional investment to make it substantive. Result: oligarchic outcomes inside a democratic frame.
Adam Smith’s anti-capture argument runs both ways. Limiting the state isn’t enough. Concentrated private capital will always get the state to produce rents. You need wide distribution of social power, not just a small state.
The three braids of “vishwas” politics in India: elite frustration with checks and balances, the failure of the developmental state collapsing into scheme-based politics, and the construction of Hindus as a victimized majority. Modi’s skill was braiding all three into a single rope.
The left and centre lost India by treating caste as demographic destiny. The right understood that political identities are constructed by political work — they were the genuine postmodernists. “Caste will cut Hindu nationalism” was the central failed prediction.
Ambedkar’s three pillars of caste — endogamy, caste-occupation link, monopoly over education — are all still standing. India did not build a public education system as a crucible of citizenship. It built buildings.
The reservation debate accidentally killed the ethical conversation about caste, replacing “how do we treat each other” with “how do we distribute seats.” The specificity of the Dalit experience got blurred away.
Building institutions requires a thousand-year time horizon and four legs aligned: professional vocation, state valuation, capital support without capture, and public demand. Ahmedabad in the 50s-60s is the rare Indian case where all four briefly aligned.
Michael Walzer’s “liberalism as the art of separation” — the university leans on capital but cannot be subjected to its logic, the state needs the autonomy of knowledge, each sphere has its own principle of legitimacy.
Nonalignment was never the nonaligned movement. It was a doctrine of world-order-building, with three principles: long-term planetary good usually aligns with national good; strategic autonomy means accumulating options; first principles beat short-term tactics.
Montesquieu’s warning that security breeds timidity, conviction-loss and courage-loss in the most comfortable classes — the political pathology of the elites of the current moment.

Claude’s Take

This is the best long-form interview I have read in months. Mehta is the rare commentator who can hold institutional design, moral philosophy, sociology and live political diagnosis in one frame without sliding into either despair or sermon. He keeps the tone level even when the diagnosis is grim.

The strongest move in the conversation is the slow pivot from Rawls to Smith — from institutional fixes to moral sentiments. It is the move every honest liberal of his generation has had to make over the last decade, and most have done it badly. Mehta does it without abandoning Rawls. He just admits the sociological preconditions were doing more of the work than the theory acknowledged. That is intellectual maturity in real time.

The professions argument deserves to be its own book. The idea that lawyers, doctors and academics used to constitute a third pillar between state and capital — with a distinct basis of legitimacy in knowledge — and that the hollowing of this pillar is what has left politics with only two players, is the single most generative frame in the conversation. It explains why “let the experts decide” no longer functions as a stable political move, and why every contemporary democracy seems to be running on either populism or capital, with nothing in between.

The “inclusion on the cheap” diagnosis of post-Mandal India is brutal and accurate. The structural transformation has happened. The civic transformation has not. Indian cities are not really urban — they are collections of segregated networks that meet in markets and go home to caste. The number that should ring loud is the chief minister’s quip about “two-and-a-half schemes well” as the winning formula. That is what a state looks like when it has given up on building public goods.

Score: 9/10. Loses a point only because Mehta, characteristically, is more diagnostic than prescriptive. The “what now” answer on building presumptive trust in political leaders gets a candid “I find this a hard question to answer.” Fair enough — he’s a philosopher, not a campaign manager. But it leaves the listener with the heavy diagnosis and only a faint outline of where the levers might be.

Worth re-reading at least once. Probably worth re-reading every six months.