by socialists and capitalists alike.After the collapse of the socialist alternative in 1989, this utopian vision took the form of a global market economy dedicated to endless growth and consumption to which there would be no alternative. According to this worldview, the dominance of which is now nearly absolute, the human norm is Homo economicus, a calculating subject whose natural desires and instincts are shaped by their ultimate motivation: to pursue happiness and avoid pain.This simple view always neglected many factors ever-present in human lives: the fear, for instance, of losing honour, dignity and status, the distrust of change, the appeal of stability and familiarity. There was no place in it for more complex drives: vanity, fear of appearing vulnerable, the need to save face. Obsessed with material progress, the hyperrationalists ignored the lure of resentment for the left-behind, and the tenacious pleasures of victimhood.And yet modern history provides enormous evidence for the persistent power of unreason. It was not so long ago in the early 19th century that French pretensions to a rational, universal, and cosmopolitan civilisation first provoked resentful Germans into the militant expression of what we now call cultural nationalism: the assertion of authentic culture rooted in national or regional character and history.One revolution after another since then has demonstrated that feelings and moods change the world by turning into potent political forces. Fear, anxiety and a sense of humiliation were the principal motive of Germanys expansionist policy in the early 20th century and it is impossible to understand the current upsurge of anti-western sentiment in China, Russia and India without acknowledging the role played by humiliation.Yet a mechanistic and materialist way of conceiving human actions has become entrenched, in part because economics has become the predominant means of understanding the world. A view that took shape in the 19th century that there is no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest has become orthodoxy once again in an intellectual climate that views the market as the ideal form of human interaction and venerates technological progress and the growth of GDP. All of this is part of the rigid contemporary belief that what counts is only what can be counted and that what cannot be counted subjective emotions therefore does not.Our current disregard of non-economic motivations is even more surprising when we learn that less than a century ago, the Enlightenments narrow rational programme for individual happiness had already become the butt of ridicule and contempt as the Austrian modernist writer Robert Musil observed in 1922. Indeed, the pioneering works of sociology and psychology as well as modernist art and literature of the early 20th century were defined in part by their insistence that there is more to human beings than rational egoism, competition and acquisition, more to society than a contract between logically calculating and autonomous individuals, and more to politics than impersonal technocrats devising hyper-rational schemes of progress with the help of polls, surveys, statistics, mathematical models and technology.Writing in the 1860s, during the high noon of 19th-century liberalism, Fyodor Dostoevsky was one of the