One hundred forty years ago, Walter Bagehot, the Victorian founder of the Economist, wrote a book, Physics and Politics, in which he addressed one of the the burning questions of the day: why do some nations progress, while others stagnate, or even go backwards? After dismissing, for the most part, the day's most popular solution (inherited racial dissimilarities), he answered his question by adducing what we would now call the cultural paradigm. The most progressive nations, he thought, were those that could implement "conservative innovation - the matching of new institutions with old ones." Of course, to a self satisfied Englishman of Bagehot's stripe, at the very zenith of the British Empire, the obvious and champeen exemplar of conservative innovation was his won sceptered isle. Granting the parochialism of Bagehot's example, his statement of the issue is very much with us. It is a strange fact that, through most of the twentieth century, the map of progressing nations - those that possess both economic power and generate new technology -- increased by one: Japan. No African nations, no Middle Eastern nations, no South American nations, deserve to be added to that list.

V.S. Naipaul, the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for literature, has been among our most intrepid explorer of non-progressing nations in the last thirty years. His latest collection of essays, which includes an array of uncollected pieces, as well as literary journalism collected from three former books, does not reprint, curiously enough,"Conrad's Darkness", his most famous and intense treatment of the problems attending a writer of Naipaul's type in confronting a world that could still be described in terms consonant with Bagehot. In that essay, Naipaul coined his famous phrase about " half made societies that seemed doomed to remain half made..." Naipaul has set himself up as the scourge of the moral and intellectual corruption rampant among half made societies. He also beats with a stick the dupes of third world oppression in the West.

Naipaul's own status as the (now distant) product of one of the half made societies, Trinidad, secures his special moral position among the dupes, otherwise known as the liberal crowd who read the New York Review of Books. The grandchild of indentured Indian emigrants brought to Trinidad in the nineteenth century, during the boom years of the sugar plantations, Naipaul made his escape early, first to Oxford and then to a career as a writer of brilliant comic novels. Up until the seventies, his fame was mostly confined to England, where he still lives. In the seventies he became an internationally known writer. In novels like A Bend in the River and Guerillas, he took on the eschatological illusions of the revolutionary politics that was faddish in the sixties and seventies, showing, in the former, an African state pullulating with the decay of the old civilities and completely unable to produce an infrastructure to sustain it; in the latter, he tells the tale of bogus Black Power group in Trinidad that serves as the holiday fare for some camp followers of trendily leftist orientation, until it turns murderous.

Accompanying this output of increasingly disenchanted fiction was a series of books of literary journalism. It was probably the publication of The Return of Eva Peron with the Killings in Trinidad, in 1980, that tipped the balance in Naipaul's reputation. For the leftwing crowd, from then on, Naipaul was an arch-traitor to his race, the loyal subaltern in the Kipling mode, a Gunga Din for the age of Thatcher. For the right, he became an honorary member of the club, our man, so to speak, in the third world (although clearly and expressly a British resident), a Solzhenitsyn of the Third World, as Jane Kramer once dubbed him.

So one reads a subtext of defiance in the inclusion, in this book, of most of the 1980 book -- a challenge to the Edward Saids of the world. That note is continued in the book's postscript, Our Universal Civilization, which was originally a talk given to the conservative Manhattan Institute.

There are two essays from that period that display Naipaul's literary journalism in its best and in its worst light. Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad is an exploration of one of the lunatic dead ends of seventies radicalism. It obviously served as a template for Naipaul's subsequent novel, Guerillas. Naipaul profiles the hapless, and finally homicidal career of Michael X, born Michael de Freitas, a pimp and conman who established himself, with the help of some sympathetic lefty journalists, as a Black Power leader, first in England, and then in his native Trinidad. That heady time in the late sixties and early seventies, when John Lennon and Yoko were holding bed ins against the war, and flower children were practicing raising their fists in the international black power salute, is still worth cringing over. As Michael X began to believe his own con, he went the route of many a minor messiah before him and spilt blood -- first directing the killing of a white camp follower, 27 year old Gale Ann Benson, and then actually crushing the head of another of his followers with a stone. Naipaul recounts this story with a maximum objectivity, but the reader feels the anger behind the narrative of facts. It is an anger that, oddly enough, is aimed less at Michael X than at Gale Ann Beson. Her sin, in Naipaul's eyes, was to dress in African clothes, engage in an undignified sexual relationship with Jamal, one of Michael X's followers, and in general make herself so available to being hurt. Such availability, in Naipaul's eyes, stems, ultimately, from a security so global that Benson can't see out of it. She can throw herself into the part of fake African, white skin and all, because the world of Africans, to her, is ultimately unreal. This unconscious contempt is her corruption -- so that, Naipaul contends, "she became as corrupt as her master." You can spot the moralist by his exaggerations. Here the reader has to pause and remember that the sum total of Benson's crimes amount to dressing up in African clothes and calling herself, sometimes, by the ridiculous name of Hale Kimga. In literature, facts lead us inexhorably to symbols. The same is not true of life: while Benson might have symbolized, both to Naipaul and Michael X, the deep corruption of the colonial mentality, she was actually just a 27 year old woman who made some stupid and tasteless mistakes.

Naipaul's worst essay is probably his piece on Argentina. It is here that the methods of literary journalism do him a particular disservice. The literary journalist is looking to nail an atmospher, not a particular sequence of events. The sequence of events that span the time from Peron's return to the military dictatorship ostensibly provides the reason for Naipaul's essay, but you won't find any clear eventline here, nor even a hint as to how these things transpired. You will find, instead, scattered fragments of an interview with Borges interspersed with meditations about the Argentinian relationship to the land, the Argentinian acceptance of torture, and the prevelance of magical thinking in the country. Naipaul makes generalizations that are debateably absurd, such as his contention that more gifted men have come into the world from New Zealand than from Argentina, or poetically absurd, such as the contention that Argentina has no history, or absurdly absurd, such as Naipaul's contention that every Argentine schoolgirl knows "the brothels ... understands that she might have to go there one day to find love..."). Perhaps Naipaul's bilious portrait of the place was effected by his brief arrest. This is the longest essay in the book, with sections that have been added on in the years since it was first published. It is, however, a mess.

The global impression left by this book is that Naipaul can't really be read solely in the light of our two current political factions. One is struck again and again in this book by the teasing familiarity of Naipaul's themes: the scathing dismissal of superstition, the contempt for the placaters of power who cannot, themselves, create power, the criticism of magic, both as metaphor and social fact. Where have we seen these things before? The answer, in Western culture, is that these are old things. They constituted the program of enlightened men and women from Francis Bacon to Voltaire and Mary Wollenscraft. What drives Naipaul into a cold fury is the casual abandoment of the enlightenment program by those liberals while have enjoyed to the full the fruits of science and intellectual inquiry, who are quite content to abandon the non-progressing nations to different cultural standards of truth in the name of multi-culturalism. That abandonment, while seemingly a gesture of tolerance and generosity, actually seals the doom of half made societies, making it impossible for new institutions to match old ones. Instead, advantage goes to the despotic, the bullying, the thieves and rhetors, the Michael X-s who have actually achieved power. In his talk to the Manhattan Institute, Naipaul describes himself as a man who has gone from the periphery to the center. Oddly enough, the center, right now, is a mad scramble for the peripheries, as writers set up shop in the name of their ethnic identies, as though they were restaurants, or their sexual identities, as though they were dating services.