Pascal Bruckner is a French writer and is part of the Cercle de l'Oratoire think tank.

After studies at the university Paris I and Paris VII, and then at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, he became maître de conférences at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, and collaborator at the Nouvel Observateur.

A prolific writer, Pascal Bruckner began writing in the vein of the so-called 'nouveaux philosophes' and counts among their best known French proponents. He published 'Parias, ou la tentation de l'Inde' ('Parias, or the temptation of India'), 'Lunes de Fiel' (adapted to film by Roman Polanski) and 'Les voleurs de beauté' (The beauty stealers) (Prix Renaudot in 1997). Among essays, 'La tentation de l'innocence' (Temptation of innocence) (Prix Médicis in 1995) and, famously, 'Le Sanglot de l'Homme blanc' ('The Cry of the White Man'), an attack against narcissistic and destructive policies in the interest for the Third World, and more recently 'La tyrannie de la pénitence' (2006), an essay on the West's endless self-criticism.

His fiery polemic stance against multiculturalism has kindled an international debate. In this tribune titled 'Enlightenment fundamentalism or racism of the anti-racists?', which defended in particular Ayaan Hirsi Ali by criticizing other tribunes by Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash, Bruckner brings in defense of his wide attack on Enlightenment, the position of modern philosopher ranging from Heidegger to Gadamer, Derrida, Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, mentioning how they had all joined together to say that "all the evils of our epoch were spawned by this philosophical and literary episode: capitalism, colonialism, totalitarianism," although later in the text settling for a preferable form of Enlightenment, as opposed to Anglo-Saxon Enlightenment, by admitting that "Denouncing the excesses of the Enlightenment in the concepts that it forged means being true to its spirit."

In May 1983 he published 'Le Sanglot de l'Homme blanc' ('The Tears of the White Man'), subtitled 'Third World, culpability and self-hatred', which was a controversial opus. Bruckner describes what he sees as a pro-Third-World sentimentalism of part of the Western Left-wing and its cheap self-culpabilisation; the essay had an influence on a whole trend of thought.

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