Pascal Bruckner is best known in Britain for the novel Bitter Moon, which Roman Polanski made into a film (incidentally, a much better adaptation than his overrated version of Robert Harris's The Ghost). But he is also a thinker of some standing in France. The cliche of a French philosophe is the complacent obscurantist, wallowing in a swamp of postmodern jargon, who subjects textual meaning to cultural interrogation and finds that it's all the dastardly product of a white, male conspiracy. Bruckner, more an heir of Raymond Aron than, say, Jean Baudrillard, is not that kind of philosopher and Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism is not that kind of book. It is a work of bracing lucidity and exhilarating perception.

Bruckner is not the first writer to bring attention to the penitential condition of the west – Paul Berman, Nick Cohen and your humble reviewer are among those who've dealt with the subject – but never has the diagnosis been more eloquently or persuasively made. His prose combines an artist's appreciation of language with an aphorist's gift for concision. On almost every page there is a sentence or paragraph that demands underlining.

For the past half century or more, says Bruckner, European ideas and debates have been informed by a sense of guilt that, despite its secular guise, is essentially religious: the guilt of original sin. From philosophy to local politics, condemnation of the west has become a reflex response.

With slavery, the Holocaust, and colonialism behind us, we in the west like to lay claim to all that is corrupt and evil in humanity. "The Euro-American is simultaneously cursed and indispensable," writes Bruckner. "Thanks to him, everything becomes clear, evil acquires a face, the dirty rat is universally designated. Biological, political, metaphysical guilt."

Thus it was that so many fine minds could greet the incineration of 3,000 people live on television in 2001 with cries of: "We had it coming"; "What did we expect?"; or, in Baudrillard's case, something close to jubilation.

But, Bruckner argues, this self-recrimination amounts to little more than delusional narcissism, a means of sustaining a sense of our own importance not through the exercise of power but through the expression of remorse. As European influence contracts, so do our claims on responsibility expand. "Our superiority complex has taken refuge in the perpetual avowal of our sins," writes Bruckner, "a strange way of inflating our puny selves to global dimensions."

To what end is this cult of guilt directed? Not to the cause of equality. The world beyond Europe is too often stripped of moral agency and, instead, seems to exist merely as a source of material to feed further self-loathing. "Let us beware of anyone who values the foreigner only out of disdain for himself," Bruckner cautions. "His self-aversion will end up infecting his sympathies."

This need to assert ownership of the world's ills denies the most vital legacy of post-Enlightenment thought, argues Bruckner. Although the west industrialised slavery, it didn't invent it. But it did invent its abolition. While Europe has given birth to monsters, it has also "given birth to theories that make it possible to understand and destroy these monsters".

Yet, our sympathies duly infected by self-aversion, there is now an increasing reluctance to challenge even the most reactionary ideas and sectarian political movements if they can boast a non-western origin. Bruckner shows that our "cultural sensitivity" is misplaced for three reasons. First, and most obviously, because it creates divisive inequalities; second, it imprisons citizens within cultural ghettos; and third, because ideologies such as fundamentalist Islam have, in fact, borrowed a great deal from the west. "The most extreme Islamists," writes Bruckner, are engaged in a "pathology of imitation and not otherness".

Bruckner has no time for the timid insularity of a Europe that, while making a show of baring its bleeding heart, seeks to turn its back not only on the world beyond its borders but also the problems incubating within them.

One of those scandals is the manner in which an unholy alliance between the needs of commerce and the dictates of guilt-ridden politics have created two equally dysfunctional models of social integration. "The free-market model makes settlement in a country equivalent to a labour contract that can be renewed or cancelled in accord with the law of supply and demand. The third world or Christian model of hospitality requires us to welcome anyone who comes to our country, without demanding anything of him or her, in an act of pure oblation." The newcomer is held in a state of social dislocation, in the first instance the better to respond to transitory economic requirements, in the second as a symbolic reminder of our sins.

Europe needs to rethink its attitude towards its past if it is to build a more inclusive and dynamic future. As this exceptional book so emphatically shows, guilt is a luxury we can no longer afford.

Andrew Anthony is the author of The Fallout: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence (Vintage)