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Age of Anger: A History of the Present Paperback – 29 January 2018
by Pankaj Mishra (Author)
4.2 out of 5 stars 704
A compelling, powerful argument about the roots of current global disorder.
How can we explain the origins of the great wave of paranoid hatreds that seem inescapable in our close-knit world - from American 'shooters' and ISIS to Trump, from a rise in vengeful nationalism across the world to racism and misogyny on social media? In Age of Anger, Pankaj Mishra answers our bewilderment by casting his gaze back to the eighteenth century, before leading us to the present.
He shows that as the world became modern those who were unable to fulfil its promises - freedom, stability and prosperity - were increasingly susceptible to demagogues. It was from among the ranks of the disaffected that the militants of the 19th century arose - angry young men who became cultural nationalists in Germany, messianic revolutionaries in Russia, bellicose chauvinists in Italy, and anarchist terrorists internationally.
Today, just as then, the wider embrace of mass politics, technology, and the pursuit of wealth and individualism has cast many more billions adrift in a literally demoralized world, uprooted from tradition but still far from modernity - with the same terrible results. Making startling connections and comparisons, Age of Anger is a book of immense urgency and profound argument. It is a history of our present predicament unlike any other.
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416 pages
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Review
Urgent, profound and extraordinarily timely -- John Banville
This is the most astonishing, convincing, and disturbing book I've read in years ― Joe Sacco
Incisive and scary.. a wake-up call -- Nick Fraser ― Guardian
Far from reassuring... his vision is unusually broad, accommodating and resistant to categorisation. It is the kind of vision the world needs right now...Pankaj Mishra shouldn't stop thinking. -- Christopher de Bellaigue ― Financial Times
This is a framework that pushes aside conventional, familiar divisions of left and right to focus on the profound sense of dislocation and alienation that spawned (and still spawns) movements ranging from fascism to anarchism to nihilism...a short book into which a lot of intellectual history has been packed. -- Laura Miller ― Slate
Stimulating... thought-provoking -- Richard Evans ― Guardian
A valuable book. Mishra's ideas are bold and initially discomfiting - it's a challenge to look over the head of the latest terrorist and try to dispassionately trace his rage back to Voltaire - but it's undeniably good to stretch intellectual muscles and test your own prejudices. Mishra invites us to hear the ugly, muffled shouts beneath the "drumbeat" of Western civilisation. -- Julie McDowall ― Sunday Herald
Mishra reads like a brilliant autodidact, putting to shame the many students who dutifully did the reading for their classes but missed the incandescent fire and penetrating insight in canonical texts... no one has discerned better than Mishra just how far we still are from the top. -- Samuel Moyn ― New Republic
Around the world, both East and West, the insurrectionary fury of militants, zealots and populists has overturned the post-Cold-War global consensus. Where does their rage come from, and where will it end? One of the sharpest cultural critics and political analysts releases his landmark "history of the present -- Boyd Tonkin ― Newsweek
An original attempt to explain today's paranoid hatreds...Iconoclastic...Mr. Mishra shocks on many levels. ― Economist
Along with quotations from Voltaire, Rousseau, and other familiar figures of Western Civ, Age of Anger includes observations from Iranian, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and other nations' scholars; their perspectives complement Mishra's deep understanding of global tensions....In probing for the wellspring of today's anger he hits on something real -- Peter Coy ― Bloomberg Businessweek
Provocative...We'll need new philosophical frameworks to understand the phenomenon of political anger in a global perspective; what's fascinating about Mishra's novel reading is that it draws on familiar philosophical and literary touchstones while turning them on their head...A brilliant work -- Eric Banks ― Bookforum
A disturbing but imperatively urgent analysis -- Bryce Christensen ― Booklist
A probing, well-informed investigation of global unrest calling for 'truly transformative thinking' about humanity's future ― Kirkus Reviews
Sensitive and illuminating....Makes a powerful case for the influence of a certain group of anti-rational and anti-commercial ideas which have influenced our world.,..Mishra's contribution is to show us how these ideas have become 'viral' and what that means for all of us. -- Jonathan Steinberg ― The Spectator
Incisive...Age of Anger, which was completed after the Brexit vote but before Trump's victory, reminds us that the dialectical movement between these two poles - between a desire to be oneself and a desire to belong to something larger than oneself - has been a feature of Western political life since the Enlightenment -- Justin E.H. Smith ― Harper’s
Pankaj Mishra's Age of Anger...exemplifies his characteristic eloquence and erudition...Leaders who are struggling to process the present backlash against core aspects of globalization would do well to heed Mishra's plea to "remember the irreducible human being, her or his fears, desires, and resentments." -- Ali Wyne ― The National Interest
An impressively probing and timely work...Highly engaging ― Publishers Weekly
Scintillating...Age of Anger looks an awful lot like a masterwork. We're only a few weeks into 2017, but one of the books of the year is already here -- Christopher Bray ― The Tablet
Book Description
A compelling, powerful argument about the roots of current global disorder.
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Product details
Publisher : Penguin Press; 1st edition (29 January 2018)
Language : English
Paperback : 416 pages
ISBN-10 : 0141984082
ISBN-13 : 978-0141984087
Dimensions : 12.9 x 2.3 x 19.8 cm
Best Sellers Rank: 234,502 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
157 in Political History (Books)
375 in Revolution Histories
398 in Globalization (Books)
Customer Reviews: 4.2 out of 5 stars 704
==
From Australia
Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant bookReviewed in Australia on 25 October 2021
A riveting and provocative read that seemed to tie in with other books I'd read about the modern West, and how change which brings about huge shifts in opportunity, wealth and power, leaves a relatively few elites at the top and a resentful mass at the bottom.
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Solutionist
2.0 out of 5 stars A luxuriously learned presentation of other people's ideas and quotes. Gets hard to digest the feast, very quickly.Reviewed in Australia on 22 June 2017
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This book is an amazingly learned cobbling together of snippets of other people's thoughts. I gave up after struggling to remain interested in reading about people I thought I ought to know more about, but it was too hard to follow - endless short quotes do not an argument make. The gist of the book was made clear quite early, I can't recall how. The rest felt like an endless weighting of scales to make a point nobody is likely to argue against anyway.
2 people found this helpful
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From other countries
Vlad Thelad
5.0 out of 5 stars Erudite darknessReviewed in Canada on 15 March 2017
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I love a book that makes me think. This one sure did. It argues that the Enlightenment, liberalism, and the first globalization engendered the intellectual roots, and comparable circumstances that explain why today we are witnessing a backlash of extreme nationalism, populism, terrorism, and widespread violence in such an overwhelming scale. It explains how the seeds of the “ressentiment” that fuel today’s anger are the same that existed from, and throughout, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The author makes his case with undoubted erudition. To write a worthy response would demand a book well beyond the scope of this reviewer. Those of us self-defined liberals, inheritors of the Enlightenment ideas, and supporters of rational thought, science, the individual’s inalienable rights, democracy, social welfare, and free market economy, still have a long way to go to make our case. However, in the broader scope of history I unapologetically believe the world is, and will be, better off when these ideals prevail.
7 people found this helpfulReport
VincentB
5.0 out of 5 stars Brillante analyse du monde d'aujourd'hui et de ses enjeux sociauxReviewed in France on 20 March 2017
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En remontant au XVIII siècle et aux grands penseurs français de l'époque pré révolutionnaire (Voltaire, Rousseau entre autres) et à leurs analyses et conflits (en particulier Rousseau vs. Voltaire), puis post révolutionnaire (Alexis de Tocqueville), Pankaj Mishra, qui pourtant n'est pas français, nous ouvre une perspective vertigineuse sur les causes et enjeux du monde d'aujourd'hui - et ce sur tous les continents.
On peut ne pas être d'accord sur tout ce qu'il dit, mais il fait une lecture originale et ouvre un vrai débat sur notre époque où la violence et la colère se mondialise, et sur ses causes. Restent les remèdes à trouver!
7 people found this helpfulReport
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Amazon カスタマー
3.0 out of 5 stars Hated at first but grew on my bit by bitReviewed in Japan on 22 March 2024
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A very tough and frustrating read. I had expected it to be about current events and the media. Instead it was mostly intellectual history involving Tocqueville, Voltaire, Rousseau and so on.
However, once I got used to what the book actually was, it became a certainly a very rewarding read. The author still could write more narratively/engagingly I felt, but it is what it is. If you put in the effort to go through it you will definitely get a lot out of it.
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GarethGray
5.0 out of 5 stars It will help you understand that you are not going madReviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 September 2017
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I highly recommend this book for anyone hoping to bolster their intellectual self-defence capabilities in a media atmosphere swamped with bile, stupidity and hatred.
When Internet trolls, politicians, talk show demagogues, and even respected newspaper columnists insist that Islam is evil, that we are locked in a “clash of civilisation”, and you know that that can’t be the whole story, and that even a nine-year-old could argue effectively against the proposition, and yet you still feel swamped and rattled by the sheer volume and intensity of the bile, you should consider reading this book, because it sets out an historical framework that puts the confusion of today into a very clear and interesting perspective. It will help you understand that you are not going mad.
Its premise is bold and will provoke strong negative reactions. In these reviews I see that it already has.
The premise is that the liberal economic order that has dominated the West since the late 17th century, and which has since been exported to or forced upon all continents, has deep, negative side effects. This economic order, its accompanying industrialisation and mass marketing, and the political structures and assumptions that support it, posits human beings as individual, acquisitive consumers who should be motivated by the craving to have what others have. By turning human beings into cogs of this order, it erodes traditional cultures and norms and leaves people deracinated, isolated, confused and angry. It propels them toward extreme, compensatory ideologies, and it drives them to murder.
As an educated liberal who is comfortable – mostly, finally – in the democratic, free-market West, my hackles rose at Mishra’s thesis, and I began preparing mentally to argue against what I assumed would be a facile, West-hating, lefty pile of wishy-washiness. But he snagged me with his opening example, of the proto-fascist Gabriele D’Annunzio, the Italian writer who led a volunteer force of nationalistic nutters to seize the Adriatic city of Fiume in 1920.
Mishra then begins to build his case, carefully, exhaustively, brick by brick, starting with the seminal rift between Voltaire, cast as the godfather of the liberal order, and Rousseau, progenitor of all romantics and revolutionaries who, as Mishra says: “described the quintessential inner experience of modernity for most people: the uprooted outsider in the commercial metropolis, aspiring for a place in it, and struggling with complex feelings of envy, fascination, revulsion and rejection.”
By the time Mishra has traced this dynamic through the upheavals and terror outbreaks of France, Germany, Russia, Italy, India, the US, Japan and other countries, there is no need to mention Boko Haram, ISIS, Al Qaeda and the rest. We can see that terrorism was not invented on 9/11. Although it should pass into liturgy here in the West Mishra’s encapsulation of what happened in the Middle East from the start of the 20th century: “the division of the Middle East into mandates and spheres of influence, the equally arbitrary creation of unviable nation states, unequal treaties with oil-rich states – and the pressures of neo-imperialism. Even when free of such crippling burdens, the modernizers could never simply repeat Europe’s antecedent development, which, as we noted earlier, had been calamitously uneven, fuelled by a rush of demagogic politics, ethnic cleansing and total wars.”
He rams his point home subtly, for instance by noting that before steering his airliner into the Twin Towers, Mohamed Atta had submitted his Master’s thesis in urban planning at the University of Hamburg on the despoilation, by highways and gleaming glass towers, of an old, traditional neighbourhood in the Syrian city of Aleppo.
The book is not perfect. You will need to get through the Prologue, which is larded with verbiage and off-putting generalities, but prepare to hit the ground running in Chapter 1.
It could have been shorter, quite a lot I suspect, without doing real damage to the case he is making. Mishra discovered a lot about the history of European philosophy and literature and he may have struggled to assess what distance to keep from the source material. As it is, you get everything, which to me clashed with the urgent contemporary nature of his argument. For this reason I considered withholding one star, but I can’t. This is a tour de force, and contains many jaw-dropping revelations, and I am only grateful.
14 people found this helpfulReport
Stephen N. Greenleaf
5.0 out of 5 stars The Past as PresentReviewed in the United States on 13 February 2017
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Here’s an idea for a history professor who teaches a class in European Thought from the Age of Enlightenment to the advent of the First World War. You give this question as the take-home exam:
"Identify a trend in European thought that spread throughout the continent and beyond that has a connection to events in the contemporary world. Identify the trend and explain how this trend relates to significant contemporary events."
I imagine that something like this popped into the head of Pankaj Mishra, and the Age of Anger is his answer to this challenge. Our imaginary professor need not look further than this brilliant book to find an “A” answer.
In this book, Mishra looks at terrorism, rising popular frustrations, and the shift toward populist politics, ardent nationalism, and autocratic rulers in the contemporary world. In Mishra’s book, we see connections between Islamic terrorists, Hindu nationalists, Brexit, and Trump voters. Each group manifests a fundamental rebellion against the social and economic—and therefore political—strictures of modernity and its most forceful representative, global capitalism. Others have identified these contemporary connections, but Mishra reaches back to the Enlightenment in 18th century France to see how the foremost nation of the age understood modernity and how it responded to the changes modernity imposed upon individuals and societies. Mishra focuses on the leading figure of the French Enlightenment, Voltaire, and its leading critic, Rousseau. European politics after 1789 can be viewed as a continuation of the battles of the French Revolution, and in the same way, European social and political thought can be seen as a continuation of the contending viewpoints of Rousseau and Voltaire.
Mishra traces the history of Rousseau’s thought as it emigrated to Germany and captured the attention of Herder and the Romantic movement. Germany was late to industrial development and late to nationhood, but it made up for its lost time with a vengeance. Mishra also charts the course of Rousseau’s thought and its attendant nationalism into Italy, which also came late to statehood and only falteringly to industrial capitalism. And Mishra looks at Russia, its nationhood achieved, but sorely lagging in the cultural and economic markers of modernity. In each nation, throughout Europe (with Great Britain a significant outlier), the demands of modernity and modern industrial capitalism tore the social fabric and created a backlash among those unable to realize the prizes offered by capitalism. In short, a backlash occurred beginning with the French Revolution and continuing through the First World War to now. While the working class struggled for basic living conditions, the intellectual class struggled with the indignities and frustrations that this system built upon mimetic desire created. Mishra examines the work of a variety of continental thinkers in this period, Herder, Proudhon, Marx, Bakunin (anarchist), Mazzini (Italian nationalist), Dostoevsky, Tocqueville, and Nietzsche, to name some of the most prominent writers who addressed these issues. Also, Mishra discusses the spread of these lines of thought through other parts of the world, including Islamic civilization, India, and China, which, in seeking to throw off the yoke of Western imperialism, adopted and modified Western thinking both modern and anti-modern.
But don’t think that this is merely an account of abstract thinkers. Mishra’s book also recounts the violence spawned by these thinkers and others like them. From the French Revolution to the Revolutions of 1848 to the anarchist bombings and assassinations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, violence plagued Europe, the U.S., and the rest of the world. And while the two world wars and the cold war placed a damper on much of this ferment, it erupted again after the end of the Cold War. Whether large scale killings like those in Bosnia, or acts of terrorism like the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building and the World Trade Center, in Mishra’s account, it’s all of a single cloth. Indeed, the physical proximity of Timothy McVeigh, U.S. Army veteran, and Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the first World Trade Center attack (1993), represents the similarity of their characteristics. Yousef claimed the mantle of Islam, and McVeigh claimed no religion other than “science,” but both held a deep-seated grievance against the existing order.
The common bond of this tale of violence is ressentiment, frustration, powerlessness, and humiliation. These feelings provide the motivation for both the angry words and the violent deeds that seek to destroy the system, to remake the world. Note that as I write this, a self-proclaimed “Leninist” who want to bring down the system, Stephen Bannon, sits at the right hand of our demagogic president. I fear it events could become uglier more quickly than we can imagine.
Mishra is a native of India and resides currently in London. He is conversant in both worlds. In An End to Suffering: the Buddha in the World, which I read some years ago, I noted how well he moved between the Buddhist tradition and the Western tradition. His mastery of the material of the “exam question” that he gave in himself in Age of Anger is also exemplary. (He provides a thorough bibliographical essay to show where he has been in this research. It’s impressive.)
More than any other source dealing with the Age of Trump, I found Mishra’s account provides the most useful guide because it reaches back in time and around the globe. I agree with Mishra that economic turmoil and uncertainty, threats such as climate change (which some deny but still no doubt fear), and the ongoing frustrations and humiliations perceived by far too many have created our volatile political climate. Like me, he looks around the world and sees millions and millions of young men [sic] who are encountering frustrated expectations as economic growth inevitably slows and thereby denying opportunities to climb the latter of status and success. Alas, Mishra doesn’t have an answer for all of this. I suspect, like me, that he doesn’t want to crush the benefits of modernity to ameliorate its detriments. But somehow, we have to find our way beyond our current fix, or we will suffer much worse to come.
54 people found this helpfulReport
Miguel Cortes
4.0 out of 5 stars El libro es bueno, pero ustedes pasadísimosReviewed in Spain on 6 March 2017
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No pienso dedicar tanto tiempo a escribir cada vez que me preguntan. Lo hago con la esperanza de que cambien alguna vez
2 people found this helpfulReport
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gautam
5.0 out of 5 stars Five StarsReviewed in India on 1 May 2017
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One of the best books that I have read on our present crisis. The author's erudition is breathtaking!
2 people found this helpfulReport
Nacir
1.0 out of 5 stars UnreadableReviewed in Mexico on 29 November 2018
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The book is simply unreadable: there are no references or support for the never-ending nonsense wordiness.
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From Australia
Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant bookReviewed in Australia on 25 October 2021
A riveting and provocative read that seemed to tie in with other books I'd read about the modern West, and how change which brings about huge shifts in opportunity, wealth and power, leaves a relatively few elites at the top and a resentful mass at the bottom.
HelpfulReport
Solutionist
2.0 out of 5 stars A luxuriously learned presentation of other people's ideas and quotes. Gets hard to digest the feast, very quickly.Reviewed in Australia on 22 June 2017
Verified Purchase
This book is an amazingly learned cobbling together of snippets of other people's thoughts. I gave up after struggling to remain interested in reading about people I thought I ought to know more about, but it was too hard to follow - endless short quotes do not an argument make. The gist of the book was made clear quite early, I can't recall how. The rest felt like an endless weighting of scales to make a point nobody is likely to argue against anyway.
2 people found this helpful
HelpfulReport
From other countries
Vlad Thelad
5.0 out of 5 stars Erudite darknessReviewed in Canada on 15 March 2017
Verified Purchase
I love a book that makes me think. This one sure did. It argues that the Enlightenment, liberalism, and the first globalization engendered the intellectual roots, and comparable circumstances that explain why today we are witnessing a backlash of extreme nationalism, populism, terrorism, and widespread violence in such an overwhelming scale. It explains how the seeds of the “ressentiment” that fuel today’s anger are the same that existed from, and throughout, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The author makes his case with undoubted erudition. To write a worthy response would demand a book well beyond the scope of this reviewer. Those of us self-defined liberals, inheritors of the Enlightenment ideas, and supporters of rational thought, science, the individual’s inalienable rights, democracy, social welfare, and free market economy, still have a long way to go to make our case. However, in the broader scope of history I unapologetically believe the world is, and will be, better off when these ideals prevail.
7 people found this helpfulReport
VincentB
5.0 out of 5 stars Brillante analyse du monde d'aujourd'hui et de ses enjeux sociauxReviewed in France on 20 March 2017
Verified Purchase
En remontant au XVIII siècle et aux grands penseurs français de l'époque pré révolutionnaire (Voltaire, Rousseau entre autres) et à leurs analyses et conflits (en particulier Rousseau vs. Voltaire), puis post révolutionnaire (Alexis de Tocqueville), Pankaj Mishra, qui pourtant n'est pas français, nous ouvre une perspective vertigineuse sur les causes et enjeux du monde d'aujourd'hui - et ce sur tous les continents.
On peut ne pas être d'accord sur tout ce qu'il dit, mais il fait une lecture originale et ouvre un vrai débat sur notre époque où la violence et la colère se mondialise, et sur ses causes. Restent les remèdes à trouver!
7 people found this helpfulReport
Translate review to English
Amazon カスタマー
3.0 out of 5 stars Hated at first but grew on my bit by bitReviewed in Japan on 22 March 2024
Verified Purchase
A very tough and frustrating read. I had expected it to be about current events and the media. Instead it was mostly intellectual history involving Tocqueville, Voltaire, Rousseau and so on.
However, once I got used to what the book actually was, it became a certainly a very rewarding read. The author still could write more narratively/engagingly I felt, but it is what it is. If you put in the effort to go through it you will definitely get a lot out of it.
Report
GarethGray
5.0 out of 5 stars It will help you understand that you are not going madReviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 September 2017
Verified Purchase
I highly recommend this book for anyone hoping to bolster their intellectual self-defence capabilities in a media atmosphere swamped with bile, stupidity and hatred.
When Internet trolls, politicians, talk show demagogues, and even respected newspaper columnists insist that Islam is evil, that we are locked in a “clash of civilisation”, and you know that that can’t be the whole story, and that even a nine-year-old could argue effectively against the proposition, and yet you still feel swamped and rattled by the sheer volume and intensity of the bile, you should consider reading this book, because it sets out an historical framework that puts the confusion of today into a very clear and interesting perspective. It will help you understand that you are not going mad.
Its premise is bold and will provoke strong negative reactions. In these reviews I see that it already has.
The premise is that the liberal economic order that has dominated the West since the late 17th century, and which has since been exported to or forced upon all continents, has deep, negative side effects. This economic order, its accompanying industrialisation and mass marketing, and the political structures and assumptions that support it, posits human beings as individual, acquisitive consumers who should be motivated by the craving to have what others have. By turning human beings into cogs of this order, it erodes traditional cultures and norms and leaves people deracinated, isolated, confused and angry. It propels them toward extreme, compensatory ideologies, and it drives them to murder.
As an educated liberal who is comfortable – mostly, finally – in the democratic, free-market West, my hackles rose at Mishra’s thesis, and I began preparing mentally to argue against what I assumed would be a facile, West-hating, lefty pile of wishy-washiness. But he snagged me with his opening example, of the proto-fascist Gabriele D’Annunzio, the Italian writer who led a volunteer force of nationalistic nutters to seize the Adriatic city of Fiume in 1920.
Mishra then begins to build his case, carefully, exhaustively, brick by brick, starting with the seminal rift between Voltaire, cast as the godfather of the liberal order, and Rousseau, progenitor of all romantics and revolutionaries who, as Mishra says: “described the quintessential inner experience of modernity for most people: the uprooted outsider in the commercial metropolis, aspiring for a place in it, and struggling with complex feelings of envy, fascination, revulsion and rejection.”
By the time Mishra has traced this dynamic through the upheavals and terror outbreaks of France, Germany, Russia, Italy, India, the US, Japan and other countries, there is no need to mention Boko Haram, ISIS, Al Qaeda and the rest. We can see that terrorism was not invented on 9/11. Although it should pass into liturgy here in the West Mishra’s encapsulation of what happened in the Middle East from the start of the 20th century: “the division of the Middle East into mandates and spheres of influence, the equally arbitrary creation of unviable nation states, unequal treaties with oil-rich states – and the pressures of neo-imperialism. Even when free of such crippling burdens, the modernizers could never simply repeat Europe’s antecedent development, which, as we noted earlier, had been calamitously uneven, fuelled by a rush of demagogic politics, ethnic cleansing and total wars.”
He rams his point home subtly, for instance by noting that before steering his airliner into the Twin Towers, Mohamed Atta had submitted his Master’s thesis in urban planning at the University of Hamburg on the despoilation, by highways and gleaming glass towers, of an old, traditional neighbourhood in the Syrian city of Aleppo.
The book is not perfect. You will need to get through the Prologue, which is larded with verbiage and off-putting generalities, but prepare to hit the ground running in Chapter 1.
It could have been shorter, quite a lot I suspect, without doing real damage to the case he is making. Mishra discovered a lot about the history of European philosophy and literature and he may have struggled to assess what distance to keep from the source material. As it is, you get everything, which to me clashed with the urgent contemporary nature of his argument. For this reason I considered withholding one star, but I can’t. This is a tour de force, and contains many jaw-dropping revelations, and I am only grateful.
14 people found this helpfulReport
Stephen N. Greenleaf
5.0 out of 5 stars The Past as PresentReviewed in the United States on 13 February 2017
Verified Purchase
Here’s an idea for a history professor who teaches a class in European Thought from the Age of Enlightenment to the advent of the First World War. You give this question as the take-home exam:
"Identify a trend in European thought that spread throughout the continent and beyond that has a connection to events in the contemporary world. Identify the trend and explain how this trend relates to significant contemporary events."
I imagine that something like this popped into the head of Pankaj Mishra, and the Age of Anger is his answer to this challenge. Our imaginary professor need not look further than this brilliant book to find an “A” answer.
In this book, Mishra looks at terrorism, rising popular frustrations, and the shift toward populist politics, ardent nationalism, and autocratic rulers in the contemporary world. In Mishra’s book, we see connections between Islamic terrorists, Hindu nationalists, Brexit, and Trump voters. Each group manifests a fundamental rebellion against the social and economic—and therefore political—strictures of modernity and its most forceful representative, global capitalism. Others have identified these contemporary connections, but Mishra reaches back to the Enlightenment in 18th century France to see how the foremost nation of the age understood modernity and how it responded to the changes modernity imposed upon individuals and societies. Mishra focuses on the leading figure of the French Enlightenment, Voltaire, and its leading critic, Rousseau. European politics after 1789 can be viewed as a continuation of the battles of the French Revolution, and in the same way, European social and political thought can be seen as a continuation of the contending viewpoints of Rousseau and Voltaire.
Mishra traces the history of Rousseau’s thought as it emigrated to Germany and captured the attention of Herder and the Romantic movement. Germany was late to industrial development and late to nationhood, but it made up for its lost time with a vengeance. Mishra also charts the course of Rousseau’s thought and its attendant nationalism into Italy, which also came late to statehood and only falteringly to industrial capitalism. And Mishra looks at Russia, its nationhood achieved, but sorely lagging in the cultural and economic markers of modernity. In each nation, throughout Europe (with Great Britain a significant outlier), the demands of modernity and modern industrial capitalism tore the social fabric and created a backlash among those unable to realize the prizes offered by capitalism. In short, a backlash occurred beginning with the French Revolution and continuing through the First World War to now. While the working class struggled for basic living conditions, the intellectual class struggled with the indignities and frustrations that this system built upon mimetic desire created. Mishra examines the work of a variety of continental thinkers in this period, Herder, Proudhon, Marx, Bakunin (anarchist), Mazzini (Italian nationalist), Dostoevsky, Tocqueville, and Nietzsche, to name some of the most prominent writers who addressed these issues. Also, Mishra discusses the spread of these lines of thought through other parts of the world, including Islamic civilization, India, and China, which, in seeking to throw off the yoke of Western imperialism, adopted and modified Western thinking both modern and anti-modern.
But don’t think that this is merely an account of abstract thinkers. Mishra’s book also recounts the violence spawned by these thinkers and others like them. From the French Revolution to the Revolutions of 1848 to the anarchist bombings and assassinations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, violence plagued Europe, the U.S., and the rest of the world. And while the two world wars and the cold war placed a damper on much of this ferment, it erupted again after the end of the Cold War. Whether large scale killings like those in Bosnia, or acts of terrorism like the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building and the World Trade Center, in Mishra’s account, it’s all of a single cloth. Indeed, the physical proximity of Timothy McVeigh, U.S. Army veteran, and Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the first World Trade Center attack (1993), represents the similarity of their characteristics. Yousef claimed the mantle of Islam, and McVeigh claimed no religion other than “science,” but both held a deep-seated grievance against the existing order.
The common bond of this tale of violence is ressentiment, frustration, powerlessness, and humiliation. These feelings provide the motivation for both the angry words and the violent deeds that seek to destroy the system, to remake the world. Note that as I write this, a self-proclaimed “Leninist” who want to bring down the system, Stephen Bannon, sits at the right hand of our demagogic president. I fear it events could become uglier more quickly than we can imagine.
Mishra is a native of India and resides currently in London. He is conversant in both worlds. In An End to Suffering: the Buddha in the World, which I read some years ago, I noted how well he moved between the Buddhist tradition and the Western tradition. His mastery of the material of the “exam question” that he gave in himself in Age of Anger is also exemplary. (He provides a thorough bibliographical essay to show where he has been in this research. It’s impressive.)
More than any other source dealing with the Age of Trump, I found Mishra’s account provides the most useful guide because it reaches back in time and around the globe. I agree with Mishra that economic turmoil and uncertainty, threats such as climate change (which some deny but still no doubt fear), and the ongoing frustrations and humiliations perceived by far too many have created our volatile political climate. Like me, he looks around the world and sees millions and millions of young men [sic] who are encountering frustrated expectations as economic growth inevitably slows and thereby denying opportunities to climb the latter of status and success. Alas, Mishra doesn’t have an answer for all of this. I suspect, like me, that he doesn’t want to crush the benefits of modernity to ameliorate its detriments. But somehow, we have to find our way beyond our current fix, or we will suffer much worse to come.
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Miguel Cortes
4.0 out of 5 stars El libro es bueno, pero ustedes pasadísimosReviewed in Spain on 6 March 2017
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No pienso dedicar tanto tiempo a escribir cada vez que me preguntan. Lo hago con la esperanza de que cambien alguna vez
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gautam
5.0 out of 5 stars Five StarsReviewed in India on 1 May 2017
Verified Purchase
One of the best books that I have read on our present crisis. The author's erudition is breathtaking!
2 people found this helpfulReport
Nacir
1.0 out of 5 stars UnreadableReviewed in Mexico on 29 November 2018
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The book is simply unreadable: there are no references or support for the never-ending nonsense wordiness.
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