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philippelazaro's review against another edition
1.0
“Our unit of analysis should also be the irreducible human being, her or his fears, desires and resentments. It is in the unstable relationship between the inner and public selves that one can start to take a more precise measure of today’s global civil war.”
–Pankaj Mishra
Book No. 18 of 2017
I think I totally had the wrong expectations for this book going into it. I was expecting a pretty thoughtful reflection on the current hostile social climate that seems to be a global phenomenon, and thoughts on facets like online discourse, outrage culture, and the false promise of overconfident authoritarians.
Instead, this book is simply a synthesis of different philosophical and political-scientific writings throughout history as modernism comes into being. I didn’t really catch on to any thoughtful insights or ideas that came as a result of different thoughts being connected. It was my only reading material on a flight to Portland, though, so I ended up finishing.
⭐️
–Pankaj Mishra
Book No. 18 of 2017
I think I totally had the wrong expectations for this book going into it. I was expecting a pretty thoughtful reflection on the current hostile social climate that seems to be a global phenomenon, and thoughts on facets like online discourse, outrage culture, and the false promise of overconfident authoritarians.
Instead, this book is simply a synthesis of different philosophical and political-scientific writings throughout history as modernism comes into being. I didn’t really catch on to any thoughtful insights or ideas that came as a result of different thoughts being connected. It was my only reading material on a flight to Portland, though, so I ended up finishing.
⭐️
charlottaliukas's review
Taking a 200 year perspective on current political boiling pots, anger and rage around the world, this is an impressive, ambitious book… but after months of trying, I admit defeat: The subject matter is interesting and the author incredibly well researched, but the writing style is just too intellectual for me (especially as this was my Libby book that I read on my phone screen). I made it about 60% in but got bored of having to read and re-read convoluted, over-the-top sentences many times over and still fail to understand them.
idrees2022's review
5.0
In Age of Anger: A History of the Present, Pankaj Mishra offers a panoramic survey of the populist wind roiling the world and a genealogy of the ressentiment propelling it. Lucid, incisive and provocative, the book may be the most ambitious effort yet to diagnose our social condition. With erudition and insight, it explains why movements from below are entrusting their future to paternalistic demagogues in the expectation of rewards from above.
With terror and immigration looming large in the rhetoric of neo-nativists, Islam and Muslims have often been portrayed as the irreconcilable other. But as Mishra notes, this presumes a West with a monolithic culture and coherent values. Western culture is varied, with room enough for both the Tea Party and MoveOn; its values can accommodate both Anders Breivik and Jon Stewart. The clash is more within than between civilisations. And the questions that have riven civilisations are not exclusive. The most inescapable among them is modernity – and it affects all.
It is to the 18th century response to modernity that Mishra traces the roots of our current woes. The West’s encounter with modernity was fraught with unprecedented upheavals in the political, economic and social realms. It was attended by mass migration, war and genocide. And with the rest of the world now catching up – a world first exposed to modernity through European imperialism – "large parts of Asia and Africa are now plunging deeper into the West’s own fateful experience of that modernity".
Seen in this context, a group like ISIL is not sui generis; it has "deep intellectual and psychological affinities" with radicals who emerged across the West in the 19th and the early-20th centuries. They include "the aesthetes who glorified war, misogyny and pyromania; the nationalists who accused Jews and liberals of rootless cosmopolitanism and celebrated irrational violence; and the nihilists, anarchists and terrorists who flourished in almost every continent against a background of cosy political-financial alliances, devastating economic crises and obscene inequalities".
Mishra paints vivid portraits of these malcontents, from the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio who created the prototype of a fascist state in Fiume, to the Russian nihilist Sergey Nechayev whose revolutionary adventures culminating in fratricide provided Dostoyevsky with one of his most memorable characters.
Since the Second World War, mainly through American influence, liberal democracy has flourished across western Europe. But there is nothing inherently liberal or democratic about western culture, Mishra writes. Its dalliance with totalitarianism was no aberration. It "crystalized the ideological currents (scientific racism, jingoistic nationalism, imperialism, technicism, aestheticized politics, utopianism, social engineering and the violent struggle for existence) flowing through all of Europe in the late nineteenth century".
The West has always presented itself as a bearer of Enlightenment ideals. Its distinct "way of life" has had its evangelists. Beginning with the Enlightenment philosophers, many have advocated for progress through science, reason, and commerce – and force, if necessary. Voltaire famously supported Russian empress Catherine (the Great) in her attempts to foist modernity upon Turkey and Poland (wiping the latter off the map).
Against this current of enforced modernisation stood Rousseau, an outsider, a parvenu, who scoffed at the air of moral superiority cultivated by his debauched peers and instead championed "the people" within whose general will the unmoored individual could find autonomy while subsuming his identity in a glorified community. Rejecting intellectualism, resenting elites, scorning the foreigner, this type of tribalism responded to psychic wounds that went beyond purely material needs. Loss of status or identity and desire for glory and recognition was always a greater motivator.
This, Mishra writes, created an enduring appeal for Rousseau’s ideas among the defeated and the left-behind. The first to embrace Rousseau were the Germans, who, not yet a nation, assimilated his ideas into a Romantic nationalism which, in conscious opposition to French civic nationalism, celebrated community and service. From philosophers like Fichte and Herder, his ideas were relayed on to poets like Goethe and Schiller. And having helped Germans coalesce into a nation, they were adapted by nation-builders farther afield, from Giuseppe Mazzini in Italy to Adam Mickiewicz in Poland. Percolating down into the writings of stateless intellectuals, they helped to imagine nations into existence from Italy to India, Poland to Pakistan.
Rooted in existential politics, however, these ideas could lend themselves as easily to progressive causes as to reactionary ones. If Romantic nationalism has led to fascistic imperialism, it has also helped defeated nations resist colonial domination. Sometimes the same ideas have found radically different interpretations in the same country.
Nothing illustrates this better than the case of Gandhi and Vinayak Savarkar, the founder of the Hindutva movement and a conspirator in Gandhi’s eventual assassination. Both men were influenced by Mazzini but each put his writings to different use. For Gandhi they represented universal ideas of community and service, for Savarkar they became a licence for chauvinism and intolerance. And while Gandhi enjoyed all the early triumphs, it is Savarkar’s ideas that have come to prevail in India today. Narendra Modi is a product of Savarkar’s movement. And his support has come not just from the downtrodden, but also from India’s professional classes, its vast diaspora and the super-rich who see in his machismo a vision of the glory that they feel they have been denied.
This mix of self-loathing and self-aggrandizement has been at the root of this politics of ressentiment. A crisis of democracy has presented demagogues from India to Britain, Hungary to the US, with an opportunity to exploit the "generalized discontent, the mood of drift, resentment, disillusionment and economic shakiness" and turn it into a plan of action. They do it by stoking xenophobia, demonising minorities, attacking the media and railing against experts and "the establishment". In its more extreme form, it also fuels the obtrusive violence of ISIL, which, regardless of its medieval references, is a product of modernity.
The glorification of violence is not something new, Mishra shows. "Ideas ripen quickly", wrote Mazzini, "when nourished by the blood of martyrs." His disciple Alfredo Oriani insisted, "blood will always be the best warm rain for great ideas". Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, spoke of the "voluptuousness of a great idea and of martyrdom". The German poet Ernst Arndt preached a "bloody hatred of the French" to "smoulder as the religion of the German folk". The dramatist Heinrich von Kleist imagined smashing a French child’s head against a church pillar.
And this was long before the horror of the two world wars.
The "will to power and craving for violence as existential experience" that characterizes ISIL was long ago foreseen by the French revolutionary Georges Sorel. But beyond the myriad pathologies it represents, writes Mishra, ISIL is also counter-culture and a bureaucracy. The "gruesome reciprocity" of its spectacular violence and the grim aesthetic of its staged executions is also a response to the snuff videos of CIA drone attacks and the carceral pageantry of orange jumpsuits debuted in Guantanamo. If it revels in its criminality, it has ample precedents.
Age of Anger is a bracing attempt to take the political pulse of an age. It is sweeping in scope and refreshingly free of dogma. But its broad canvas necessarily leads to gaps and omissions, some of them vital. The question of power, for example, remains unexplored. But by recognising the existential roots of politics and tracing its antecedents, Mishra has made perhaps the most valuable contribution to the understanding of our turbulent age.
With terror and immigration looming large in the rhetoric of neo-nativists, Islam and Muslims have often been portrayed as the irreconcilable other. But as Mishra notes, this presumes a West with a monolithic culture and coherent values. Western culture is varied, with room enough for both the Tea Party and MoveOn; its values can accommodate both Anders Breivik and Jon Stewart. The clash is more within than between civilisations. And the questions that have riven civilisations are not exclusive. The most inescapable among them is modernity – and it affects all.
It is to the 18th century response to modernity that Mishra traces the roots of our current woes. The West’s encounter with modernity was fraught with unprecedented upheavals in the political, economic and social realms. It was attended by mass migration, war and genocide. And with the rest of the world now catching up – a world first exposed to modernity through European imperialism – "large parts of Asia and Africa are now plunging deeper into the West’s own fateful experience of that modernity".
Seen in this context, a group like ISIL is not sui generis; it has "deep intellectual and psychological affinities" with radicals who emerged across the West in the 19th and the early-20th centuries. They include "the aesthetes who glorified war, misogyny and pyromania; the nationalists who accused Jews and liberals of rootless cosmopolitanism and celebrated irrational violence; and the nihilists, anarchists and terrorists who flourished in almost every continent against a background of cosy political-financial alliances, devastating economic crises and obscene inequalities".
Mishra paints vivid portraits of these malcontents, from the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio who created the prototype of a fascist state in Fiume, to the Russian nihilist Sergey Nechayev whose revolutionary adventures culminating in fratricide provided Dostoyevsky with one of his most memorable characters.
Since the Second World War, mainly through American influence, liberal democracy has flourished across western Europe. But there is nothing inherently liberal or democratic about western culture, Mishra writes. Its dalliance with totalitarianism was no aberration. It "crystalized the ideological currents (scientific racism, jingoistic nationalism, imperialism, technicism, aestheticized politics, utopianism, social engineering and the violent struggle for existence) flowing through all of Europe in the late nineteenth century".
The West has always presented itself as a bearer of Enlightenment ideals. Its distinct "way of life" has had its evangelists. Beginning with the Enlightenment philosophers, many have advocated for progress through science, reason, and commerce – and force, if necessary. Voltaire famously supported Russian empress Catherine (the Great) in her attempts to foist modernity upon Turkey and Poland (wiping the latter off the map).
Against this current of enforced modernisation stood Rousseau, an outsider, a parvenu, who scoffed at the air of moral superiority cultivated by his debauched peers and instead championed "the people" within whose general will the unmoored individual could find autonomy while subsuming his identity in a glorified community. Rejecting intellectualism, resenting elites, scorning the foreigner, this type of tribalism responded to psychic wounds that went beyond purely material needs. Loss of status or identity and desire for glory and recognition was always a greater motivator.
This, Mishra writes, created an enduring appeal for Rousseau’s ideas among the defeated and the left-behind. The first to embrace Rousseau were the Germans, who, not yet a nation, assimilated his ideas into a Romantic nationalism which, in conscious opposition to French civic nationalism, celebrated community and service. From philosophers like Fichte and Herder, his ideas were relayed on to poets like Goethe and Schiller. And having helped Germans coalesce into a nation, they were adapted by nation-builders farther afield, from Giuseppe Mazzini in Italy to Adam Mickiewicz in Poland. Percolating down into the writings of stateless intellectuals, they helped to imagine nations into existence from Italy to India, Poland to Pakistan.
Rooted in existential politics, however, these ideas could lend themselves as easily to progressive causes as to reactionary ones. If Romantic nationalism has led to fascistic imperialism, it has also helped defeated nations resist colonial domination. Sometimes the same ideas have found radically different interpretations in the same country.
Nothing illustrates this better than the case of Gandhi and Vinayak Savarkar, the founder of the Hindutva movement and a conspirator in Gandhi’s eventual assassination. Both men were influenced by Mazzini but each put his writings to different use. For Gandhi they represented universal ideas of community and service, for Savarkar they became a licence for chauvinism and intolerance. And while Gandhi enjoyed all the early triumphs, it is Savarkar’s ideas that have come to prevail in India today. Narendra Modi is a product of Savarkar’s movement. And his support has come not just from the downtrodden, but also from India’s professional classes, its vast diaspora and the super-rich who see in his machismo a vision of the glory that they feel they have been denied.
This mix of self-loathing and self-aggrandizement has been at the root of this politics of ressentiment. A crisis of democracy has presented demagogues from India to Britain, Hungary to the US, with an opportunity to exploit the "generalized discontent, the mood of drift, resentment, disillusionment and economic shakiness" and turn it into a plan of action. They do it by stoking xenophobia, demonising minorities, attacking the media and railing against experts and "the establishment". In its more extreme form, it also fuels the obtrusive violence of ISIL, which, regardless of its medieval references, is a product of modernity.
The glorification of violence is not something new, Mishra shows. "Ideas ripen quickly", wrote Mazzini, "when nourished by the blood of martyrs." His disciple Alfredo Oriani insisted, "blood will always be the best warm rain for great ideas". Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, spoke of the "voluptuousness of a great idea and of martyrdom". The German poet Ernst Arndt preached a "bloody hatred of the French" to "smoulder as the religion of the German folk". The dramatist Heinrich von Kleist imagined smashing a French child’s head against a church pillar.
And this was long before the horror of the two world wars.
The "will to power and craving for violence as existential experience" that characterizes ISIL was long ago foreseen by the French revolutionary Georges Sorel. But beyond the myriad pathologies it represents, writes Mishra, ISIL is also counter-culture and a bureaucracy. The "gruesome reciprocity" of its spectacular violence and the grim aesthetic of its staged executions is also a response to the snuff videos of CIA drone attacks and the carceral pageantry of orange jumpsuits debuted in Guantanamo. If it revels in its criminality, it has ample precedents.
Age of Anger is a bracing attempt to take the political pulse of an age. It is sweeping in scope and refreshingly free of dogma. But its broad canvas necessarily leads to gaps and omissions, some of them vital. The question of power, for example, remains unexplored. But by recognising the existential roots of politics and tracing its antecedents, Mishra has made perhaps the most valuable contribution to the understanding of our turbulent age.
tbr_the_unconquered's review
2.0
That's how it starts, sir. The fever, the rage, the feeling of powerlessness that turns good men... cruel.
While this may be too melodramatic for a work of non-fiction that talks about our present day society, the tone conveyed by this snippet of dialog is elaborated extensively by Pankaj Mishra. A voluminous work that spans most of western civilization’s history tells us why we have come to a deadly impasse of late across the world. Mishra highlights some key world leaders – Trump in the US, Putin in Russia, Modi in India and Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey and asks us a question as to why have they come to power with such large majorities. This metaphorical question however is not the base of the book, it lies elsewhere in trying to seek answers to why there is an increase in rage, frustration and fear in the present day world and if this is an isolated phase of human history.
The answer to the last question according to the author was a no. Starting from the the time of the Industrial Revolution in Europe, Mishra points out instances as to how modernization, the clustering of wealth in the hand of a few individuals and social discrimination have led to the rise of disenchanted individuals and later groups. Starting with the Rousseau v/s Voltaire debate the two sides of the fence are introduced. With the inexorable march of history, Mishra also calls out the first call to a holy war in post-Christian world but ironically this call was from Prussia to fight against the French infidel, Napoleon. While these were pretty much interesting to read and comprehend, there then followed a barrage of information and thoughts from authors who I had no clue about. These included – Tocqueville, Herzen, Bakunin, Mazzini and Sorrel among others. As Mishra himself points out in the bibliographic essay, a fair amount of understanding about the works of these individuals would help you make more sense of what is being dissected here.
It is only in the last couple of chapters that the author discusses the nature of Islamic and Hindu fundamentalism. For the first he chooses to talk about ISIS while for the second he selects India’s current government. While I had read earlier about Mishra’s world view being leftist liberal, having read this first hand I got a fair understanding of why this could be. There are claims made here which have been dismissed time and again by courts for lack of evidence. However these points are not given as asides or remarks but put across as assertions. Having lived in the country through the said incidents and after seeing/hearing/reading the news it was pretty straightforward to distinguish conjencture from fact. What was interesting was how much Mishra had to talk about the current state of affairs in the nation but there is little or no mention of what he thinks the nation could do different to make things better.
To fully appreciate the scope of this book, you have to be very well read on a lot of varied aspects of history and its various epicycles. If not, like me you will be befuddled to a great extent.
While this may be too melodramatic for a work of non-fiction that talks about our present day society, the tone conveyed by this snippet of dialog is elaborated extensively by Pankaj Mishra. A voluminous work that spans most of western civilization’s history tells us why we have come to a deadly impasse of late across the world. Mishra highlights some key world leaders – Trump in the US, Putin in Russia, Modi in India and Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey and asks us a question as to why have they come to power with such large majorities. This metaphorical question however is not the base of the book, it lies elsewhere in trying to seek answers to why there is an increase in rage, frustration and fear in the present day world and if this is an isolated phase of human history.
The answer to the last question according to the author was a no. Starting from the the time of the Industrial Revolution in Europe, Mishra points out instances as to how modernization, the clustering of wealth in the hand of a few individuals and social discrimination have led to the rise of disenchanted individuals and later groups. Starting with the Rousseau v/s Voltaire debate the two sides of the fence are introduced. With the inexorable march of history, Mishra also calls out the first call to a holy war in post-Christian world but ironically this call was from Prussia to fight against the French infidel, Napoleon. While these were pretty much interesting to read and comprehend, there then followed a barrage of information and thoughts from authors who I had no clue about. These included – Tocqueville, Herzen, Bakunin, Mazzini and Sorrel among others. As Mishra himself points out in the bibliographic essay, a fair amount of understanding about the works of these individuals would help you make more sense of what is being dissected here.
It is only in the last couple of chapters that the author discusses the nature of Islamic and Hindu fundamentalism. For the first he chooses to talk about ISIS while for the second he selects India’s current government. While I had read earlier about Mishra’s world view being leftist liberal, having read this first hand I got a fair understanding of why this could be. There are claims made here which have been dismissed time and again by courts for lack of evidence. However these points are not given as asides or remarks but put across as assertions. Having lived in the country through the said incidents and after seeing/hearing/reading the news it was pretty straightforward to distinguish conjencture from fact. What was interesting was how much Mishra had to talk about the current state of affairs in the nation but there is little or no mention of what he thinks the nation could do different to make things better.
To fully appreciate the scope of this book, you have to be very well read on a lot of varied aspects of history and its various epicycles. If not, like me you will be befuddled to a great extent.
lucasmiller's review
5.0
I came to this book from Mishra's Op-Ed in the New York Times, "The Religion of Whiteness Becomes a Suicide Cult." I'm no great reader of the NYT Op-Ed page, but a co-worker passed it along, and I found it quite striking. This set my expectations for Age of Anger, and it proved to be much more than I expected.
I don't know if I agree with all of Mr. Mishra's conclusions, but the sources he mines for an understanding of the particular form of grievance so common in the 21st century is incredibly intriguing to me. This book has created a reading list that will last me a couple of years I imagine.
Reassessments of the Enlightenment are above my intellectual pay grade for the most part, but Mishra does a lot of heavy lifting to fit his theories into accessible bite sized pieces so that all of the -isms and perspectives don't overwhelm. The downside to this program is that he is all over the place and seems to just pile connection on top of one another without feeling much pressure to bring all of his strands of thought together. This is grounded in the frequent citations from Rousseau, Nitzche, Tocqueville, and Herzen. But all of these figures, three very familiar ones, are re-contextualized in some pretty challenging ways.
This book is dark, but I was intrigued. The type of book I am more interested in interrogating then agreeing or disagreeing with. Read. Then hit me up so we can talk about it.
I don't know if I agree with all of Mr. Mishra's conclusions, but the sources he mines for an understanding of the particular form of grievance so common in the 21st century is incredibly intriguing to me. This book has created a reading list that will last me a couple of years I imagine.
Reassessments of the Enlightenment are above my intellectual pay grade for the most part, but Mishra does a lot of heavy lifting to fit his theories into accessible bite sized pieces so that all of the -isms and perspectives don't overwhelm. The downside to this program is that he is all over the place and seems to just pile connection on top of one another without feeling much pressure to bring all of his strands of thought together. This is grounded in the frequent citations from Rousseau, Nitzche, Tocqueville, and Herzen. But all of these figures, three very familiar ones, are re-contextualized in some pretty challenging ways.
This book is dark, but I was intrigued. The type of book I am more interested in interrogating then agreeing or disagreeing with. Read. Then hit me up so we can talk about it.
admiralette's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
tense
slow-paced
4.0
spb3's review
4.0
This is a fun book conceptually, with loads of literary, historical, and philosophical references, many of which Mishra hopes for us to take on good faith. Yet, one can't help but to wonder how much Mishra has left out or modified to fit his argument. He approached an enormous task in an appealing way, but left himself exposed to the weaknesses of his Age of Anger.