Mishra's ambitious tracing of the philosophical roots of global political outrage situates the current moment within the long history of ressentiment, the moralizing and self-righteous revenge of those without power ... If Mishra's philosophical net seems awfully wide, his long view of modernity and its discontents is also provocative, providing a broadly conceived idea of how the conditions of political outrage and its often aestheticized expression have developed over the past three hundred years ... Age of Anger is especially scornful of clash-of-civilizations theorists and West-versus-the-rest apologists, who see the political anger of the Middle East as confined to one part of the world ... The scope of Age of Anger is ambitious, and rather than an exacting account of intellectual history, it offers a kind of vast cultural portrait. The result is what is at once most fascinating and exasperating about Mishra's project: In fusing biography and historical survey his story vacillates between sweeping perspective and intimate detail, and the push and pull of long history and close-up viewpoint sometimes give the book a herky-jerky pace. Nevertheless, it's a brilliant work.
To grasp the fear and desire behind violent reaction, Mishra contends, we need not just Karl Marx and Thomas Piketty, but also analysts of the psyche and spirit ... A self-proclaimed history of the present, Age of Anger also feels like a blast from the past. In its literacy and literariness, it has the feel of Edmund Wilson’s extraordinary dramas of modern ideas but with a different endpoint and a more global canvas. 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 ... he holds out no defined alternative. It is unclear whether Mishra feels the chief flaw lies in modernity’s failures—its false promise to liberate everyone—or in its successes, and the devastation that has accompanied them ... If intellectual history matters in this parlous situation, then getting Rousseau right does, too. Interpreting him, as Mishra does, as nostalgic for ancient liberty or protective of interior freedom in the face of the modern catastrophe, will ultimately not work.
This is an important, erudite and flawed book about the deepest roots of this inflamed moment, which was shipped to the printer before the outcome of the American election. The fact that the book contains only a smattering of references to the new president strangely enhances the credibility of its doomsaying. Mishra didn’t scramble for a theory to fit the facts ... Just when lessons from the past seem to be building toward a point about ISIS or globalization, he layers on another digression about Dostoyevsky or Ataturk. This tendency can be frustrating — and one begins to suspect it is a crutch, since our current spate of anarchists, populists and terrorists are so much less theoretically minded and articulate than their antique antecedents. It’s a strange imbalance, but Mishra writes with enough style, energy and incision that he carries the reader through ... Mishra dwells in the realm of ideas and emotions, which get short shrift in most accounts of global politics. So it’s bracing and illuminating for him to focus on feelings, what he calls 'the wars in the inner world.' But he doesn’t have much to say about the material reality of economics and politics other than angry bromides about the 'Western model' and broad, unsupported statements about stagnation.
[Mishra] wants to remind Westerners of our own painful, violent transition to modernity and to emphasize that much of the turmoil in the developing world is a symptom of the same ordeal ... There are two aspects to Mishra’s argument. One is that the Western model of secular rationalism—whether it takes the form of democratic capitalism or state socialism—promises equality, opportunity, and dignity for all and then fails to deliver on that promise. The other is that the malaise of modernity afflicts even the privileged because the promise itself is hollow ... Age of Anger is a short book into which a lot of intellectual history has been packed ... Only occasionally does Mishra explicitly address the rise of Donald Trump and similar demagogues in Europe and the U.K., but anyone reading Age of Anger with them in mind will find that nearly every page illuminates the current political climate of 'cultural supremacism, populism and rancorous brutality' that has left many feeling sideswiped and bewildered.
To read Age of Anger is to learn that the world is in fact destined to become still more riven and disorderly — and deservedly so ... The anger that Mishra himself injects into the current debate over globalisation, prosperity and freedom is not that of the neoliberal or the socialist; he is sceptical of any system of belief that claims to deliver wellbeing exclusively and in all circumstances ... vitally germane to the global expressions of discontent that we are now witnessing ... Such glimpses into a western past lend credence to the idea that our present disorders follow an established pattern of behaviour that surfaces in response to wrenching change ... It isn’t entirely surprising that Age of Anger, having ascribed our present troubles to all-encompassing ideology, shies from offering a blueprint for solving the problems of the world.
...[a] stimulating and depressing book ... How did this come to pass? Mishra looks to the history of ideas for an explanation, spending many chapters tracing a line of thought from Rousseau through the Romantics and the Russian nihilists to D’Annunzio and the anti-intellectual revolt of the fin de siècle and the early 20th century. But is this really convincing? Many of the parallels he draws between radical Islamic thinkers and European critics of Enlightenment rationalism seem strained, to say the least ... It’s hard to see the relevance of Mishra’s lengthy discussion of Rousseau to the politics of the present day. For one thing, he ignores the two ideas for which Rousseau is best known – the social contract, something modern populists implicitly disavow, and the general will, the expression of direct democracy, to which one might imagine they were more sympathetic. For another, one can’t imagine populist politicians knowing the first thing about Rousseau or Bakunin ... And what is all this meant to explain? Mishra lumps together the radical violence of Islamic State and Islamist extremism with the rise of Trumpism and the populist, anti-immigrant right, although they are differing phenomena that in the end require differing explanations. His sweeping rhetoric ends up by hugely exaggerating the dimensions of the problem he’s trying to explain ... history is a many-sided phenomenon. It cannot in the end be made to serve the interests of explaining the present through the vast and questionable arguments Pankaj Mishra puts forward in this thought-provoking book.
While he in no way justifies violence and terror, Mishra has the courage to pose deeply disturbing questions: What if al-Qaeda and ISIS, for all their savagery, are inevitable products of a world order in which the forces of individualism and self-seeking global capitalism are destroying older, settled ways of being without delivering a better life for millions? ... One of Mishra's many gifts is the ability to find in thinkers of the past important themes that suddenly speak to our moment in time. He finds fertile ground in Dostoevsky ... One strong caveat: After Mishra's brilliant and compelling diagnosis of our modern maladies, after we have been shown through overwhelming detail that 'the present order, democratic or authoritarian, is built upon force and fraud,' leading to a growing 'apocalyptic' mood — he ends without solutions, reforms or so much as a to-do list.
Mr Mishra shocks on several levels. First, he sees no hope that 2016 might prove the high-water mark of anger, cynicism and ugly nationalism. Indeed, he argues that the world will become only more divided and disorderly ... Mr Mishra sustains an angry assault on the notion—which in his depiction risks creating a straw man—that progress has led in a graceful arc from the Enlightenment to the liberal internationalism that prevailed until recently ... Mr Mishra shows how violence, nihilism and hatred of the 'other' have ample precedents among Western liberalism’s 19th- and 20th-century opponents, whether revolutionaries, anarchists or artists ... This history is usually very welcome, but sometimes infuriatingly meandering, the author’s century-spanning chains of associations stretching well past the point where many readers will want to follow. But it is nonetheless worth sticking with, as the early chapters are the worst offenders, and there is much rich reading. It is harder to agree with his argument that modern liberalism 'lies in ruins.'
There’s a lot of anger in this age of ours, but not all anger is the same and not all anger has equal justification. To describe terrorism as an act of anger, for example, may seem to imply that it has a justifying cause. In lumping together the anger of workers left high and dry by plant shutdowns, young people unable to find a secure job, and jihadi killers, Mishra fails to distinguish an anger that results in indiscriminate slaughter and has no justification whatever. Mishra doesn’t bother with such distinctions, it seems, because he sympathizes with the anger of jihadists and believes it has some justification ... To say that 'modernity' led to world wars, totalitarian regimes, and genocide, without showing the clear connection to actual history, is to rely on invective ... Since modernity is actually a multifaceted accumulation of dark and light, progress and retrogression, Mishra’s analysis quickly becomes tangled in its own contradictions ... Mishra’s analysis, which removes political agency from the story of modernity, makes it impossible to grasp that our present situation could have turned out very differently.
...[a] brilliant book ... Mishra's overview – amazingly capacious, considering the book's relative brevity – is grounded in a study of people across the spectrum ... Age of Anger is a fiercely literate and eloquent status report on systemic madness that seems to be the young 21st century's defining characteristic, and Mishra isn't afraid to follow some of his own theories to their ultimate implications.
Mishra cites a myriad of such authors, and although the breadth of his reading is impressive, his argument is chronologically scattershot and thematically repetitive ... Still, even if the book could have been streamlined, the theme bears repeating: Our current situation is recapitulating some of the most violent and dangerous episodes in modern history ... Noting that we need a deeper understanding of our own complicity in suffering as well as a 'transformative way of thinking,' he leaves readers with a dire diagnosis — not a recommended treatment. With powerful and worrisome insights into history, Pankaj Mishra has clarified our present. The future is up to us.
Mishra may well be the ideal writer to diagnose our current moment. For more than two decades, the Indian essayist has grappled with the epochal question of what it means to be modern ... We live in revolutionary times. In Age of Anger, Mishra has produced an urgent analysis of a moment in which the forgotten and dispossessed are rising up to challenge everything we thought we knew about the state of the world.
Mishra covers a lot of ground in Age of Anger, linking together the various forms discontent has taken — from Romanticism to terrorism — and weaving them into a truly global view. The result is an essential and sobering read. A belief in progress, or just a hope that things might get better at some point in the future, is a cornerstone of our civilization. But many today are losing that faith, and not without reason. Seeing progress as a cheat and an unrealizable fantasy, they want to put the machine into reverse. If they can’t share the gains, then they at least want the pain to be felt by everyone. Mishra sees this as a real problem, as we no longer live in a world that is capable of satisfying all of the dreams of material progress and individual empowerment it has raised. Which means the age of anger is going to get angrier yet.
...a book of far greater ambition than its timeliness suggests ... Age of Anger intends to undermine the social and cultural premises of democratic capitalism as thoroughly as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) sought to undermine the premises of market economics. Neither book, however, offers much detail about what will or should come next, and in light of this common lacuna, they are equally unpersuasive ... resentment in the violent form Mr. Mishra limns is only one of many possible responses to such a sense of injustice. Another, the most common, is to pursue a quiet life notwithstanding the fact of injustice. A third, however, is to seek improvement, of self or society or both. This last underlies the Enlightenment impulse that led to modernity. That’s a story Mr. Mishra knows well but excuses himself from telling in Age of Anger.”
Reading Age of Anger, Trump and his ilk across the globe seem like a combination of the worst aspects of these two figures. Remove all the intellect from Voltaire until you have nothing but the bourgeois businessman, combine it with Rousseau’s penchant for feeling slighted by every aspect of human existence, and you have a Frankenstein’s monster who doesn’t frighten the torch-carrying villagers, but leads them on a rampage to raze everything in sight ... If there is a weakness to Age of Anger, it’s that Mishra only glances at the events of the 20th century as he tracks the course of anti-modern reaction.
