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Pankaj MishraPankaj Mishra
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Age of Anger: A History of the Present Kindle Edition
by Pankaj Mishra (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 720 ratings
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. The many who came late to this new world or were left, or pushed, behind, reacted in horrifyingly similar ways: intense hatred of invented enemies, attempts to re-create an imaginary golden age, and self-empowerment through spectacular violence. 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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382 pages
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English
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Review
"Mishra may well be the ideal writer to diagnose our current moment . . . 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." --Sebastian Strangio, Los Angeles Review of Books
"Important, erudite . . . 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 . . . A decent liberalism would read sharp critics like Mishra and learn." --Franklin Foer, The New York Times Book Review
Columnist and historian Pankaj Mishra has named a moment and an era: His brilliant new book Age of Anger: A History of the Present looks at the rising tide of radical nationalism, racism, intolerance, misogyny, xenophobia, and fascism that's sweeping away calmer and more measured opposition all over the world, and he attempts to understand the phenomena before it engulfs everybody on the planet. . . Fiercely literate and eloquent." --Steve Donoghue, The Christian Science Monitor
"In its literacy and literariness, [Age of Anger] has the feel of Edmund Wilson's extraordinary dramas of modern ideas--books like To the Finland Station--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." --Samuel Moyn, The New Republic
"In probing for the wellspring of today's anger [Pankaj Mishra] hits on something real. He traces our current mood back to the French Enlightenment of the 18th century . . . 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." --Peter Coy, Bloomberg Businessweek
"Erudite ...[In] Age of Anger: A History of the Present, which was conceived before Brexit and Trump, the Indian nonfiction writer and novelist Pankaj Mishra argues that our current rage has deep historical roots." --Bryan Walsh, Time
"Richly learned and usefully subversive." --John Gray, Literary Review
"A bowel-churning kick in the guts . . . [Pankaj Mishra's] vision is unusually broad, accommodating and resistant to categorisation. It is the kind of vision the world needs right now . . . Age of Anger is vitally germane to the global expressions of discontent that we are now witnessing" --Christopher de Bellaigue, Financial Times
"[An] ambitious world history of anti-progressive backlash." --New York
"A disturbing but imperatively urgent analysis." -- Bryce Christensen, Booklist (starred review)
"A probing, well-informed investigation of global unrest calling for 'truly transformative thinking' about humanity's future." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"With a deep knowledge of both Western and non-Western history, and like no other before him, Pankaj Mishra comes to grips with the malaise at the heart of these dangerous times. This is the most astonishing, convincing, and disturbing book I've read in years." --Joe Sacco
"In this urgent, profound and extraordinarily timely study, Pankaj Mishra follows the likes of Isaiah Berlin, John Gray and Mark Lilla by delving into the past in order to throw light on our contemporary predicament, when the neglected and dispossessed of the world have suddenly risen up in Nietzschean ressentiment to transform the world we thought we knew." --John Banville
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. --Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, The National
About the Author
Pankaj Mishra is the author of From the Ruins of Empire, Age of Anger, and several other books. He is a columnist at Bloomberg View and writes regularly for The Guardian, the London Review of Books, and The New Yorker. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he lives in London.
Product details
ASIN : B01JTV79X6
Publisher : Penguin; 1st edition (26 January 2017)
Language : English
File size : 2.0 MB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Not Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 382 pagesBest Sellers Rank: 71,960 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)11 in Globalization (Kindle Store)
11 in Revolutionary Historical Study
27 in 21st Century World HistoryCustomer Reviews:
4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 720 ratings
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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.
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d.alfred-mn
5.0 out of 5 stars An end of history is not in sightReviewed in Germany on 17 March 2017
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Phenomena such as Hindu nationalism, Chinese nationalism, Russian nationalism or radical Islamism are by no means novel phenomena according to Mishra. The spiritual forefathers are found in Europe of the 19th century.
The resentment, the feelings of backwardness, the feverish excitement of allegedly violated national honor of today's actors can already be found there. For example, in the increasingly radicalizing reaction of the German intellectual elites to the
French - British superiority in cultural and economic terms and to the French Revolution.
The Italian, Polish and Russian elites have radicalized according to patterns similar to the Germans.
Mishra does not provide a solution to our current crises. However, his book offers a very interesting starting point for those who are looking for solutions.
For all Germans and Austrians who have the “WHY??? “of National Socialism, I highly recommend the book. Through this book I have a completely different look at the 19th century from a German-speaking point of view. However ,
little human sympathy has remained to me through this reading for some of our poets and thinkers of the 19th century.
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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!
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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.
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Deep Knowledge
5.0 out of 5 stars Truelly a masterpieceReviewed in India on 12 June 2019
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If You want to genuinely understand what is going on around, today's political situation is neither new nor accidental. I relished each page of this book. Pankaj Mishra is already in my list of top 10 authors.
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Invisible Hand
5.0 out of 5 stars Originality and depth enough even for the seasoned readerReviewed in the United States on 22 February 2017
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Pankaj Mishra has sired that rarest beast in today's saturated media environment: an original argument. As a member of the media / think-tank guild Mishra rightly criticizes in the book, I found myself stunned by the brazen novelty of his argument, which is a heresy from the perspective of mainstream thought on many of the individual topics (ISIS, resurgent nationalism, etc.) that Mishra weaves through in his book. That he manages to weave through all of them in articulating a single, coherent argument distinguishes this book even further, elevating it above the half-a-dozen or so truly original arguments on a current topic that typically surface in a given year.
In the unlikely event you do not find yourself hooked by Mishra's central thesis, it is worth reading to gain familiarity with the sources Mishra cites. These include Russian and Italian thinkers likely to be unfamiliar even to readers who have advanced degrees in pertinent subjects, as they are outside the purview of most course syllabi (for now).
In the service of supporting this argument, Mishra does at times tread on terrain of intellectual history -- Rousseau, Voltaire, Nietzsche, Wagner -- that will in principle be familiar to many with background in classical philosophy and social thought. But Mishra adds a depth of historical context that will enrich how students of philosophy understand these ideas (his discussion of the relationship between Rousseau and Voltaire, for instance, flavors the book beyond what any discussion of either author alone could offer.
In short, this is an extremely original and well-documented attempt at tackling the most important issues of the day by putting them in historical context. Though a few chapters felt dilatory, I would say this is one of the most thought-provoking and brazenly brilliant books I've read in the last five years.
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