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AGE OF ANGER: A HISTORY OF THE PRESENT PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Pankaj Mishra | 416 pages | 26 Jan 2017 | Penguin Books Ltd | 9780241299395 | English | London, United Kingdom Age of Anger - Wikipedia He traces our current mood back to the French Enlightenment of the 18th century. It is the kind of vision the world needs right now. 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. Get in touch Email: orders elliottbaybook. Cafe Information Little Oddfellows www. My Account. By Pankaj Mishra. Description One of our most important public intellectuals reveals the hidden history of our current global crisis. Slate 's Laura Miller stated, "The middle of the book could be heavy sledding for anyone lacking a passing familiarity with figures such as Fichte, Bakunin, and Kropotkin, but the chapters on how these European writers affected subsequent generations of leaders in India, Turkey, and China make it worth the effort. Critiques of the book focused on Mishra's evidence, relying more on "novelists and poets than historians and sociologists," [3] and on his attempt to use a single, wide-ranging cause to explain "differing phenomena that in the end require differing explanations. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Age of Anger First edition UK. Retrieved Retrieved from LiteraryReview. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. There are many problems with his argument, not least its almost total neglect of Marxism and social democracy as alternatives to and critics of the liberal and neoliberal economic and political order. 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. The discontents of the dispossessed are fundamentally economic, and to a degree cultural, assertions of the politics of identity in the face of globalisation, and it is a pity that he did not focus more sharply on these. 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. Democracy has spread since the fall of communism, above all in Africa and Latin America, two parts of the world about which Mishra has little to say. Life expectancy, literacy and other measures of prosperity have increased. The anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany only has significant support in the former East German states where the roots of democracy are shallow. Popular resistance to the authoritarian and misogynistic policies of the Polish government is strong. The future is not as bleak and as hopeless as Mishra thinks. If 19th-century Europe was generally peaceful, its peace was punctuated by episodes of extreme and bloody violence. Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra The subsequent fear and rage will divide those who may resort to radical violence because they have nothing left to lose from those who will empower more radical elites who promise to tear down the existing system. However, for Mishra, this chaos is fully representative of the process of liberal modernization. Once you strip the implications of liberal modernization of its positive rhetoric, what remains is a cacophony of violence. Slavery, imperialism, and warfare have always been the dark underbelly of the liberal project. For example, Voltaire routinely emphasized the exemplary capacity of humanity to exercise free will, however, he actively encouraged Catherine the Great to coerce Poles and Turks into Enlightenment education under threat of violence. Mishra also alerts readers to the various thinkers such as Rousseau and Nietzsche who prefigured the growth of dissident populations and their inevitable role as destabilizers during the emergence of modernization, drawing interesting parallels to the role of Islam in the twentieth century. For example, ressentiment could describe the attitude of the colonized under imperial regimes. Indeed, as Mishra contends, leaders from all over the global south and east met imperialism by synchronizing with Western ideology in order to secure their independence from the West. This aspiration failed locking much of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and various Marxist movements into liberal modernity. Around the globe — from the cold- blooded killers of the Islamic State to Polish patriots fearful of cultural contamination, from Hindu chauvinists in India to immigrant bashers in America — resentment is boiling over into rage. Populist passions naturally target scapegoats that are local, so the variety is staggering; but behind the specificities of bigotry, Pankaj Mishra sees a general phenomenon. The story of progress guiding modernity assumed that the march forward was universal. When people feel themselves left behind, when they see that progress exists but not for them, they get very, very angry. The outlines of this diagnosis were sketched by Jean- Jacques Rousseau in the decades just before the French Revolution. While cosmopolitan intellectuals like Voltaire were expressing faith in the inevitability of positive change, Rousseau saw a society that was fostering accelerated inequality — a society that was manufacturing vanity and resentment but no moral basis on which to build solidarity or community. Rousseau realized early on that the rich would use the power of the state to increase their own privileges, and he wrote on behalf of those who would be victimized by the new elites. As modernization became a globalized phenomenon, resistance to it took the form of cultural nationalism. Many of these voters admitted, with little compunction, that they wanted to implant his brash persona in the seat of power to shock the system, because the system deserved a shock. That sentiment inspired Brexit, which passed over warnings of financial doom, and it has transported populists to the cusp of power across Europe. 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. An anger that Mishra both interprets and shares. The prospect of freedom and cultural transformation stirred unachievable expectations, which predictably ended in humiliation and rage. 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. And a primary source of his greatness is his hatred of Voltaire. Mishra paints Voltaire as the archetypal elite intellectual, and the worst villain of them all. That is, he believed that society should reward talent and brains, not inherited titles. Age of Anger by Pankaj Mishra review – globalisation is rebounding on us | Books | The Guardian Scholars in subaltern and imperial histories have argued for decades that the sheer arrogance of narratives of Western liberal progress have concealed the crumbling foundations of modernized globalization. Mishra offers an accessible and nuanced narrative of the emergence of popular rage from the European Enlightenment, through the advent of industrialization and imperialism, and the various alignments of the non-Western world within a Eurocentric global order during the twentieth century. A Tea Party protest in via Wikimedia Commons. Mishra predicts that continuing economic stagnation will exacerbate the bitterness of these existing divisions. Many will react to literal displacement from their societies or social and political displacement as we have seen with the recent and rapid expansion of activities in United States immigration. The subsequent fear and rage will divide those who may resort to radical violence because they have nothing left to lose from those who will empower more radical elites who promise to tear down the existing system. However, for Mishra, this chaos is fully representative of the process of liberal modernization. Once you strip the implications of liberal modernization of its positive rhetoric, what remains is a cacophony of violence. Slavery, imperialism, and warfare have always been the dark underbelly of the liberal project. For example, Voltaire routinely emphasized the exemplary capacity of humanity to exercise free will, however, he actively encouraged Catherine the Great to coerce Poles and Turks into Enlightenment education under threat of violence. Mishra also alerts readers to the various thinkers such as Rousseau and Nietzsche who prefigured the growth of dissident populations and their inevitable role as destabilizers during the emergence of modernization, drawing interesting parallels to the role of Islam in the twentieth century. For example, ressentiment could describe the attitude of the colonized under imperial regimes. Indeed, as Mishra contends, leaders from all over the global

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