« THE AGE OF ANGER » 2017
The rejection of conventional models of governance is taking many forms in the 21st century: Brexit, Trump, jihad, the European far right, Hindu, Turkish and Russian nationalism, etc. But these examples are not isolated incidents or temporary phenomena. They stem from a feeling of betrayal that runs through societies around the world, pointing to the unfulfilled promises of modernity, and in particular of globalised liberalism. Going back to Rousseau, Voltaire, the German Romantics, Nietzsche, Bakunin, but also Arendt and Mazzini, the author recounts the betrayal of the Enlightenment, which gave birth to a commercial system serving the interests of the elites. The resentment thus created pits individuals against each other and sets the stage for a possible global civil war.

Presentation

This monumental work is a testament to the author’s incredible erudition. More than two hundred authors are cited two or more times. Thirteen pages of index and thirty pages of bibliographical references give an idea of the author’s enormous literary, political and philosophical culture. The work is structured around seven titles that illustrate the progression of the essay: “The victors of history and their illusions – Progress and its contradictions – Islam, secularism and revolution – Unbridled nationalism – Messianic visions – The legacy of nihilism – Rediscovering reality”.

A growth in resentment

Mishra draws numerous parallels between the 19th century and our own in several regions of the world. He explains the current universal crisis not by Islam or religious extremism, but by the rise of the European industrial economy which, after causing world wars, totalitarian regimes and genocides, now exposes larger regions to a type of modernity that is fundamentally foreign to them. The result is resentment, ’a terrible increase in mutual hatred and an almost universal irascibility of everyone towards everyone else’ (Arendt). This ‘tilts the universal balance towards authoritarianism and toxic forms of chauvinism’.

He seeks to reveal ‘recurring phenomena throughout the ages (…) which have their source (…) in the advent of a mercantile and industrial civilization in the West and its reproduction elsewhere’. He shows ‘that a philosophy of individual and collective empowerment has spread throughout the world, both through imitation and coercion, creating serious upheavals, social maladjustments and political crises’, as well as psychological damage.

To demonstrate this, he focuses on German, Polish, Arab, Iranian, Indian, Russian and Italian thinkers who are little known to the public. ‘He sees resentment as the defining feature of a world where mimetic desire, “Darwinian mimicry” (Herzl), proliferates relentlessly and where the modern promise of equality is confronted with formidable disparities in power, education, status and material property’. He also shows that similar analyses had already been put forward in the mid-20th century by various authors from countries in the Global South.

From Enlightenment to survival

Mishra reconstructs links across centuries and countries. By limiting reality to what is rational, the Enlightenment laid the groundwork for corrupting the notion of progress. The emergence of industrial and materialistic society in Western Europe is at the root of global imbalance: ‘By ignoring the costs of Western “progress”, we have seriously compromised the possibility of explaining the proliferation of a policy of violence and hysteria in today’s world’.

He identifies Rousseau as the first prescient critic of modern society, ‘which creates new forms of slavery’. On this point, he vehemently opposed the wealthy Voltaire, who saw the stock market as the secular embodiment of social harmony. The German Romantics took up Rousseau’s ideas, as did English, American and Russian authors in the 19th century (Dickens, H.D. Thoreau, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, etc.). But German Romanticism led to nationalist resentment for economic and political reasons. This is the first example where a link can be made between economic disappointment and messianic nationalism, which has been repeated elsewhere to this day. The result was an identification of God – banished from modern reality – with national identity.

The book is full of examples from various thinkers showing the failure of attempts to modernize colonial or emerging states ‘from above’ using this logic, thus creating a chain reaction of reactions from below in Russia, India, Iran, etc. The culmination of this thinking was Nietzsche and his dream of the strong man living an epic and heroic life. Mishra summarizes this evolution with the thinking of sociologist Georges Sorel: “The political transformation of the 19th century: from the liberal conception of the Enlightenment, which emphasized rational individual interest, to the Napoleonic values of total war, heroism, grandeur and aestheticization, and finally to an existential politics in which survival is at stake and the choice is between life and death’. The logical consequence of this is anarchism (Bakunin) and European terrorism in the 19th and second half of the 20th centuries, but also jihadism and domestic terrorism, such as that perpetrated by McVeigh in the United States or Breivik in Norway.

Putting the spotlight in the right place

The author rejects the explanation of the religious origin of terrorism, showing that Western Orientalist denigration began with Montesquieu. With the Enlightenment, modernity became intrinsically liberal, and therefore anti-religious. Terrorism originating in Muslim countries could therefore only be linked to religion for the West, and not to an unjust system that failed to deliver on its promises. The same is true of current Russian, Hungarian and Serbian nationalism. As the American philosopher Eric Voegelin explains, « the current revolutionary crisis differs from previous revolutions in that the spiritual substance of Western society has melted away to the point of almost disappearing, to the extent that it seems threatened with being unable to recharge itself from new sources ‘. Mishra adds: ’In a world with a stagnant economy that offers everyone the dream of individual power but no hope of political change, the seduction of active nihilism can only grow ».

Lucid in the face of failure

Mishra concludes: « Since its emergence with the Enlightenment, the modern world has been led and defined by the autonomous individual asserting himself as such, who, condemned to be free, never ceases to open up new horizons for human mastery and emancipation. This project was considered indispensable from the 17th and 18th centuries onwards. This quasi-religious belief in continuous progress condemns ‘billions of the poorest people to be prisoners of a social-Darwinist nightmare’ and to brandish their dignity as a ‘substitute for freedom’. Appropriative mimicry (Girard), the principle of self-expansion, dominates the actions of every individual. To quote Camus: the world seems to suffer from ‘self-intoxication, the harmful secretion, in a closed environment, of prolonged impotence’. Individual dissatisfaction with the degree of freedom available constantly clashes with complex theories and promises of individual freedom and emancipation. German sociologist Max Scheler developed a systemic theory of resentment as a phenomenon characteristic of societies based on the principle of equality: where ‘formal equality between individuals coexists with considerable differences in power, education, status and property’.

The conclusion is not optimistic, but lucid about the task ahead of us: « Now, with Donald Trump’s victory, it has become impossible to deny or hide the gigantic gap (…) between an elite that reaps the finest fruits of modernity while disdaining ancient truths, and the uprooted masses who, finding themselves deprived of those same fruits, retreat into cultural supremacism, populism and vindictive brutality. The contradictions and costs of progress for a minority (…) have become visible on a global scale. They encourage the suspicion – potentially lethal for the hundreds of millions of people condemned to be superfluous – that the current order, whether democratic or authoritarian, is based on force and deception. They give rise to a feeling of apocalypse that is more widespread than ever. »

Assessment

The reality of the modern ideal

This essay offers us a disenchanted reading of modernity. It reminds us that the emancipatory ideal of the Enlightenment concealed from the outset the specter of absolutism, whether collective or individual. It also reminds us that more than a hundred years before Jihad, German and Italian nationalists were calling for holy war for the Nation, that thousands of young Europeans rallied to political crusades, determined to die and kill for “freedom”. ‘As today, the humiliating impression of being subjected to an arrogant and treacherous elite’ prevailed. In the meantime, fascism, Nazism and communism have come and gone as innovative attempts to mobilize the masses and collective energies.

There is a link between all of this. ‘The dominant interpretation of European history isolates Stalinism, fascism and Nazism, describing them as monstrous aberrations’. This was a mistake, or at the very least a culpable laziness. Today, the ideal is undermined by a self-centered individualism whose main expression is the ‘selfie’, even in Daesh circles. Since the dawn of the era of globalization, ‘political life has been constantly echoing with unlimited demands for individual freedoms and satisfactions’.

The dead ends of imposed modernity

The merit of this book is to draw all these threads of causality and correlation between the philosophical presuppositions of modernity and the catastrophes that have arisen in the societies that have translated them into political programs. It also shows that European colonialism is not only an economic or military phenomenon, but also a cultural and identity-based one, and that it is not a thing of the past. It shows the failure of attempts by many regimes that have sought and still seek to force their countries to reach the level of modernity of Western Europe in just a few decades, as well as the pressure exerted by Westerners on them to move in this direction.

The result is, on the one hand, Western crowds exhausting themselves in pursuit of superficial personal happiness, and on the other, populations frustrated at having no means of realizing these dreams and condemned to serve uprooted elites. ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation’ (H.D. Thoreau, p. 145).

Fundamentally, this book questions the intellectual and moral legitimacy of “Western” rationality and the universal validity of liberal democracy. The latter preaches freedom, but does not refrain from waging wars abroad, imposing its system through economic and military force, and attacking civil liberties at home. « The political impasses and economic shocks of our societies, as well as the irreparable damage caused to the environment, corroborate the darkest visions of 19th-century critics who condemned modern capitalism as a heartless machine working (…) against such fundamental human aspirations as stability, community and a better future.

What about religion?

What place does religion have in this analysis? Mishra does not mention it explicitly but points out that the liberal model was born out of a desire to free itself from its tutelage. In the last sentence of his book, however, he asserts that the current chaos ‘underscores (…) the need for truly transformative thinking about the self and the world’. Such disruptive discourse is often found in the churches of the South, accompanied by a certain rejection or heavy silence in the face of the churches of the North and their position ‘between two stools’. We cannot forget their support for kings, colonialism and murderous nationalism. It is precisely the trauma associated with this complicity that led to the development of the ecumenical movement. In this sense, this book is also a call for traditional churches to more publicly question the primacy of maximum individual freedom and to actively participate in transforming the global social status quo in favor of the ‘precariat’.

The author

Novelist, literary critic and essayist Pankaj Mishra (*1969) is one of the most influential English-speaking thinkers of our time. Born in Uttar Pradesh, he has published several award-winning novels. In From the Ruins of Empire (2012), he wonders how to find dignity in a world created by Westerners, where the best places have been reserved for themselves and their friends. In 2015, the British magazine Prospect ranked him among the 50 most important global thinkers. He divides his time between India and the United Kingdom.

Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present, Paris, Éditions Zulma, 2022 (2017 for the English edition), 459 p. The page numbers mentioned refer to the 2022 french edition.

Serge Fornerod, march 2026