Pankaj Mishra:

Mishra begins the book with the Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio who in 1919 led an expedition to take over the town of Fiume, lost by Italy during World War I. Mishra may be onto something if he views that event as leading to all the populist dictatorships of the 20th century: Mussolini seized power in 1922 and Hitler copied Mussolini in 1933, and the rest is history. Instead Mishra backtracks a few years to 1909 when Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the manifesto of Futurism (which very few people read in the world) in which Marinetti glorified war as well as the terrorism of anarchists and in which Marinetti called for the destruction of museums, libraries and academies. Maybe Mishra thinks that D'Annunzio was influenced by Marinetti? D'Annunzio would sue Mishra for such a thought: D'Annunzio repeatedly insulted Marinetti calling him comical epithets like "una nullita' tonante" (a thundering nothingness) and "un cretino fosforescente" (a phosphorescent cretin). But the topic is quickly abandoned and Mishra moves on to ISIS as if there is a connection between Marinetti/D'Annunzio and ISIS. Soon he begins his rant against "modernization" claiming that it "is largely one of carnage and bedlam". Mishra really needs to read books written by serious scholars who did serious research, for example Pinker's "The Better Angels of our Nature". The carnage and bedlam has actually declined over the centuries, so a more correct statement would be "is one of reduced carnage and bedlam" (and i would leave the "largely" out because at the same time a lot of important things happened, including several inventions that have saved the lives of hundreds of millions of people and extended the life expectancy of everybody). One sentence later Mishra claims that "sanitized histories" leave stalinism, fascism and nazism out as aberrations. I wonder which historians (if any) he has read. One sentence later he quotes Walter Benjamin, mainly famous as an art critic: "Humanity's self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order". Cute quote. But what does it mean? A few pages later Mishra points out that the two ways in which humankind can self-destruct are: civil war on a global scale and destruction of the natural environment. I don't see the proof that either would lead to self-destruction. In fact, both have been going on for thousands of years. Ours is the first era that is trying to stop both. He points out that they are "rapidly converging". I am not sure what it means. He closes the introduction by accusing that the "Atlantic West" has largely unacknowledged its history of violence. I wonder again which historians (if any) he has read. Statements like this recur over and over in the book, claiming that "centuries of civil war, imperial conquest, genocide and slavery" have been omitted in the histories written by the West. Again, we wonder which histories he is referring to (he doesn't mention any). This is just the introduction of the book. Then it gets worse.

The book is full of debatable statements that are dropped with no serious defense. Too many to list. He thinks that terror was invented by the French revolution as if terror didn't exist in the Mongol empire or in the Roman empire or in the Inca empire or in the Qin dynasty. He thinks that by the 1970s the West had created "massive underdevelopment and impoverishment, untold exploitation and oppression". This was true in Soviet-controlled eastern Europe, in Mao's China and in Indira Gandhi's India, i.e. in the places where the Western idea of liberal free-market democracy was rejected. It was not true in Europe, where for the first time in centuries there was peace among the powers and bitter rivals like France, Germany, Britain and Italy were forming a continental union while their standard of living had exponentially improved compared with previous centuries. It was, alas, still true in Africa and Latin America, where the geopolitical games of the Cold War caused poverty, dictatorship and civil war, but one could argue that the ultimate cause was how the West kept those places from adopting the West's one models of liberal market-oriented democracy: it wasn't the model to cause those problems, it was the deprivation of that model that caused those problems. He writes "It is now clear that the post-9/11 policies of pre-emptive war, massive retaliation, regime change, nation-building and reforming Islam have failed - catastrophically failed" but doesn't prove any of these "clear" facts. Regime change has certainly happened in Iraq. Nation building has failed. Reforming Islam has largely happened via the Arab Spring, and we can argue forever if Bush's Islamic wars helped the Arab Spring. In the next sentence he claims that the "dirty war against the West's own Enlightenment" has been a wild success, implying that those post-9/11 policies have created a less enlightened West, which may be true in the USA but hardly so in western Europe, the place where the Enlightenment originated. Mishra views Samuel Huntington's theory of "clash of civilization" (whose origin he credits to Bernard Lewis' article "The Roots of Muslim Rage") as starting a line of thought that the troubles of the West with the Islamic world reflect a civil war going on inside the Islamic world between the Westernizers and the traditionalists. I think he missed the Arab Spring, which showed precisely that. I am sure there are other causes too, but the internal conflicts are certainly a factor in the emergence of the various Islamist movements (that, incidentally, mainly kill Muslims).

Scattered throughout the book are references to those who opposed techno-scientific progress. Start with Dostoevsky's novel "Notes from Underground", a polemic against English rationalism that followed the writer's visit to the Crystal Palace, a symbolic monument to progress built in London for the Great Exhibition of 1851. But then Mishra moves to Anwar al-Awlaki, an ideologue of international jihad, implicitly arguing that both Dostoevsky and Awlaki are effects of the same causes, and then he introduces the Islamist terrorist Zarqawi pointing out that he was a former pimp, alcoholic and drug dealer. And then comes Timothy McVeigh (the Oklahoma City bomber, who was not politically affiliated, just angry at the government) "and many other anti-government militants in the United States". Now we jump to Rousseau, credited with launching a counter-revolution against the Enlightenment (which, by the way, was French, not Anglo-American). Mishra admires Rousseau to the point of attacking his rival Voltaire, a very "enlightened" philosopher who believed in progress. Mishra accuses Voltaire of celebrating the progressive czars Peter the Great and Catherine the Great who launched the modernization of Russia despite the fact that both were brutal dictarors. But why pick on Voltaire and absolve his rival Rousseau who was a xenophobe and male chauvenist whose dream nation was the militaristic dystopian society of Sparta? And if Voltaire was a hypocrite, so what? We can easily find millions of cases of hypocrisy in all ages and in all (all) cultures. It is not clear what point Mishra is trying to make: that all defenders of progress are defenders of brutal dictators? There are billions of us who defend technological and scientific progress: can we poll these billions and see how many support the current dictators of the world? Mishra sees a parallel between Rousseau's admiration for Sparta and the struggle of the Islamists to revive the original caliphate of Islam. And he credits Roussaeu with pioneering "militant cultural nationalism", implying that there was a "militant cultural universalism" imposed by mainstream culture. (I personally don't agree that Roussaeu pioneered such "militant cultural nationalism" but i do think that he pioneered libertarian utopias). Mishra also mentions a few times Jalal Al-e-Ahmad's book "Gharbzadeg/ Westoxification" (1962), that was influential in criticizing the way Iran was selling its soul and identity to Western ideas (sociologist Ali Shariati was no less influential). At the time Iran was ruled by a Westernizing dictator, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the "shah". In that very year of 1962 the shah introduced a series of Western-inspired reforms (including women's suffrage) known as the "white revolution". In the following 15 years Iran's GDP per capita increased fivefold. Then in 1979 the Islamic Revolution happened and Khomeini installed a theocratic state based on the ideas of the Shiite philosopher Velayat-e Faqih that is a complete rejection of Western ideals. Since then Iranians have lived in a much worse place. To use Mishra's own words: "massive underdevelopment and impoverishment, untold exploitation and oppression". Then Mishra compares Al-Suri (Mustafa Nasar), the Syrian author of the 1,600-page manual for globalized terrorism "The Global Islamic Resistance Call" (2004), to the 19th-century Russian intellectuals who reacted against the czar's westernizing reforms. Khomeini is a "radically modern leader", a descendant of messianic nationalists like Giuseppe Mazzini (who was not a fanatical religious person at all, in fact opposed to the Catholic Church), and a defender of national dignity.

The story of Timothy McVeigh returns in the last chapter. Mishra finally explains in more detail why he sees him as expressing the same anti-Enlightenment spirit and then connects him with Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the mastermind of the first major Islamist attack (they met in jail and became friends) and with Anders Behring Breivik, who committed the largest massacre in the history of modern Scandinavia and finally with Al Qaeda (Osama bin Laden) and ISIS. In his opinion the rise of ISIS owes more to the war on terror launched by the West than on Islamic theology. One page later he says that "global jihadists as well as domestic terrorists are unmistakably a product of the modern era: its technologies of communication and advertising etc". Then, sure enough, we jump back in time again, returning to the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and to the anarchic movement of the late 19th century (which he says was not really a movement). He views Bakunin as inventing a new existential way to find meaning in life "transcending history". Praise on Mishra for mentioning Lala Har-Dayal, an Indian anarchic in California. But Mishra commits the mistake of thinking that "terrorism" was born with these people. There were terrorists in previous centuries too. It's just that they didn't have guns and explosives and so it was much harder for an ordinary person to kill a king. Spartacus was a terrorism for the Romans and so were the Jews who revolted three times (and in particular the Sicarii, Jewish zealots that someone could see as the predecessors of today's jihadism), and so were many of the "barbarians" (particularly the Britons who massacred the Roman settlers at Camulodunum - read Cassius Dio Coeccianus' chronicle of the massacre and Al Zarqawi will look like an amateur terrorist). One year before Mishra's book came out, Brill published the "Brill's Companion to Insurgency and Terrorism in the Ancient Mediterranean".

In the last pages he turns to today's world and laments an "extraordinary if largely imperceptible destruction of faith in the future" (implying that in previous centuries ordinary people had, instead, a strong faith in the future), he laments "how unequally its opportunities are distributed" (somehow implying that in previous centuries wealth was more evenly distributed, but never proving this hidden assumption). These are powerful statements (reflecting widely assumed stereotypes in the media) but they need a better analysis. I think that the ordinary people of the past were too busy surviving and therefore didn't think much about the future. And most of them were painfully aware that the nobility owned all of the opportunities. I think that it was "progress" (the progress that in Mishra's opinion created "ressentiment") that enabled billions of families to start thinking about the future and to start realizing the inequalities. Those are not new: what is new if the possibility for the individual to think about it.

After briefly mentioning Pope Francis as "the most convincing and influential public intellectual today" because he "is not an agent of reason and progress", Mishra turns again to Roussaeu as the first thinkers who understood "ressentiment", followed by Kierkegaard (who coined the term), the German sociologist Max Scheler (who viewed it as originating from envy)... and then finally we arrived at Donald Trump, viewed as the culmination of the "ressentiment" of the Western masses.

Mishra's book reads like a long indictment of technological and scientific modernity (the outcome of the philosophy of the enlightenment and of the industrial revolution), somehow responsible or subjected to liberal capitalist democracy, that has caused tragedies and failures instead of what the French Revolution promised: "liberty, equality, fraternity". He also seems disillusioned with secularism, forgetting of course the millions of people killed by religious intolerance over the centuries, starting with the Roman persecutions of Christians, the Islamic invasion, the crusades, the pogroms of Jews and the Inquisition.

He sees a problem in individualism, caused by competition and the ruthless quest for profit, which has resulted in the disintegration of social fabrics. True, but there seems to be a universal yearning for privacy and isolation. Give people a chance and they will want to leave in a house surrounded by a garden, not in a crowded tenement. People flocked to social media precisely because they didn't like the idea of physical friendships. And that's happening all over the world. Blame it on human nature, not on Western philosophy.

At the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama published "The End of History and the Last Man", predicting that liberal democracy would triumph all over the world and would become the final form of government. Mishra thinks that this was a general feeling in the West (although many of us criticized Fukuyama's book when it came out, so i would demand at least a recount of how many Westerners felt that way). Mishra mocks the idea that "Anglo-American institutions" (i.e. liberal democracy and market economy) would spread worldwide. However, so far, that's precisely what has happened. Whether it will keep happening in the future is unknown, but it's fair to say that the chances that Libya or Venezuela are reborn as democracies are much higher than the chances that Spain or Canada become a dictatorship.

As more and more people around the world embrace it, it is hard to accept Mishra's thesis that liberal capitalist democracy has failed. Nobody ever said that it is perfect, but where does he see the masses voting against it? The only places that steer away from that model are places like China where the regime has to employ millions of bureaucrats to censor and brainwash its subjects.

Mishra sees the failure of the West in the growing chaos of international affairs. Mishra is obviously correct that there was a "West-dominated world order" in 1945 and that now there is "global disorder" but somehow he completely misses the root cause: the world of 1945 was made of very few independent states, whereas the 21st century world is made of 200 independent states, each one free to side with this or that power, each one potentially a place of crisis. The root cause of "global disorder" is decolonization: the empires that maintained that order have dissolved and have been replaced by a multitude of governments. The fact that those governments are, in most cases, chosen via democratic elections introduces another factor of "disorder". Gone are the days that a dictator would rule for life and provide stability. Indirectly, Mishra is nostalgic about the age of colonial empires and of life-long dictators.

Mishra fails to tell us the most important thing about today's world created by liberal capitalist democracy: the highest degree of wealth, health, life expectancy and literacy ever in the history of humankind. And (read Pinker's book) also the most peaceful and safe era ever.

It is not clear how Tocqueville fits in Mishra's narrative but it is always nice to see quotes of prescient Tocqueville ideas. It was only 1840 when Tocqueville noticed the trend towards globalization and wrote "Variety is disappearing from the human race; the same ways of acting, thinking, and feeling are to be met with all over the world" (Mishra omits the second part of that paragraph: "As the men of each country relinquish more and more the peculiar opinions and feelings of a caste, a profession, or a family, they simultaneously arrive at something nearer to the constitution of man, which is everywhere the same.").

There are few stimulating ideas in this book. One is his alternative to the cash of civilization: the imitation of Western civilization. He thinks that movements opposed to Western civilization often ended up imitating it and involuntarily parodying it. A typical case is India, where leaders of the independence movement were westernized Indians. Anti-colonial movements internalized Western dogmas, even while rebelling against them. "The key to man's behaviour lies not in any clash of opposed civilizations, but, on the contrary, in irresistible mimetic desire: the logic of fascination, emulation and righteous self-assertion that binds the rivals inseparably. It lies in ressentiment, the tormented mirror games in which the West as well as its ostensible enemies and indeed all inhabitants of the modern world are trapped." And so Mishra resurrect's Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of "ressentiment", which i hoped had been buried forever: Western power has produced a global culture of ressentiment. Read a thousand books on Nietzsche and you'll find a thousand different definitions of that word. Mishra adopts his own, a mixture of disillusionment and envy that first leads to imitation and then to anger.

Mishra then somehow connects ressentiment with the resentment of ordinary Western people who feel unjustly marginalized and then vote for right-wing parties and demagogues. And so he connects Brexit in Britain and Donald Trump in the USA, and with authoritarian leaders in Hungary, Poland, Russia, India and Turkey, and with the rise of xenophobia and persecution of religious minorities. Mishra totally ignores the details here: Brexit was voted for by only 37% of the British electorate, and Trump lost the 2016 election by three million votes and became president on a technicality largely thanks to Russia's undercover machinations. The xenophobic right-wing parties of Europe have rarely been in power, and only in coalitions as minor partners. Today's authoritarian governments of Poland and Hungary are way less authoritarian than the communist dictators who preceded them (and of the czars and emperors that preceded those dictators). I think that future historians will see this phenomenon more related to Russia than to "ressentiment": Russia interfered in Western elections, and some Western elections were influenced by anti-Russian nationalism. In other cases (India and Turkey) the rise of nationalism can hardly be blamed on rampant Western liberal capitalism; perhaps on the exact opposite, on resistance to the implementation of reforms that would make those countries truly "liberal" (India still has castes and rampant corruption, Turkey still refuses to recognize the Armenian genocide and still oppresses the Kurds).

If he thinks that today there is racism against religious minorities, he hasn't read much of history. The racism of previous ages resulted in the extermination of entire groups (and certainly not only in Europe). Today's racism is peanuts compared with what happened in previous centuries, starting with Islam (the first major case of religious intolerance). And, again, he doesn't seem to have studied history if he thinks that today's masses are more susceptible to demagogues than in the past.

Mishra's best intuition is to trace back the pioneers of "angry young nationalism" to late 18th century Germany, when the "romantic" movement was born. That was a reaction to the rationality of the Enlightenment. The German romantic movement pivoted around the concepts of "kultur" (the national culture) and "volk" (the traditional values of a people, in particular ancient national folklore). Both contributed to create a national identity in a country that didn't exist yet (Germany was split into dozens of small states). The Enlightenment had spread the idea of a universal civilization based on science and progress. The romantics opted for the exact opposite: a multitude of national civilizations. Mishra thinks that the romantic movement was somehow a reaction to the passion for French style by the German aristocracy, and this is less credible. On the other hand he is probably right about the effect of the French revolution: initially viewed favorably by the German intellectuals, but then viewed with horror when Robespierre started beheading people randomly, and finally viewed as a new imperial aberration when Napoleon invaded Germany. The wars of "restoration" were wars of "liberation" for the German romantics. Mishra argues that nationalism became a religion, and then spread to othre countries, notably Italy (another country that, split in small states and occupied by foreign army, didn't exist yet) and Poland (a country that didn't exist because it had been split between Austria and Russia). Poland's hero Adam Mickiewicz lived in exile (mostly in Turkey) and fought in vain for Polish independence. Mishra sees him as creating the mood of patriotic martyrdom. Giuseppe Mazzini, the founder of the secret revolutionary society Young Italy, was the most articulate apostle of patriotism as a new religion. Mishra's narrative, always unstable, goes back and forth in time (confusingly), but basically he points out that the "romantic" experiment failed becaue Bismarck (the prime minister who unified Germany) and his successors turned Germany towards its own "enlightnment" at breakneck speed. Germany industrialized and became as "westernized" as its western neighbords. Germany became better than France at what France had invented. And so Mishra views it as yet another contradiction of "ressentiment": Germany became a country that was proudly nationalistic and critical of western "degeneracy" but (quote) "deeply embedded in a globalized modern world".

I miss the point of how Mishra at this point connects the independence movements of 1848 with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, and i don't understand how Mishra lumps together Nietzsche, Bergson and Herbert Spencer as attacking the "liberal conception of society" and why only these three and not all of the other philosophers of the time. Anyway, Mishra thinks that the Nietzsche's idea of the "superman" influenced intellectuals in multiple countries: Maxim Gorky in Russia, Muhammad Iqbal in India, Lu Xun in China, and, alas, Mussolini in Italy, all reacting against the "degenerate" western values. Minutes later Mishra adds Georges Sorel to the list of philosophers of the era that he thinks matter for his thesis, but i miss both what his thesis is and how Sorel fits in it (he did write a book titled "The Illusions of Progress" but Mishra doesn't mention it). Minutes later we are back to Mazzini's followers in independence movements, this time in India, where in 1923 Vinayak Savarkar published "Hindutva", a manifesto of Hindu nationalism, in China, where in 1913 Liang Qichao founded the Progressive Party (while in exile in Japan, in 1902 he had published "Biographies of the Three Masters of the Italian Unification" on Mazzini, Garibaldi and Cavour), and even in Egypt, where Jamal al-Afghani founded the "Young Egypt" society and in 1884 (while in exile in Paris) launched one of the first publications of Islamic nationalism, the newspaper al-Urwah al-Wuthqa.

If the book is supposed to be a history of today's "angry" people, there have been angry people before. I am not sure if today's terrorists or today's Trump voters are angrier than, say, the slaves who revolted in ancient Rome. In the old days there weren't newspapers, TV stations and writers like Mishra to discuss violence.

Perhaps Mishra's biggest mistake is to try to find a common cause to completely different phenomena like Islamic State and Islamist extremism with the rise of Trumpism and the populist, anti-immigrant right, although they are differing phenomena. In this he is the racist, he is the one influenced by a tradition of hyper-rationalism that views humans as little more than robots, all reacting the same way to the same stimuli. A Frenchman thinks differently from an Indian or an Argentinian: different stories, different backgrounds, different landscapes, different seasons, even different diseases. Someone raised in a Muslim society that was great in the 16th century and now is poor and oppressive has stimuli that are completely different from the Trump voter who was raised in an economic boom and now is a victim of the opioid epidemic and of a surveillance economy. There are similarities but it's a stretch to find too many similarities.

Mishra never demonstrates any of the "conclusions" that he reaches, usually in a single convoluted sentence that uses a random premise, a couple of intellectual quotes and some poetic rambling. Indirectly, this book assumes that one can write a history of the world by reading philosophers. Almost every "conclusion" is based on the writings of some famous intellectual. I doubt this is how history works. A philosopher is rarely a typical representative of a historical trend. Mishra cherry-picks his favorite philosophers (unfortunately, some of my least favorite ones, like Nietzsche, leaving one the truly great ones) and decides that they are better than historians at explaining what happened in their eras.

Mishra spends too much time reading philosophers and too little time reading historians.

It would be nice if he had at least followed a chronological sequence of events, instead of jumping back and forth in time (perhaps deliberately creating confusion in the reader to hide the fact that most of his statements are vague).

Furthermore, Mishra commits the sin that i often find in discussions of past philosophers: he mis-represents them. He spends dozens of pages on Rousseau but the casual reader will not learn much about the social contract and the fact that Rousseau pioneered the idea of direct democracy.

Somehow, in a book mostly devoted to criticizing liberal economic and political order, he hardly ever discusses Marxism, which is the main (only?) rigorous ideological alternative so far emerged. For a book that attacks liberal capitalist democracy, there are also very few quotes from British and Northamerican philosophers, economists and sociologists.

The book would be more valuable as a book on how philosophers (and philosophers only, a tiny 0.00000001% of the population) view the transition from the old world of religious monarchical and colonial order to the world of secular democratic liberal order, but in that case the book should include dozens of great philosophers who were left out.