Age of Anger Quotes

“Postcolonial nation-building was an extraordinary project: hundreds of millions of people persuaded to renounce – and often scorn – a world of the past that had endured for thousands of years, and to undertake a gamble of creating modern citizens who would be secular, enlightened, cultured and heroic.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“They encourage the suspicion – potentially lethal among the hundreds of millions of people condemned to superfluousness – that the present order, democratic or authoritarian, is built upon force and fraud; they incite a broader and more apocalyptic mood than we have witnessed before. They also underscore the need for some truly transformative thinking, about both the self and the world.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“For Rousseau, ‘the word finance is a slave’s word’ and freedom turns into a commodity, degrading buyer and seller alike, wherever commerce reigns. ‘Financial systems make venal souls.’ Their secret workings are a ‘means of making pilferers and traitors, and of putting freedom and the public good upon the auction block’.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“The Great Transformation (1944) that ‘the utopian experiment of a self-regulating market will be no more than a memory’. In the 1980s, the decade of deregulation and privatization in the West, however, this experiment was revived. The collapse of communist regimes in 1989 further emboldened the bland fanatics, who had been intellectually nurtured during the Cold War in a ‘paradise’, as Niebuhr called it, albeit one ‘suspended in a hell of global insecurity’. The old Hegelian-Marxist teleology was retrofitted rather than discarded in Fukuyama’s influential end-of-history hypothesis.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“In other words, in 1919 relatively few people could become disenchanted with liberal modernity because only a tiny minority had enjoyed the opportunity to become enchanted with it in the first place. Since then, however, billions more people have been exposed to the promises of individual freedom in a global neo-liberal economy that imposes constant improvisation and adjustment – and just as rapid obsolescence.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“How could, it was felt, people be so opposed to modernity, and all the many goods it had to offer to people around the world: equality, liberty, prosperity, toleration, pluralism and representative government.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“we all share the same fate: we carry within us more love, and above all more longing than today’s society is able to satisfy. We have all ripened for something, and there is no one to harvest the fruit … Karl Mannheim (1922)”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“Responding to Fukuyama’s thesis in 1989, Allan Bloom was full of foreboding about the gathering revolts against a world that ‘has been made safe for reason as understood by the market’, and ‘a global common market the only goal of which is to minister to men’s bodily needs and whims’.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“Herzl wrote The Jewish State, his path-breaking manifesto of Zionism, in 1895 under the influence of Wagner, one of the nineteenth century’s most notorious anti-Semites.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“the modern religions of secular salvation have undermined their own main assumption: that the future would be materially superior to the present. Nothing less than this sense of expectation, central to modern political and economic thinking, has gone missing today, especially among those who have themselves never had it so good. History suddenly seems dizzyingly open-ended, just as Henry James experienced it when war broke out in 1914 and he confronted the possibility that the much-vaunted progress of the nineteenth century was a malign illusion – ‘the tide that bore us along was all the while moving to this as its grand Niagara’.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“One inevitable result of cutting the ‘cord of consciousness’ linking the past to the present was sanitized history. The centuries of civil war, imperial conquest, genocide and slavery in Europe and America were downplayed in accounts that showed how the Atlantic West privileged with reason and individual autonomy made the modern world, and became with its liberal democracies a vision of the superior people everyone else ought to catch up with.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“It was clearly too disconcerting to acknowledge that totalitarian politics crystallized the ideological currents (scientific racism, jingoistic nationalism, imperialism, technicism, aestheticized politics, utopianism, social engineering and the violent struggle for existence) flowing through all of Europe in the late nineteenth century.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“The sanitized histories celebrating how the Enlightenment or Great Britain or the West made the modern world put the two world wars in a separate, quarantined box, and isolated Stalinism, Fascism and Nazism within the mainstream of European history as monstrous aberrations.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“But the schemes of worldwide convergence on the Western model always denied the meaning of the West’s own extraordinarily brutal initiation into political and economic modernity.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“Their evidently natural rights to life, liberty and security, already challenged by deep-rooted inequality, are threatened by political dysfunction and economic stagnation, and, in places affected by climate change, a scarcity and suffering characteristic of pre-modern economic life. The result is, as Arendt feared, a ‘tremendous increase in mutual hatred and a somewhat universal irritability of everybody against everybody else’, or ressentiment. An existential resentment of other people’s being, caused by an intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness, ressentiment, as it lingers and deepens, poisons civil society and undermines political liberty, and is presently making for a global turn to authoritarianism and toxic forms of chauvinism.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“Thus, individuals with very different pasts find themselves herded by capitalism and technology into a common present, where grossly unequal distributions of wealth and power have created humiliating new hierarchies. This proximity, or what Hannah Arendt called ‘negative solidarity’, is rendered more claustrophobic by digital communications, the improved capacity for envious and resentful comparison, and the commonplace, and therefore compromised, quest for individual distinction and singularity.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“The shock waves emanating from the financial crisis of 2008 and Brexit and US presidential elections in 2016 confirmed that, as Hannah Arendt wrote in 1968, ‘for the first time in history, all peoples on earth have a common present’. In the age of globalization, ‘every country has become the almost immediate neighbour of every other country, and every man feels the shock of events which take place at the other end of the globe’.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“The new empirico-mathematical method seemed to offer a model for analysing everything in secular terms: ethics as well as politics and society, and religion itself. Indeed, religion was first identified (and weakened) in the eighteenth century as yet another human activity, to be examined alongside philosophy and the economy. The European sense of time changed, too: belief in divine providence – ​Second Coming or Final Days – ​gave way to a conviction, also intensely religious, in human progress in the here and now. A youthful Turgot asserted in a famous speech at the Sorbonne in 1750 that: Self-interest, ambition, and vainglory continually change the world scene and inundate the earth with blood; yet in the midst of their ravages manners are softened, the human mind becomes more enlightened . . . and the whole human race, through alternate periods of rest and unrest, of weal and woe, goes on advancing,”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“The emphasis on individual rights has heightened awareness of social discrimination and gender inequality; in many countries today, there is a remarkable greater acceptance of different sexual orientations. The larger political implications of this revolutionary individualism, however, are much more ambiguous.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“Emil Cioran”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“To accept the conventions of traditional society is to be less than an individual. To reject them is yo assume an intolerable burden of freedom in often fundamentally discouraging conditions.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“History, largely experienced previously as a series of natural disasters, could now be seen as a movement in which everyone could potentially enlist.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“As Keynes wrote, with devastating understatement, ‘The age of economic internationalism was not particularly successful in avoiding war.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“Nationalism has again become a seductive but treacherous antidote to an experience of disorder and meaninglessness: the unexpectedly rowdy anticlimax, in a densely populated world, of the Western European eighteenth-century dream of a universally secular, materialist and peaceful civilization.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“Marx reproduced medieval and Reformation millenarian expectations in his utopia of a classless, stateless society.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“The eschatological impulse, a reflection (or distortion) of the Orthodox Church, was recognizably at work among Russian revolutionaries, notably Belinsky and Bakunin. The most fanatical engineers of the human soul, such as Chernyshevsky, Dobroliubov and Stalin, were either children of priests or seminarians (like, remarkably, Al-e-Ahmad, Shariati, Qutb and many Islamist ideologues). But nearly every major thinker in Europe – whether liberal, nationalist, Marxist, atheistic or agnostic – also transposed Christian providentialism into would-be rationalistic categories.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“Shaped by political considerations, and then driven by geopolitical urgencies, Khomeinism was always a hybrid: the beneficiary of an ideological account of Islamic tradition, which borrowed from modern idioms and used secular concepts, particularly those of Shariati, and also incorporated a Third Worldist revolutionary discourse. Islamists negating top-down modernizers ended up mirroring, even parodying, their supposed enemy, cancelling their own simple oppositions between Us and Them.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“Foucault’s enthusiastic reception of Khomeini was over-determined by his own distaste for the political and economic systems – industrial capitalism and the bureaucratic nation state – created by the Atlantic West. (Foucault in this sense followed Montesquieu in using Iran to pursue an internal critique of the West.) Earlier that year of the revolution in Iran, he had told a Zen Buddhist priest that Western thought was in crisis. Foucault was hostile to Communism, which had attracted many of his fellow intellectuals in France. But he was equally contemptuous of the capitalist West:”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“So they did in 1978, a year after Shariati died, under a leader he might have condemned as a very model of clerical despotism and arbitrary vanguardism. Born in a small town in 1902, Khomeini was educated as a cleric and philosopher. He came to prominence in 1963 at the head of a vigorous opposition to the Shah of Iran’s programme of modernization called the ‘White Revolution’, which included the privatization of state-owned enterprises, enfranchisement of women and mass literacy. He spent most of the next decade and a half in exile while Iranian youth absorbed the message of Al-e-Ahmad and Shariati. (Iran’s current supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, was present at one of their rare joint meetings in Mashhad back in 1969.)”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“Al-e-Ahmad explored the ideas of Marx; he translated Camus, and brought an intense focus to his reading of Heidegger (to whom he had been introduced at the University of Tehran by an influential specialist in German philosophy called Ahmad Fardid, who actually coined the term ‘Westoxification’). These very modern critics of modernity’s spiritual damage turned out to be stops on Al-e-Ahmad’s journey to a conception of Islam itself as a revolutionary ideology.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present