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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Age of Anger: A History of the Present, by Pankaj Mishra (2017)

By Ben Weiss

In Age of Anger: A History of the Present, acclaimed author and journalist Pankaj Mishra explores what he describes as the tremors of global change. For the past several decades, liberal cosmopolitanism provided a false sense of security after the fall of the Soviet Union. Now, Mishra claims, world schisms have begun to manifest in increasingly overt displays of violence by state and non-state actors alike, leaving dubious possibilities for the coming years. In this accessible work of public history, Mishra traces a long arc of the rise of the Age of Anger from the Enlightenment to what he perceives as the precarious present.

The book was written and published as we watched the explosion of chaos in Syria and Iraq, the collapse of established and relatively balanced political and economic relationships, increases in terrorist activity in places such as Turkey, Kenya, and Nigeria, and increasing violence stemming from racial prejudices in France, Great Britain, and the United States. The rise of rancorous populism cracking its way through the foundations of traditional model democracies in the West, evidenced by the success of Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, and Brexit, leads Mishra to fear that the globe is on the precipice of world wide disaster.

“After a long, uneasy equipoise since 1945, the old west-dominated world order is giving way to an apparent global disorder.” This new disorderly Age of Anger ranges both from the destabilizing fury of history’s marginalized populations as well as the counterrevolutionary response that has mobilized hatred within mainstream political discourses. Unfortunately, Mishra offers little perspective on how the world may emerge from this predicament. For him, the tumultuous year that was 2016 is only the beginning.

The real value of this fairly pessimistic yet stimulating work is in Mishra’s analysis of how we arrived in the Age of Anger. 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. From the upheavals of the Reign of Terror in revolutionary France to the rise of fascism in the twentieth century, he shows that the neatly packaged concept of liberal modernization mostly consists of a process of “carnage and bedlam.” Mishra argues that elites, unable to cope with the reality of modernization, take refuge in precipitating alienation: destruction of civil liberties, states of emergency, anti-Islamic movements, rhetoric purporting the global clash of civilizations, and the like. Though perhaps framed within too much of a polarized dichotomy, Mishra’s analysis reveals a massive schism between political and economic elites and the larger masses who have been directed into “cultural supremacism, populism and rancorous brutality” as a result of being denied the promised advantages of modernity. The consequential tension leaves us on the threshold of a “global civil war.”

A Tea Party protest in 2009 (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.

While modernization has generated the context for this violence to take on truly global proportions for the first time, Mishra’s detailed history describes the development of these themes through earlier centuries. 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. All the while, Catherine’s actions allowed him to make a fortune in the commercial investments of new markets that arose as a result of this coerced ideological diffusion. 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.

The Ottoman capitulation in 1877 ended the Russo-Turkish War (via Wikimedia Commons).

By demonstrating the connection of ideas in Europe with the rest of the world, Mishra is able to draw heavily from Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment, which encapsulates the innate hatred and envy fostered by groups who are positioned as inferior. For example, ressentiment could describe the attitude of the colonized under imperial regimes. Mishra claims that Muhammad Iqbal, an Islamic poet and religious reformist, and Lu Xun, an activist in China all pulled from Nietzsche’s ideas, while “Hitler revered Atatürk” and “Lenin and Gramsci were keen on Taylorism.” This mix of Enlightenment thought with global adaptations speaks to the paradoxical fusion of self-contempt instilled by liberal otherization with the rage that facilitates resistance to the same system. 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. “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.”

The Paris Commune stormed the Tuileries Palace in 1792 during the French Revolution (via Wikimedia Commons).

The ambitious project of Age of Anger is not without its faults, namely some oversights and generalizations. For one, Mishra does not consider social democracy or Marxism as the alternatives to neoliberal world systems that they perceive themselves to be. In other ways, his attempts to paint a larger history in broad strokes risks overgeneralizing some phenomena and exaggerating historical causality. Due to some of these flaws, proponents of liberalism may find his arguments unconvincing, but for those sympathetic to analysis of the darker sides of modernity, Mishra’s work should prove thought provoking while drawing attention to potential linkages in historical developments across multiple centuries in a way that brings arguments previously sequestered to academia into the public sphere.

Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017).


Also by Ben Weiss on Not Even Past:

My Alternative PhD in History.
The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, by Robert C. Allen (2009).
Violence: Six Sideways Perspectives, by Slavoj Žižek (2008).

Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism

By Cali Slair

While totalitarianism did not first emerge in the twentieth century, the totalitarian states of Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler (1933-1945) and the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin (1924-1953) were distinct. In The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century, seeks to explain why European populations were amenable to totalitarianism in the twentieth century and to identify what factors distinguish modern totalitarian regimes. Arendt was born into a German-Jewish family in Hanover, Germany in 1906 and in 1933, fearing Nazi persecution, she left Germany. The Origins of Totalitarianism is Arendt’s attempt to better understand the tragic events of her time.

Origins of Totalitarianism

In The Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt explores the histories of anti-semitism and imperialism and their influence on the development of modern totalitarian regimes. Arendt argues that anti-semitism, race-thinking, and the age of new imperialism from 1884-1914 laid the foundation for totalitarianism in the twentieth century. Arendt traces how racism and anti-semitism were used as instruments of imperialism and nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe. Arendt shows that imperialism and its notion of unlimited expansion promoted annexation regardless of how incompatible a country may have been. Nationalism developed along with imperialism, and foreign peoples who did not fit in with the nation were oppressed. Modern totalitarian regimes, aware of the efficacy of these instruments, used them in pursuit of their singular goals.

Hannah Arendt. Via The Nation.
Hannah Arendt. Via The Nation.

Arendt argues that the origins of totalitarianism in the twentieth century have been too simplistically attributed to nationalism, and totalitarianism has been too easily defined as a government characterized by authoritative single-party rule. Arendt also argues that scholars and leaders have mistakenly equated nationalism and imperialism. Arendt rejects the notion that a dictatorship is necessarily totalitarian. Dictatorships can be totalitarian, but they are not inherently totalitarian. Totalitarian governments are characterized by their replacement of all prior traditions and political institutions with new ones that serve the specific and singular goal of the totalitarian state. Totalitarian governments strive for global rule and are distinguished by their successful organization of the masses. In fact, Arendt argues that totalitarianism is significantly less likely to originate in locations with small populations.

Arendt also argues that modern totalitarian regimes are defined by their use of terror. Totalitarian terror is used indiscriminately; it is directed at enemies of the regime and obedient followers without distinction. Arendt argues that, for modern totalitarian regimes, terror is not a means to an end, but an end in itself. Arendt states that modern totalitarian regimes used alleged laws of history and nature that noted for example, the inevitability of war between chosen and lesser races, to justify terror. Arendt also argues that the bourgeoisie’s rise in power eroded the political realm as a space for freedom and deliberative consensus and contributed to the amenability of populations to totalitarianism.

According to Arendt, the appeal of totalitarian ideologies is their ability to present a clear idea that promises protection from insecurity and danger. After World War I and the Great Depression, societies were more receptive to these ideas. These ideas are fictional and the success of totalitarianism hinges on the regime’s ability to effectively obscure the distinctions between reality and fiction. One way this is accomplished is through propaganda.

Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism is an influential work that takes on the difficult task of trying to understand the devastating rise of Nazi Germany and Soviet Stalinism.

You may also like these articles in our Social Theory series:

Abikal Borah on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincialising Europe

Joshua Kopin discusses Walter Benjamin on Violence

Ben Weiss explain’s Slavoj Žižek’s theory of Violence

Jing Zhai on Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction

Charles Stewart talks about Foucault on Power, Bodies, and Discipline

Juan Carlos de Orellana discusses Gramsci on Hegemony

Michel Lee explains Louis Althusser ideas on Interpellation, and the Ideological State Apparatus

Katherine Maddox on Ranajit Guha’s ideas about hegemony

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