But that experience of a sovereign life in a circumscribed place is much harder to achieve in the vast and complex space of the global, which is marked by currents, flows and waves rather than clear outlines or limits. In place of society or nature, the individual confronts a new indecipherable whole: the globe, in which multiple spaces and times bewilderingly overlap. Enmeshed in its various dense networks, including an electronic web mediating his relationship with reality, the individual can act satisfactorily neither upon himself nor upon the world, and is reminded frequently and humiliatingly of his limited everyday consciousness and meagre individual power.
Man, as Goethe wisely wrote in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795), ‘is born to fit into a limited situation; he can understand simple, close and definite purposes, and he gets used to employing the means which are near at hand; but as soon as he goes any distance, he knows neither what he will nor what he should be doing.’ Thrown into opaque global processes, and overwhelmed by incalculable variables, man, or woman, can no longer connect cause to effect.
Considerably more people than during Goethe’s time know what is owed to them. Individual and national capabilities have been greatly enlarged by technology: the despots of impoverished North Korea possess nuclear bombs, and anyone, as the parody accounts of Kim Kardashian reveal, can rapidly build up a large following on Twitter. But self-assertion and mimesis in the absence of clear norms and ends prove to be self-defeating; they entangle human beings in open-ended processes that ceaselessly provoke anxious uncertainty.
Instead of making history, individuals find themselves entangled in histories they are barely aware of; and their most conscientiously planned action often produces wholly unintended consequences, generating more perplexing histories. After more than a century of global warming many dreams of individual and collective greatness can never turn into realistic projects. To take only one example: the greatest ventures of national modernization since Bismarck’s Germany that accelerated in India and China in recent decades, appearing to power the world economy. Burdened by uncontrollable social unrest, and irreversible climate change, Indians and Chinese will never enjoy in their lifetime the condition of a civilized urban existence that a few millions in Europe and America enjoyed intermittently through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
There is plainly much more longing than can be realized legitimately in the age of freedom and entrepreneurship; more desires for objects of consumption than can be fulfilled by actual income; more dreams than can be fused with stable society by redistribution and greater opportunity; more discontents than can be allayed by politics or traditional therapies; more demand for status symbols and brand names than can be met by non-criminal means; more claims made on celebrity than can be met by increasingly divided attention spans; more stimuli from the news media than can be converted into action; and more outrage than can be expressed by social media.
Simply defined, the energy and ambition released by the individual will to power far exceed the capacity of existing political, social and economic institutions. Thus, the trolls of Twitter as much as the dupes of ISIS lurch between feelings of impotence and fantasies of violent revenge.
* * *
Even in advanced countries, the collapse of the labour market and the systems of solidarity around it, and the growth of the informal economy, bears more than a passing resemblance to the working conditions of the European nineteenth century that were such a fertile soil for revolutionaries, anarchists and terrorists. Marx thought that wage slavery, insecure and impersonal, was worse than serfdom; but, today, stable employment in a single line of work, let alone a single enterprise, is becoming increasingly rare. Ad hoc work is more common. Many young people work part-time, study and work at the same time, travel huge distances in order to find work – if they can find it at all.
These significantly numerous members of the precariat know that there is no such thing as a level playing field. They share a suspicion, which was previously mostly found among paranoid conspiracy theorists, that their own political elite has become the enemy of freedom, not its protector. The fierce contempt among these groups in America for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton reflects more than just a misogynist backlash against the gains of feminism, or deflected hatred of minorities; it reflects a severely diminished respect for the political process itself.
The failure of any convincing rebuttal from the elite gives their fears greater plausibility. Thus, white nationalists in the United States claim to be taking their own lives in hand again, vindicating their own liberties. Despite the repellant xenophobic aspects of their rhetoric, they offer an anti-elite case that does not fail to connect with the wider public’s own hunches. Trump and his supporters in the world’s richest country are no less the dramatic symptom of a general crisis of legitimacy than those terrorists who plan and inspire mass violence by exploiting the channels of global integration.
The appeal of formal and informal secessionism – the possibility, broadly, of greater control over one’s life – has grown from Catalonia, Scotland, England to Hong Kong, beyond the cunningly separatist elites with multiple citizenships and offshore accounts. More and more people feel the gap between the profligate promises of individual freedom and sovereignty, and the incapacity of their political and economic organizations to realize them.
Yet the obvious moral flaws of our universal commercial society have not made it politically vulnerable. In Europe and America, a common and effective response among reigning elites to unravelling national narratives and loss of legitimacy is fear-mongering against minorities and immigrants – an insidious campaign that continuously feeds off the alienation and hostility it provokes.
Chinese, Russian, Turkish and Indian leaders have even less reason to oppose a global economic system that has helped enrich them and their cronies and allies. Rather, Xi Jinping, Modi, Putin and Erdogan retrofit old-style nationalism for their growing populations of uprooted citizens, who, like the Germans and Italians of the nineteenth century, have unfocused and often self-contradictory yearnings for belonging, identity and community, as well as for individual autonomy, material affluence and national power. The demagogues promise security in a radically insecure world. And so their self-legitimizing narratives are unavoidably hybrid: Mao-plus-Confucius, Holy Cow-plus-Smart Cities, Putinism-plus-Orthodox Christianity, Neo-liberalism-plus-Islam.
* * *
ISIS, too, offers a postmodern collage rather than a coherent doctrine. Born from the ruins of two nation states that dissolved in sectarian violence, it is a beneficiary, along with mafia groups, human traffickers and drug lords, of the failure of governments to fulfil their basic roles: to create or maintain a stable political order, protect their citizens from external turbulence, including unruly economic and migratory flows as well as foreign invaders, and maintain a monopoly on violence. Led by stalwarts of Saddam Hussein’s secular regime, ISIS represents an ultimate stage in the privatization of war that has progressively characterized, along with many other privatizations, the age of globalization.
ISIS resembles many other racial, national and religious supremacists, in offering to release the anxiety and frustrations of the private life into the violence of the global. Unlike its rivals, however, ISIS mobilizes globally and stokes ressentiment into militant rebellion against the status quo. It is the canniest and most resourceful of all traders in the flourishing international economy of disaffection.
The appeal of demagogues lies in their ability to take a generalized discontent, the mood of drift, resentment, disillusionment and economic shakiness, and transform it into a plan for doing something. They make inaction seem morally degrading. And many young men and women become eager to transform their powerlessness into an irrepressible rage to hurt or destroy.
Faced with a rigidly enclosed world, with rules that are both arbitrary and impossible to change, they develop a romantic urge for flashy self-transcendence. ISIS caters to these narcissistic Baudelairean dandies, much like Gabri
ele D’Annunzio did, with its regalia and anthems. These converts to a haughty counter-culture mock the imperative of an entrepreneurial age to project an appealing persona; they post snuff videos and selfies with Kalashnikovs instead on Instagram.
While identifying various external enemies, ISIS directs its most malevolent energies at an internal enemy: the perfidious Shiite. At the same time, ISIS has a stern bureaucracy devoted to proper sanitation and tax collection. Some members of ISIS extol the spiritual nobility of the Prophet, and the earliest caliphs. Others confess through their mass rapes, choreographed murders and rational self-justifications a primary fealty to the amoralism Dostoyevsky rightly feared: one that makes it impossible for modern-day Raskolnikovs to deny themselves anything, and possible to justify anything.
The shape-shifting aspect of ISIS, which incorporates rebels, former socialists, Sunni supremacists and white European converts as well as accountants and doctors, is hardly unusual in a world in which ‘liberals’ morph into warmongers, and ‘conservatives’ institute revolutionary free-market ‘reforms’ and then initiate such radically disruptive socio-economic engineering as Brexit. It is another reflection of a fundamentally unstable social and political order in which old concepts and categories no longer hold firm.
We can of course cling tight to our comforting metaphysical dualisms and continue to insist on the rationality of liberal democracy vis-à-vis against ‘Islamic irrationalism’ while waging infinite wars abroad and assaulting civil liberties at home. Such a conception of liberalism and democracy, however, will not only reveal its inability to offer wise representation to citizens.
It will also make freshly relevant the question about intellectual and moral legitimacy that T. S. Eliot asked at a dark time in 1938: whether ‘our society, which had always been so assured of its superiority and rectitude, so confident of its unexamined premises, assembled round anything more permanent than a congeries of banks, insurance companies and industries, and had it any beliefs more essential than a belief in compound interest and the maintenance of dividends?’
Today, the unmitigated exercise of what Shelley called the calculating faculty looks just as indifferent to ordinary lives, and their need for belief and enchantment. The political impasses and economic shocks of our societies, and the irreparably damaged environment, corroborate the bleakest views of nineteenth-century critics who condemned modern capitalism as a heartless machine for economic growth, or the enrichment of the few, which works against such fundamentally human aspirations as stability, community and a better future.
Radical Islamists, among many other demagogues, draw their appeal from a deeply felt incoherence of concepts – ‘democracy’ and ‘individual rights’ among them – with which many still reflexively shore up the ideological defences of a self-evidently dysfunctional system. Very little in contemporary politics and culture seems to be able to match their offer of collective identity and self-aggrandizement to isolated and fearful individuals. This is why the failure to check the expansion and appeal of an outfit like ISIS is not only military; it is also intellectual and moral.
And now with the victory of Donald Trump it has become impossible to deny or obscure the great chasm, first explored by Rousseau, between an elite that seizes modernity’s choicest fruits while disdaining older truths and uprooted masses, who, on finding themselves cheated of the same fruits, recoil into cultural supremacism, populism and rancorous brutality. The contradictions and costs of a minority’s progress, long suppressed by historical revisionism, blustery denial and aggressive equivocation, have become visible on a planetary scale.
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.
Bibliographic Essay
The idea for this book came to me from some remarks by Nietzsche about the conflict between the serenely elitist Voltaire and the enviously plebeian Rousseau. They seemed to offer a fresh take on the modern world’s divisions since its inception in the late eighteenth century. Similar discoveries, inspirations and intuitions – about Rousseau’s influence on young German provincials, the latter’s world-historical encounter with France, and the significance of neglected figures like Bakunin, Mazzini and Sorel – guided me through the writing of Age of Anger. Their strengthening and elaboration required extensive reading and cross-referencing; and the bibliography of a book so wide-ranging can only be selective, shaped chiefly by my conscious intellectual debts and what I think may take the reader deeper into the subject.
The frequent recourse to Tocqueville, Herzen and Nietzsche in the preceding pages would, I hope, have demonstrated the need to read their writings both sympathetically and critically. Some later books that seem indispensable to understanding the intellectual and emotional tendencies of our age are: Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought, trans. David E. Green (New York, 1964); Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective (Chicago, 1986); Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1980); Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1951); Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty, trans. Arthur Wills and John Petrie (London, 1958); Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (London, 1944); Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Chicago, 1983); Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of Germanic Ideology (Berkeley, 1963); John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London, 1995); Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London, 1982); Christopher Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1870–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (London, 2004); and Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA, 2007).
1. Prologue
The most recent biography of D’Annunzio is Lucy Hughes-Hallett, The Pike: Gabriele D’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War (London, 2013). It is also worth looking up Michael A. Ledeen, The First Duce: D’Annunzio at Fiume (London, 1977), and John Woodhouse, Gabriele D’Annunzio: Defiant Archangel (Oxford, 1998). The chapter on D’Annunzio in William Pfaff’s The Bullet’s Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia (New York, 2004) is an insightful introduction to this figure. John A. Thayer, Italy and the Great War: Politics and Culture, 1870–1915 (Madison, 1964), remains an analytically powerful pre-history of Italian fascism. See also R. J. Bosworth, Italy and the Approach of the First World War (London, 1983). On the ferment in nineteenth-century Germany, see George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York, 1964). William D. Irvine, The Boulanger Affair Reconsidered: Royalism, Boulangism, and the Origins of the Radical Right in France (New York, 1989), is a fascinating guide to the promptings of fascism in late nineteenth-century France. Carol A. Horton, Race and the Making of American Liberalism (New York, 2005), offers an insightful account of anti-immigration solidarity in the United States. It is worth returning to the original contention that racism could be a form of democracy: Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, 2 vols (New York, 1944). On Tocqueville and Algeria, see Alexis de Tocqueville: Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. and trans. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore, 2003). Marinetti’s pronouncements can be sampled in F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings, ed. Günter Berghaus, trans. Doug Thompson (New York, 2006). Hans Magnus Enzensberger has some penetrating reflections on the perils of the post-Cold War era in Civil Wars: From L.A. to Bosnia, trans. Piers Spence and Martin Chalmers (New York, 1994). A handy digest of bien pensant thinking about globalization is Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York, 1999). For a counter-critique,
see Edward Luttwak’s Turbo-Capitalism: Winners and Losers in the Global Economy (New York, 1998). Two revealing genealogies of neo-liberalism are Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Cambridge, MA, 2012), and Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (eds), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA, 2009). On the loss of political spaces, see Saskia Sassen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in the Age of Globalization (New York, 1996). On Arendt’s notion of the common present and negative solidarity, see her essay on Karl Jaspers in Men in Dark Times (New York, 1970). On ressentiment, see Max Scheler, Ressentiment, trans. Lewis B. Coser and William W. Holdheim (Milwaukee, 1994). Fresh thinking on the much-abused category of totalitarianism can be found in David D. Roberts, The Totalitarian Experiment in Twentieth-Century Europe: Understanding the Poverty of Great Politics (London, 2005). Jerry Z. Muller explores Voltaire’s relationship with capitalism and the Jews in The Mind and the Market (New York, 2007). The ambiguities of Jewish emancipation and the imperatives of Darwinian mimicry are sensitively described in Amos Elon, Herzl (New York, 1975). Isaiah Berlin’s stern judgement on Rousseau can be found in, among other places, Freedom and its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty (London, 2002). The most succinct account of the German counter-tradition is Louis Dumont, German Ideology: From France to Germany and Back (Chicago, 1996). See also the essay on Herder in Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London, 1976). R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, 2 vols (Princeton, 1959, 1964), remains an indispensable resource for the study of the early modern age. E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (London, 1977), is still the best single-volume account of European tumult after the French Revolution. For a relatively conservative perspective, see J. L. Talmon, Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase (London, 1960). Adam Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries, 1776–1871 (London, 1999), is a masterly account of the nineteenth century’s angry young Europeans. See also his Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 1789–1848 (London, 2014). The wider currents of the nineteenth century are covered in Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton, 2014), and Richard Evans, The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815–1914 (London, 2016). For an intellectual background, see Jack Hayward, After the French Revolution: Six Critics of Democracy and Nationalism (London, 1991). Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2004), relates this fascinating episode of the early modern age. On machismo in the nineteenth century, see Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge, 1985), and Peter Gay, The Cultivation of Hatred: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud (New York, 1993). On the first phase of international terrorism, see Isaac Land (ed.), Enemies of Humanity: The Nineteenth-Century War on Terrorism (New York, 2008); John Merriman, The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (Boston, 2009); and Matthew Carr, The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism (London, 2007). The trauma of socio-economic change in France is documented in Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, 1976). James Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (New York, 1980), is a comprehensive account of millenarian revolutionism. On the overlapping of political projects across ideological lines, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933–1939 (New York, 2006). The most interesting among the new histories that take the unstable individual self as their unit without descending into psychobabble is by Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley, 2008).
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