Age of Anger

by Pankaj Mishra

  2. Clearing a Space

  Reinhold Niebuhr’s critique of ‘bland fanatics’ can be found in The Structure of Nations and Empires (New York, 1959). The most comprehensive account to date of the origins and influence of Modernization Theory is Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore, 2003). The fears and expectations of the Anglo-American heralds of globalization are eloquently conveyed in John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge’s The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State (London, 2014). On Bagehot’s world view, see David Clinton, Tocqueville, Lieber, and Bagehot: Liberalism Confronts the World (New York, 2003). Herzen’s critique of liberalism is passionately articulated in his From the Other Shore, now available free on the internet at http://altheim.com/lit/herzen-ftos.html. George Santayana’s view of Americanism and liberalism was most engagingly expressed in his novel The Last Puritan (New York, 1935). Some sustained reflections can be found at http://www.archive.org/stream/soliloquiesineng00santrich/soliloquiesineng00santrich_djvu.txt. Enquiry into Cold War modes of thinking and acting is deepening, though a broad cultural and intellectual history is still unavailable. Three especially illuminating volumes are Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA, 2010); Jan-Werner Müller, Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe (New Haven, 2011); and Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, 2009). On the appropriation of Japan in a narrative of Western-style progress, see John W. Dower, Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering: Japan in the Modern World (New York, 2012). The contents of Heinrich August Winkler, Germany: The Long Road West, 1933–1990 (New York, 2007), are as revealing as its title. Raymond Aron’s anxieties about modernization are contained in Progress and Disillusion: The Dialectics of Modern Society (London, 1968) and The Opium of the Intellectuals (New York, 1962). Bloom’s response to Fukuyama can be found at https://archive.org/details/AllanBloomResponseToFukuyamasendOfHistoryAndTheLastMan. For John Gray’s response, see Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings (London, 2009). For an illuminating French view of post-1989 ideology, see Claude Lefort, Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy, trans. Julian Bourg (New York, 2007). The first surge of post-Cold War nationalism is elegantly described in Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (New York, 1993). See also Robert D. Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War (New York, 1994). The most eloquent reassertion of Western liberalism after 9/11 is Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism (London, 2003). The fantasy of neo-imperialism was elaborated in Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York, 2003). Carl Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York, 2007), has some eerie predictions about the borderless militants of today. On the notion of economic, political and cultural gradients, see the authoritative work by Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA, 1962), and Catherine Evtuhov and Stephen Kotkin (eds), The Cultural Gradient: The Transmission of Ideas in Europe, 1789–1991 (New York, 2002). See also David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840 (New York, 2009). The radical break with the past that the French Revolution represented is emphasized in Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1984). See also Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA, 2004). The legacy of 1789 is carefully documented in Geoffrey Best (ed.), The Permanent Revolution: The French Revolution and its Legacy, 1789–1989 (Chicago, 1988). Some observers closer to the event in time were very perceptive, such as Madame de Staël, whom I frequently invoke. See Major Writings of Germaine de Staël, trans. Vivian Folkenflik (New York, 1987). Norman Hampson’s The Enlightenment (London, 1968) is probably still the best single-volume introduction to the Enlightenment, respectful of its diversity and dissensions. For an early contrarian view of the Enlightenment, see C. L. Becker, Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven, 1932). Tocqueville did much demystification in The Old Regime and the Revolution, trans. Alan S. Kahan (Chicago, 1998). For a provocative take on Bakunin’s philosophy, see Paul McLaughlin, Mikhail Bakunin: The Philosophical Basis of His Anarchism (New York, 2002). Robert Darnton helped broaden the study of the Enlightenment with The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA, 1985). See also his The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 2009). Keith Michael Baker’s Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1990) is full of fascinating hypotheses about how the French Revolution became thinkable. On French Anglomania, see Josephine Grieder, Anglomania in France, 1740–1789: Fact, Fiction and Political Discourse (Geneva, 1985). On Napoleon’s reshaping of Europe through a new kind of war, see David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (New York, 2007). See also Bell’s superb account of the construction of nationalism in France, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA, 2001). The definitive texts of mimetic theory are René Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore, 1986), and Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, 1977). On the role of emulation and ressentiment in geopolitics, the most thought-provoking book is Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA, 1992). Dostoyevsky described his first trip to Europe in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, trans. Richard Lee Renfield (New York, 1955). For a different account of his travels, see Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865 (Princeton, 1988). On Africa and Western ideologies, see Basil Davidson, The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State (London, 1992). The classic work on this subject, Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, DC, 1974), has not been dated by its ideological commitments. On ‘derivative discourses’ in the postcolonial world, see The Partha Chatterjee Omnibus (comprising Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, The Nation and its Fragments and A Possible India) (Delhi, 1999).

  3. Loving Oneself Through Others

  On the reshaping of social ethics and the rise of commercial society in the eighteenth century, see Albert O. Hirschman, Rival Views of Market Society (New York, 1986). A broader view can be found in J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge, 1985). See also Istvan Hont, Politics in Commercial Society: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith (Cambridge, MA, 2015), and Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA, 2010). On Voltaire, the best recent biography is Roger Pearson, Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom (London, 2005). See also Ian Davidson, Voltaire in Exile (London, 2004). The literature on Rousseau is vast. Leo Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (New York, 2005), is an excellent biography. For those inclined to explore further the contradictions of this extraordinary figure, the two volumes by Jean Guéhenno would be very rewarding: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York, 1966). The classic study of Rousseau is by Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, 1988). See also Judith Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory (Cambridge, 1969); Arthur Melzer, The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of Rousseau’s Thought (Chicago, 1990); and Mark Hulliung, The Autocritique of Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Philosophes (Cambridge, MA, 1994). The power and immediacy of Rousseau’s thought are best experienced through his own writings. There are many excellent translations, but his collected writings, edited by Christopher Kelly and Judith R. Bush, and published by the University Press of New England, contains some texts never previously translated into English, notably the crucial dialogues, Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques. For a Cold War view of Rousseau, see, apart from Isaiah Berlin’s essays on Rousseau
, J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London, 1955). The lively realm of freethinkers is described engagingly in Philipp Blom, A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment (New York, 2010). See also Blom’s Enlightening the World: Encyclopédie, the Book that Changed the Course of History (New York, 2005). Steven Kale, French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848 (Baltimore, 2004), is a fascinating history of Parisian salons. Daniel Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton, 1994), is a provocative and thorough account of the culture of sociability. T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660–1789 (Oxford, 2002), is the rare example of a thrilling social history. Joseph de Maistre’s views on Rousseau are contained in Richard A. Lebrun (trans. and ed.), Against Rousseau: ‘On the State of Nature’ and ‘On the Sovereignty of the People’ by Joseph de Maistre (Montreal, 1996). Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, 1994), explores the Enlightenment philosophes’ view of Eastern Europe and Russia. On Catherine and her relationship with the French thinkers, see Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (London, 1982). See also her collected essays in Politics and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia (New York, 2014). The correspondence between Catherine and Voltaire can be found in Documents of Catherine the Great: The Correspondence with Voltaire and the Instruction of 1767 in the English text of 1768, ed. W. F. Reddaway (Cambridge, 2011). Two notable recent contributions to this scholarship are Inna Gorbatov, Catherine the Great and the French Philosophers of the Enlightenment (Bethesda, 2006), and Edward G. Andrew, Patrons of Enlightenment (Toronto, 2006). On feminist critiques of Rousseau, see Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 1988), and Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New York, 1990).

  4. Losing My Religion

  On ‘modernization’ in the Third World, see the classic works, André Gunder Frank, The Underdevelopment of Development: Essays on the Development of Underdevelopment and the Immediate Enemy (New York, 1966), and Samir Amin, Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism (New York, 1976). For a recent take, see Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, 2012). There are some penetrating reflections in James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, 1998). On technocratic rule in underdeveloped countries, see Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, 2002). A recent book, Timothy Nunan, Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan (Cambridge, 2016), breaks new ground in the field. On indigenous ideas of modernity, see Charlotte Furth, The Limits of Change: Essays on Conservative Alternatives in Republican China (Cambridge, MA, 1976); Kathleen Newland and Kamala Chandrakirana Soedjatmoko (eds), Transforming Humanity: The Visionary Writings of Soedjatmoko (West Hartford, CT, 1994); and Fred R. Dallmayr and G. N. Devy (eds), Between Tradition and Modernity: India’s Search for Identity. A Twentieth-Century Anthology (Walnut Creek, CA, 1998). For a stimulating discussion of Montesquieu’s use of Persia, see Hamid Dabashi, Persophilia: Persian Culture on the Global Scene (Cambridge, MA, 2015). See also Roxanne L. Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge (Princeton, 2006). Bernard Lewis’s best-known work on Turkey is The Emergence of Modern Turkey (New York, 2002). A fresh take on his subject is Carter Vaughn Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity: A History (New Haven, 2011). The best recent biography of Atatürk is M. şükrü Hanioğlu, Atatürk: An Intellectual Biography (Princeton, 2011). On the Nazi cult of the Turkish leader, see Stefan Ihrig, Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination (Cambridge, MA, 2014). On Belinsky, see J. L. Talmon, The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution: The Origins of Ideological Polarisation on the Twentieth Century (London, 1981), and Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers (London, 1978). See also the lucid essays on Russian writers in Aileen M. Kelly, Toward Another Shore: Russian Thinkers between Necessity and Chance (New Haven, 1998). Martin Malia covers a lot more than just his ostensible subject in Russia under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum (Cambridge, MA, 1999). See also Derek Offord, Journeys to a Graveyard: Perceptions of Europe in Classical Russian Travel Writing (Dordrecht, 2010). Sadegh Hedayat’s novel is available in English: The Blind Owl, trans. D. P. Costello (New York, 1994). To understand why men such as Abu Musab al-Suri would spurn Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood for anarchist terrorism, see Hazem Kandil, Inside the Brotherhood (New York, 2014). For Iran’s historical background, see Homa Katouzian, The Persians: Ancient, Mediaeval, and Modern Iran (New Haven, 2009). On Iran’s encounter with Western ideologies, see Daryush Shayegan’s Cultural Schizophrenia: Islamic Societies Confronting the West, trans. John Howe (Syracuse, NY, 1997); Ali Mirsepassi, Political Islam, Iran, and the Enlightenment: Philosophies of Hope and Despair (Cambridge, 2011); Ali Mirsepassi and Tadd Graham Fernée, Islam, Democracy, and Cosmopolitanism: At Home and in the World (Cambridge, 2014); and Ali Gheissari, Iranian Intellectuals in the 20th Century (Austin, 1998). Gholam Reza Afkhami, The Life and Times of the Shah (Berkeley, 2009), is a revealing biography of Iran’s despot. For a more intimate if cloying take, see Farah Pahlavi, An Enduring Love: My Life with the Shah. A Memoir (New York, 2004). On the revolution and its ideologues, Hamid Dabashi, Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundation of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (New York, 1992), remains formidable. There is no good biography in English of Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, but Ali Shariati has one in Ali Rahnema, An Islamic Utopian: A Political Biography of Ali Shari‘ati (London, 2000). Jalal Al-e-Ahmad’s account of his visit to Israel will be published soon by Restless Books as The Israeli Republic: An Iranian Revolutionary’s Journey to the Jewish State. See also his Lost in the Crowd, trans. John Green (Washington, DC, 1985), and Occidentosis: A Plague from the West, trans. R. Campbell (Berkeley, 1984). John Calvert’s Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism (London, 2010) is a useful counter to the post-9/11 clichés about his subject. Three books by Ervand Abrahamian are indispensable: Iran between Two Revolutions (Princeton, 1982); Radical Islam: The Iranian Mojahedin (London, 1989); and Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic (Berkeley, 1993). Juan Cole, Sacred Space and Holy War: The Politics, Culture and History of Shi’ite Islam (London, 2002), is a good overview of the Shiite tradition. Baqer Moin, Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah (London, 1999), has many useful details. Two excellent accounts of gender relations in Iran, before and after the revolution, are offered by Afsaneh Najmabadi: The Story of the Daughters of Quchan: Gender and National Memory in Iranian History (Syracuse, NY, 1998), and Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley, 2005). On Foucault’s engagement with Iran, see a stern reckoning in Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago, 2005). A recent book takes a very different view: Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment (Minneapolis, 2016). For the most intelligent assessment of Mazzini’s ‘popular theocracy’, see Gaetano Salvemini, Mazzini: A Study of His Thought and its Effect on 19th Century Political Theory, trans. I. M. Rawson (London, 1956). On Maududi’s notions of the vanguard, see Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jama‘at-i Islami of Pakistan (Berkeley, 1994). For an intelligent assertion of the old secularization thesis, see Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton, 1999). The exploration of ‘political religion’ has dramatically grown since 9/11. Among the most stimulating studies are Paul W. Kahn, Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (New York, 2011), and Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion (Princeto
n, 2006). Akeel Bilgrami, Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment (Cambridge, MA, 2014), makes some enlightening connections.