Age of Anger

by Pankaj Mishra

  5. Regaining My Religion

  I. Nationalism Unbound

  Godse’s remarkable courtroom testament is now available in a revised edition: Nathuram Vinayak Godse, Why I Assassinated Mahatma Gandhi (Delhi, 2014). On Savarkar’s connection to Gandhi’s assassination, see A. G. Noorani, Savarkar and Hindutva: The Godse Connection (New Delhi, 2002). Naipaul’s early views of India are contained in the essays in The Writer and the World (London, 2002) and India: A Wounded Civilization (London, 1977). For Nirad Chaudhuri’s choleric assessment of modern Hindus, see The Continent of Circe: Being an Essay on the Peoples of India (London, 1965). Keynes wrote about early globalization in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London, 1919). For a general overview of cultural, political and intellectual movements in Germany, these three books can hardly be bettered: Heinrich August Winkler, Germany: The Long Road West (1789–1933), trans. Alexander Sager (Oxford, 2006, 2007); David Blackbourn, History of Germany 1780–1918: The Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2002); and Thomas Nipperdey, Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, 1800–1866, trans. Daniel Nolan (Princeton, 1996). There are some brilliant insights in Helmut Walser Smith, The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race across the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2008). For another unconventional take on German modernity, see David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (London, 2006). On Herder, see Johann Gottfried von Herder: Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge, 2002), and Johann Gottfried Herder, Another Philosophy of History, and Selected Political Writings, trans. and ed. Ioannis D. Evrigenis and Daniel Pellerin (Indianapolis, 2004). A thorough study of Herder is F. M. Barnard’s Herder’s Social and Political Thought: From Enlightenment to Nationalism (Oxford, 1965). See also his comparative study of Rousseau and Herder, Self-Direction and Political Legitimacy: Rousseau and Herder (Oxford, 1988). On the peculiar ingredients of German ideologies, see Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, 1990). Two succinct and sharp accounts of the Romantic movement are T. C. W. Blanning, The Romantic Revolution (London, 2010), and Rüdiger Safranski, Romanticism: A German Affair, trans. Robert E. Goodwin (Evanston, 2014). The German Romantics describe their early encounters with the world in Frederick C. Beiser (ed. and trans.), The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics (Cambridge, 1996). See also the remarkable works by Frederick C. Beiser: The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism (Cambridge, MA, 2004), and Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790–1800 (Cambridge, MA, 1992). Ossian’s success is described in Thomas M. Curley, Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud, and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2009). On German writers and politics, see Gordon A. Craig, The Politics of the Unpolitical: German Writers and the Problem of Power, 1770–1871 (Oxford, 1995), and Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind (New York, 1952). On Saint-Simon and his peers, see Frank E. Manuel, The Prophets of Paris: Turgot, Condorcet, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Comte (New York, 1965), and The New World of Henri Saint-Simon (Cambridge, MA, 1956). For a more surprising account of Saint-Simon’s influence, see Richard Pankhurst, The Saint-Simonians Mill and Carlyle: A Preface to Modern Thought (London, 1957). Edmund Wilson wrote about the influence of both Saint-Simon and Fourier in To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (New York, 1940). On George Sand and her cult, see Renee Winegarten, The Double Life of George Sand, Woman and Writer (New York, 1978). Given his extraordinary influence over the nineteenth century, Lamennais has received very little scholarly attention. See John J. Oldfield, The Problem of Tolerance and Social Existence in the Writings of Félicité Lamennais, 1809–1831 (Leiden, 1973). On the transfigured cult of divinity in nineteenth-century Europe, see Frank E. Manuel, The Changing of the Gods (Hanover, NH, 1983). Sudhir Hazareesingh provides a comprehensive account of another cult in The Legend of Napoleon (London, 2005). On Marx’s response to Germany’s historical vagaries, see Harold Mah, Enlightenment Phantasies: Cultural Identity in France and Germany, 1750–1914 (New York, 2003). For writings by Heine, see Heinrich Heine, On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, and Other Writings, ed. Terry Pinkard, trans. Howard Pollack-Milgate (Cambridge, 2007), and The Harz Journey and Selected Prose, trans. and ed. Ritchie Robertson (London, 2006). See also Ritchie Robertson, The ‘Jewish Question’ in German Literature, 1749–1939: Emancipation and its Discontents (Oxford, 1999). An illuminating biography of Treitschke is Andreas Dorpalen, Heinrich von Treitschke (New Haven, 1957). On the growth of nationalism in nineteenth-century Germany, see George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (New York, 1975), and Paul Kennedy and Anthony James Nicholls (eds), Nationalist and Racialist Movements in Britain and Germany before 1914 (London, 1981). On anti-Semitism, see Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (New York, 1964), and on its most interesting mouthpiece, Robert W. Lougee, Paul de Lagarde, 1827–1891: A Study of Radical Conservatism in Germany (Cambridge, MA, 1962). See also Pierre Birnbaum, The Anti-Semitic Moment: A Tour of France in 1898, trans. Jane Marie Todd (New York, 2003). In addition to Carl Schorske’s work on turn-of-the-century Vienna, see also Wolfgang Maderthaner and Lutz Musner (eds), Unruly Masses: The Other Side of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (New York, 2008). Two noteworthy books on Wagner among many are Joachim Köhler, Richard Wagner: The Last of the Titans (New Haven, 2004), and David C. Large and William Weber (eds), Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics (Ithaca, NY, 1984). Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage (New York, 1941), is still very stimulating. On the intersections of Japanese and German thought, see Andrew E. Barshay, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan: The Public Man in Crisis (Berkeley, 1991). For the German origins of historical and cultural studies, see Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, 1968).

  II. Messianic Visions

  Roman Koropeckyj, Adam Mickiewicz: The Life of a Romantic (Ithaca, NY, 2008), does justice to an extraordinary life. Mickiewicz’s Istanbul escapade is described in Neal Ascherson’s wonderful Black Sea (London, 1995). For Mazzini and Italy, see Harry Hearder, Italy in the Age of the Risorgimento, 1790–1870 (London, 1983), and E. E. Y. Hales, Mazzini and the Secret Societies: The Making of a Myth (London, 1956). Mazzini’s own writings are collected in Stefano Recchia and Nadia Urbinati (eds), A Cosmopolitanism of Nations: Giuseppe Mazzini’s Writings on Democracy, Nation Building, and International Relations (Princeton, 2009). The most important recent book on Mazzini is Simon Levis Sullam, Giuseppe Mazzini and the Origins of Fascism (New York, 2015). Although dated, the biography of Bakunin by E. H. Carr (London, 1937) is full of absorbing detail. On Italian anarchism and Bakunin, see Nunzio Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, 1864–1892 (Oakland, 1993), and The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader, ed. Davide Turcato, trans. Paul Sharkey (Oakland, 2014). For intellectual trends of the late nineteenth century, two magisterial accounts are still H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930 (London, 1959), and J. W. Burrow, The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848–1914 (New Haven, 2000). On the neo-Machiavellians, see Robert A. Nye, The Anti-Democratic Sources of Elite Theory: Pareto, Mosca, Michels (London, 1977). The scholarship on Social Darwinism is immense. See Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945 (Cambridge, 1997). On ideas of degeneration and mass irrationality, see Robert A. Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave LeBon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic (London, 1975), and Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918 (Cambridge, 1989). On eugenics, see Geoffrey Searle, Eugenics and Politics in Britain, 1900–1914 (Leiden, 1976), and Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism,
1870–1945 (Cambridge, 1989). On Aryanism and race see Geoffrey G. Field, Evangelist of Race: The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (New York, 1981). The international construction of whiteness is detailed in Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge, 2008). There are some brilliant insights into the historical evolution of our notions of race and gender in Colette Guillaumin, Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology (London, 1995). No synthetic study exists of Nietzsche’s massive influence in Asia and Africa, though there are many monographs devoted to his impact in Europe and the United States. See Zhaoyi Zhang, Lu Xun: The Chinese ‘Gentle’ Nietzsche (London, 2001). Herbert Spencer, on the other hand, is now receiving much attention. See Bernard Lightman (ed.), Global Spencerism: The Communication and Appropriation of a British Evolutionist (Leiden, 2015), and Marwa Elshakry, Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950 (Chicago, 2013). On Gobineau, see Michael D. Biddiss, Father of Racist Ideology: The Social and Political Thought of Count Gobineau (London, 1970). On the French nationalism of the radical right, see Michael Curtis, Three against the Third Republic: Sorel, Barrès and Maurras (Westport, 1976), and Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel (Princeton, 1986). On the American fantasy of regeneration, see Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York, 2009). A gripping account of the cultural and ideological clashes in France is Frederick Brown, For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus (New York, 2010). On the intellectual and emotional origins of Zionism, see Arthur Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea (New York, 1959), and David J. Goldberg, To the Promised Land: A History of Zionist Thought (London, 1996). On Jabotinsky, see the rich and original study by Michael Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky (Berkeley, 2001). Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The Controversy of Zion: Jewish Nationalism, the Jewish State, and the Unresolved Jewish Dilemma (Reading, MA, 1996), has a sharp portrait of the Zionist. The fin de siècle as a global phenomenon is now receiving close attention. See Michael Saler (ed.), The Fin-de-Siècle World (London, 2014), and Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst (eds), The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History, c.1880–1900 (Oxford, 2000). The insights of an early study by Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London, 1991), are still pertinent. On Sorel, see Irving Louis Horowitz, Radicalism and the Revolt against Reason: The Social Theories of Georges Sorel (London, 1961), and J. R. Jennings, Georges Sorel: The Character and Development of His Thought (London, 1985). On the intellectual origins of fascism, the timeless work is Gaetano Salvemini, The Origins of Fascism in Italy, ed. and trans. Roberto Vivarelli (New York, 1973). For a clear sense of political debates in nineteenth-century Italy, see Carlo G. Lacaita and Filippo Sabetti (eds), Civilization and Democracy: The Salvemini Anthology of Cattaneo’s Writings (Toronto, 2006). On the links between modernism and fascism, see Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke, 2007). Mazzini’s influence outside Europe is catalogued in C. A. Bayly and Eugenio F. Biagini (eds), Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalisation of Democratic Nationalism, 1830–1920 (Oxford, 2008). For his influence among Chinese intellectuals, see Xiaobing Tang, Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao (Stanford, 1996). For useful introductions to nineteenth-century Indian nationalism, see the essays of Tapan Raychaudhuri in his Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth-Century Bengal (Delhi, 2002), and Sudipta Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India (Delhi, 1995). On Savarkar, the biography by Dhananjay Keer, Veer Savarkar (Bombay, 1966), is detailed, if uncritical. Harindra Srivastava, Five Stormy Years: Savarkar in London, June 1906–June 1911 (New Delhi, 1983), has some useful facts. Savarkar’s writings, anthologized in Selected Works of Veer Savarkar, 4 vols (Chandigarh, 2007), can be read at savarkar.org; see also his Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? (Bombay, 1969) and The Indian War of Independence of 1857 (London, 1909). For his political background, see Arun Bose, Indian Revolutionaries Abroad, 1905–1922 (Patna, 1971), and G. P. Deshpande, The World of Ideas in Modern Marathi: Phule, Vinoba, Savarkar (New Delhi, 2009). The RSS’s world view is outlined by M. S. Golwalkar, We or Our Nationhood Defined (Nagpur, 1945). An essential account of the RSS is Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India (New York, 1996). See also Aparna Devare, History and the Making of a Modern Hindu Self (New Delhi, 2011), and Jyotirmaya Sharma, Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism (New Delhi, 2011).

  6. Finding True Freedom and Equality

  On McVeigh, see Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck, American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Tragedy at Oklahoma City (New York, 2001). The contradictions in McVeigh’s character have a history, which is brilliantly told in T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago, 1981). On Yousef, see Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York, 2006), and Simon Reeve, The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama Bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism (Boston, 2001). A good reference book for contemporary terrorism in America is Jeffrey Kaplan (ed.), Encyclopedia of White Power: A Sourcebook on the Radical Racist Right (Lanham, 2000). See also Alston Chase, A Mind for Murder: The Education of the Unabomber and the Origins of Modern Terrorism (New York, 2004). Faisal Devji’s two books contain some refreshingly unconventional views of terrorism: Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity (London, 2005) and The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics (London, 2008). Proudhon is mostly remembered today because of his disagreements with Marx. A good recent edition of his writings is Iain Mckay (ed.), Property Is Theft! A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology (Oakland, 2010). See also John Ehrenberg, Proudhon and His Age (Atlantic Highlands, 1996). Ruth Kinna (ed.), Early Writings on Terrorism, 4 vols (London, 2006), is a very handy collection. Although the above-mentioned biography by E. H. Carr has all the relevant facts, a recent biography of Bakunin has some provocative theses: Mark Leier, Bakunin: The Creative Passion (New York, 2006). James Joll, The Anarchists (London, 1964), is an excellent single-volume account. On the traumatic events of 1871 in Paris, see R. Christiansen, Paris Babylon: The Story of the Paris Commune (London, 1996). Kristin Ross uncovers some deeper intellectual antecedents in Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (London, 2015). On international radicalism in the late nineteenth century, see James L. Gelvin and Nile Green (eds), Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print (Berkeley, 2013); Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914 (Berkeley, 2010); and Maia Ramnath, Decolonizing Anarchism: An Antiauthoritarian History of India’s Liberation Struggle (Oakland, 2011). The Chinese fascination with anarchism is detailed in Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley, 1991). See also Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (London, 2005), and Peter Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal: The Rise of Revolutionary Terrorism in India, 1900–1910 (New Delhi, 1993). A very entertaining history of the feverish climate of anarchism is Alex Butterworth, The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents (New York, 2010). On Baader-Meinhof, see Jillian Becker, Hitler’s Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang (London, 1989). Al-Zarqawi’s early life is documented in Joby Warrick, Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS (New York, 2015). On 1848, see Mike Rapport, 1848: Year of Revolution (New York, 2010). For reactions to the 1848 revolutions, see Eugène Kamenka and F. B. Smith (eds), Intellectuals and Revolution: Socialism and the Experience of 1848 (London, 1979), and L. B. Namier, 1848: The Revolution of the Intellectuals (Oxford, 1971). Apart from the above-mentioned works on Russian intellectual and political life in the nineteenth century, see also Ronald Hingley, Nihilists
: Russian Radicals and Revolutionaries in the Age of Alexander II (1855–81) (London, 1967), Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (New York, 1978), and Woodford McClellan, Revolutionary Exiles: The Russians in the First International and the Paris Commune (London, 1979). Herzen has had many distinguished champions and explicators. See Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812–1855 (New York, 1971), and Edward Acton, Alexander Herzen and the Role of the Intellectual Revolutionary (Cambridge, 1979); Isaiah Berlin, ‘Herzen and his Memoirs’, in his Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (Oxford, 1981), and Russian Thinkers (London, 1978). E. H. Carr’s The Romantic Exiles: A Nineteenth-Century Portrait Gallery (London, 1933) is still valuable and immensely readable. But there is no substitute for reading Herzen’s own words, especially My Past and Thoughts: Memoirs, 6 vols, trans. Constance Garnett (London, 2008). The violence at Haymarket is described in James Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America (New York, 2006). On anarchism among immigrant communities in America, see Tom Goyens, Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880–1914 (Urbana, 2007), and Frederic Trautmann, The Voice of Terror: A Biography of Johann Most (Westport, 1980). The essays in Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Gerhard Hirschfeld (eds), Social Protest, Violence and Terror in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe (New York, 1982), are invaluable. The relationship between Bakunin and his most notorious follower is described in Paul Avrich, Bakunin and Nechaev (London, 1987). The most comprehensive account of the European response to the first phase of terrorism is Richard Bach Jensen, The Battle against Anarchist Terrorism: An International History, 1878–1934 (Cambridge, 2014). See also Isaac Land (ed.), Enemies of Humanity: The Nineteenth-Century War on Terrorism (New York, 2008); Scott Miller, The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century (New York, 2011); and Bernard Porter, The Origins of the Vigilant State: The London Metropolitan Police Special Branch before the First World War (London, 1987). On Bakunin’s Spanish connection, see Temma Kaplan, Anarchists of Andalusia, 1868–1903 (Princeton, 1977). The life of his foremost Italian disciple is described in Max Nettlau, Errico Malatesta: The Biography of an Anarchist (New York, 1924).