How can we explain the origins of the great wave of paranoid hatreds that seem inescapable in our close-knit world – from American ‘shooters’ and ISIS to Trump, from a rise in vengeful nationalism across the world to racism and misogyny on social media? In Age of Anger, published in India, the U.S. and U.K. in early 2017, Pankaj Mishra answers our bewilderment by casting his gaze back to the eighteenth century, before leading us to the present.
Making startling connections and comparisons, Age of Anger is a book of immense urgency and profound argument. It is a history of our present predicament unlike any other.
“Around the world, both East and West, the insurrectionary fury of militants, zealots and populists has overturned the post-Cold-War global consensus. Where does their rage come from, and where will it end? One of the sharpest cultural critics and political analysts releases his landmark “history of the present.”—Boyd Tonkin, Newsweek
“Bracing…The first essential read of the Trump Era”—Vogue
“Ground-breaking new analysis”–BBC Radio 4 “Book of the Week’
“This important, erudite book probes the deepest roots of our inflamed moment.”—New York Times
“An original attempt to explain today’s paranoid hatreds…Insightful…Iconoclastic…Mr. Mishra shocks on many levels.”—The Economist
“A searing attack on the assumption that modernity is synonymous with progress.”—Wall Street Journal
“Urgently vigorous….It is Age of Anger‘s singular ambition to give the world as have it a past, a how-we-got-here, a where-the-mistakes-lie…The book marks an important advance in our most urgent discourse.”—Patrick Lawrence, The Nation
“Could not be better timed…A much-needed perspective from outside of the creaking liberal-conservative biosphere….Mishra’s voice is one of the rare few who alerted us to our current crisis long before the media caught on”–Tank
“A bowel-churning kick in the guts . . . [Pankaj Mishra’s] vision is unusually broad, accommodating and resistant to categorisation. It is the kind of vision the world needs right now . . . Age of Anger is vitally germane to the global expressions of discontent that we are now witnessing” ―Christopher de Bellaigue, Financial Times
“Pankaj Mishra has named a moment and an era…Brilliant…Fiercely literate and eloquent…Mishra’s overview [is] amazingly capacious, considering the book’s relative brevity.”–Steve Donoghue, Christian Science Monitor
“Bracing and essential….In his intellectual concerns and moral sensibilities, [Mishra] is a follow-up to central and eastern European writers such as Alexsander Wat, Leszek Kołakowski, Czesław Miłosz and Václav Havel—Gavin Jacobson, Caravan
“We all now live in this age of anger, and many–including much of the political and media class–have treated it like a strange new phenomenon, driven by the mostly white, working-class voters (“the forgotten men,” as Trump calls them) who put a fearmonger in the Oval Office. In his erudite new book, Mishra argues that our current rage has deep historical roots.”–Bryan Walsh, Time
“Mishra’s richly learned and usefully subversive book presents a different and more accurate view….Rightly, Mishra believes that the political convulsions of the past century and a half were often foreshadowed in literature…Wide-ranging and absorbing” ―John Gray, Literary Review
“In its literacy and literariness, [Age of Anger] has the feel of Edmund Wilson’s extraordinary dramas of modern ideas…Mishra reads like a brilliant autodidact, putting to shame the many students who dutifully did the reading for their classes but missed the incandescent fire and penetrating insight in canonical texts”—Samuel Moyn, New Republic
“As the world stage swells with supremacist demagogues of all hues, and our screens with endless slaughter, ethnic cleansings and refugee “swarms”, the often electrifying Indian author and essayist Pankaj Mishra has delivered a caustic archaeology of “unreason””—Mic Moroney, Irish Times
“Lucid, incisive and provocative…a panoramic survey of the populist wind roiling the world and a genealogy of the ressentiment propelling it….By recognizing the existential roots of politics and tracing its antecedents, Mishra has made perhaps the most valuable contribution to the understanding of our turbulent age.”–Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, The National
“The ideal writer to diagnose our current moment…We live in revolutionary times. In Age of Anger, Mishra has produced an urgent analysis of a moment in which the forgotten and dispossessed are rising up to challenge everything we thought we knew about the state of the world.”—Sebastian Strangio, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Bracing and illuminating…Mishra writes with…style, energy and incision…[He] dwells in the realm of ideas and emotions, which get short shrift in most accounts of global politics…A decent liberalism would read sharp critics like Mishra and learn.”–Franklin Foer, New York Times Book Review
“Riveting…Mishra paints in thick, furious strokes, then lingers on minute details…This book makes you feel smarter for having read it, even if you feel a little stupid first.”–Carlos Lozada, Washington Post
“A rangy, brilliant, penetrating analysis of the long run-up to the age we are now in….intellectual history to the third power…In this strong, nuanced, wise book, Pankaj Mishra has transmuted anger into understanding.”—Paul Elie, Onbeing.org
“Impressive…Our current situation is recapitulating some of the most violent and dangerous episodes in modern history….With powerful and worrisome insights, Pankaj Mishra has clarified our present.”–Michael S. Roth, San Francisco Chronicle
“Beautifully written….If the rise of nationalism around the globe has your head spinning, pick up Pankaj Mishra’s profound and compelling book Age of Anger, which take a tour of the disenfranchised malcontents left behind by globalization to show how the current period of turmoil is anything but unique”—Paul Hamilos, Buzzfeed
“Along with quotations from Voltaire, Rousseau, and other familiar figures of Western Civ, Age of Anger includes observations from Iranian, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and other nations’ scholars; their perspectives complement Mishra’s deep understanding of global tensions….In probing for the wellspring of today’s anger he hits on something real”—Peter Coy, Bloomberg Businessweek
“Provocative…We’ll need new philosophical frameworks to understand the phenomenon of political anger in a global perspective; what’s fascinating about Mishra’s novel reading is that it draws on familiar philosophical and literary touchstones while turning them on their head…A brilliant work”—Eric Banks, Bookforum
“This is a framework that pushes aside conventional, familiar divisions of left and right to focus on the profound sense of dislocation and alienation that spawned (and still spawns) movements ranging from fascism to anarchism to nihilism…a short book into which a lot of intellectual history has been packed.”—Laura Miller, Slate
“Age of Anger reflects an extraordinary breadth of reading…Eye-opening…places the problem of modernization in an illuminating context.”–Fred Siegel, City Journal
“What astonishes is Mishra’s mastery of both Western and Eastern sources….Age of Anger will likely stand as the most comprehensive analysis of those whom the Russian writer Alexander Herzen called “uninvited guests at the feast of life” – those who are reshaping history with spasmodic blows of the hammer.”—Michael LaPointe, Globe and Mail
“Stimulating… thought-provoking”—Richard Evans, Guardian
“An astonishing, provocative, fascinating book that everyone would profit from reading”—Tom Holland, BBC HistoryExtra
“Age Of Anger is a hard book to get through, much like having to down a bile-bitter brew. But take the book in a few pages a day, as you would sip a herbal tonic, and you will likely feel better about your new learning”—Cheong Suk-Wai, The Straits Times (Singapore)
“A valuable book. Mishra’s ideas are bold and initially discomfiting – it’s a challenge to look over the head of the latest terrorist and try to dispassionately trace his rage back to Voltaire – but it’s undeniably good to stretch intellectual muscles and test your own prejudices. Mishra invites us to hear the ugly, muffled shouts beneath the “drumbeat” of Western civilisation.”—Julie McDowall, Sunday Herald
“[Mishra] teases out the contradictions inherent in the very project of modernity….This book is an important intervention that asks us to think deeply…For what we need today is not a fight-to-the-death to save modernity from its putative enemies or even a project to modernise or ‘reform’ the adherents of ideologies identified as pre-modern, but a better understanding of modernity.”—G. Sampath, The Hindu
“Mishra [is] …one of our most elegant prose writers..Turn the back pages of Europe’s intellectual history, as Mishra does with such panache rarely seen in contemporary narrative non-fiction, and you will realise how irredeemably trapped the world is in its own inheritance of ideas…An indispensable addition to the canon of intellectual histories”—S. Prasannarajan, Open Magazine
“Age Of Anger is vintage Pankaj Mishra, the literary iconoclast [and] maverick political thinker—edgy, sly and idiosyncratic—weaving a kind of witchcraft with the wounded frankness of prose….In a profoundly illuminating and enticing operatic ‘dance macabre’, “to the great amazement of both the actors and spectators”, Mishra recreates an elegiac, philosophical history of the origins and spread of inequality and hatred.”–Ashwani Kumar, Financial Express
“A disturbing but imperatively urgent analysis.” ― Bryce Christensen, Booklist (starred review)
“Expansive….Mishra insists on reexamining the dominant inherited categories through which we have so far understood ourselves and the world around us…That alone makes it a must-read.”—Shahab Saqib, The Friday Times (Pakistan)
 “A probing, well-informed investigation of global unrest calling for ‘truly transformative thinking’ about humanity’s future.” ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Full credit to Mishra for his effort to identify and explain present challenges. Or to quote Pope Francis, the task is to improve a world where “some are mired in desperate and degrading poverty, with no way out, while others have not the faintest idea of what to do with their possessions.”—John McGreevy, Commonweal
“Engaging and thought-provoking….Age of Anger is a book that I would encourage people to read, but more importantly to discuss.”—Kate Bailey, The LSE Review of Books
“Sensitive and illuminating….Makes a powerful case for the influence of a certain group of anti-rational and anti-commercial ideas which have influenced our world…Mishra’s contribution is to show us how these ideas have become ‘viral’ and what that means for all of us.”—Jonathan Steinberg, The Spectator
“Incisive…Age of Anger, which was completed after the Brexit vote but before Trump’s victory, reminds us that the dialectical movement between these two poles — between a desire to be oneself and a desire to belong to something larger than oneself — has been a feature of Western political life since the Enlightenment.”—Justin E.H. Smith, Harper’s
“Incisive and scary.. a wake-up call”—Nick Fraser, Observer
“Brilliant and compelling diagnosis of our modern maladies….One of Mishra’s many gifts is the ability to find in thinkers of the past important themes that suddenly speak to our moment in time.”–Chris Tucker, Dallas Morning News
“Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger…exemplifies his characteristic eloquence and erudition…Leaders who are struggling to process the present backlash against core aspects of globalization would do well to heed Mishra’s plea to “remember the irreducible human being, her or his fears, desires, and resentments.”—Ali Wyne, The National Interest
“An extraordinary work, a counter-history of the Enlightenment whose central thesis is as simple as it is disturbing: liberalism is an elite idea; it did not and will not work for everyone.”—Ratik Asokan, The Baffler
“An impressively probing and timely work…Highly engaging”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Pankaj Mishra is in the vanguard of writers interpreting the bewilderment of contemporary times. He brings to this lucid study the full force of historical context and sensitive understanding of the intellectual sources that have influenced modern-day western and Asian political predicaments.”—Talmiz Ahmad, Outlook
“In this urgent, profound and extraordinarily timely study, Pankaj Mishra follows the likes of Isaiah Berlin, John Gray and Mark Lilla by delving into the past in order to throw light on our contemporary predicament, when the neglected and dispossessed of the world have suddenly risen up in Nietzschean ressentiment to transform the world we thought we knew”—John Banville
“With a deep knowledge of both Western and non-Western history, and like no other before him, Pankaj Mishra comes to grips with the malaise at the heart of these dangerous times. This is the most astonishing, convincing, and disturbing book I’ve read in years”—Joe Sacco
“Brilliant, incendiary…. Pankaj Mishra explains the current crises as new manifestations of one long disruption.”—George Monbiot
“Scintillating…Age of Anger looks an awful lot like a masterwork. We’re only a few weeks into 2017, but one of the books of the year is already here.”—Christopher Bray, The Tablet
“Every once in a (long) while a book comes out that rips the zeitgeist, shining on like a crazy diamond. Age of Anger, by Pankaj Mishra, author of the also-seminal From the Ruins of Empire, might as well be the latest avatar”–Pepe Escobar, Counterpunch
Pankaj Mishra’s previous book From the Ruins of Empire won the Crossword Award for Best Nonfiction in 2013 and in 2014 became the first book by a non-Western writer to win Germany’s prestigious Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding. It was also shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize, a literary award for the world’s best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs, the Orwell Prize, Britain’s most prestigious prize for political writing, and Asia Society’s Bernard Schwartz Book Award.
From Reviews:
“A subtle, erudite and entertaining account…by a leading Indian public intellectual who, with a surprising new perspective, is the heir to Edward Said”—Best Books of 2012, The Economist
“Enormously ambitious but thoroughly readable, this book is essential reading for everyone who is interested in the processes of change that have led to the emergence of today’s Asia”—Amitav Ghosh, Wall Street Journal
“Compelling…Invaluable..Its detailed and rigorous historical emphasis..stands in stark contrast to some of the more superficial instant analyses of what the ‘rise of Asia’ might mean for the world”—Rana Mitter, Times Literary Supplement
“Not just an excellent history of Asia in the late colonial period, but also a valuable history for contemporary Asians thinking about the future of their continent”—Mohsin Hamid, 2012 Books of the Year, Financial Times
“A reminder, by way of an intellectual history of Asian responses to imperialism, that European intellectual and political predominance was a freak of history unlikely to be sustained. Whatever else may distinguish this century from the last one, the geographies of thought, politics, and energy are all being remade”—Benjamin Kunkel, 2012 Books of the Year, New Statesman
“A breakthrough success….Blessed with a novelist’s attention to detail…Mishra is familiar with the historical ironies coiled within some of the world’s most powerful ideologies, from evangelical free market capitalism to militant Islam to Hindu nationalism”—Drew Calvert, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Original, engaging, and often completely surprising…As a history of some of the ideas that have shaped the world we inhabit but remain neglected in the historical scholarship, Mishra’s narrative breaks new ground”—Ananya Vajpeyi, World Policy Journal
“Tremendous…Vibrant….Mishra’s book invites Anglophone readers to a conversation about the current shifts, but with an eye not only to the intellectual concerns of Paris, London and New York, but also to those current at intellectual addresses that we do not normally consider”—Vijay Prashad, Himal SouthAsian
“The scope and ambition of From the Ruins of Empire would have overwhelmed a lesser writer. Mishra delivers with panache…rigour and sensitivity. His sharply drawn characters are woven into a narrative that is riveting and insightful. But it is Mishra’s unerring political instincts, unencumbered by ideology, that make this book such a compelling read”–Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, Guernica
“Timely and important….Mishra’s astute and entertaining synthesis of these neglected histories goes a long way to substantiating his claim that “the central event of the last century for the majority of the world’s population was the intellectual and political awakening of Asia”—-Hari Kunzru, New York Times
“Novel in its attempts to link the tumultuous early twentieth century to today’s “rise of the rest….Mishra tells the story with authority and rich color, and weaves a staggering amount of historical information to create coherent narratives”—Joshua Kurlantzick, Asia Unbound, Council on Foreign Relations
“A remarkable work…Unique in the way it seeks out intellectuals from the colonised societies but avoids the obvious men who shaped history. You should read it. Now”—Jerry Pinto, Man’s World
“In his brilliant new book Pankaj Mishra reverses the long gaze of the West upon the East, showing modern history as it has been felt by the majority of the world’s population from Turkey to China. These are the amazing stories of the grandfathers of today’s angry Asians. Excellent!” —Orhan Pamuk
“The amazingly diverse trajectories trodden by Asia in the last century finally make sense”—Madhusree Mukerjee, Philadelphia Inquirer
“Fascinating and magisterial….It is a tribute to Mishra’s skills as a writer that this demanding book has won widespread (and deserved) accolades. In lesser hands, this material could have easily descended into a jumble of names, dates and thumbnail sketches, but here the narrative is lucid and doesn’t groan beneath the prodigious research”—Jeff Kingston, Japan Times
“Deeply researched and arrestingly original…this penetrating and disquieting book should be on the reading list of anybody who wants to understand where we are today”—John Gray, Independent
“Original…Thoughtful and stimulating…From the Ruins of Empire challenges the Western reader to revisit modern Asian history from a sometimes disorienting perspective, that of the dominated and humiliated, free of any nostalgia for Raj or Legation”—Tim O’Connell, Asian Review of Books
“A fascinating narrative, which challenges the Eurocentric version of ‘the truth’…The post-Edward Said phase in the world of ideas requires writers like Mishra to continue with the internationalist tradition”—Raza Rumi, Friday Times
“A comprehensive and much-needed reminder of the resistance among Asian intellectuals to the overpowering materialism of the West”—Mark Tully, Resurgence
“Breaks new ground….By writing from outside traditional western ideology, and by offering his sources the detail and attention they require, Mishra has provided a bold, fresh, and much appreciated perspective on the history of Empire”—Kwasi Kwarteng, Prospect
“In finely wrought biographical portraiture, Mishra lays bare an intellectual transformation whereby the chains of Western imperialism were broken and a self-consciously modern Asia envisioned. This searching, accessible book….adds to our understanding of political Islam, and of China’s and India’s place in the world”—Michael Kimmage, New Republic
“Lively…Engaging…From the Ruins of Empire retains the power to instruct and even to shock. It provides us with an exciting glimpse of the vast and still largely unexplored terrain of anti-colonial thought that shaped so much of the post-western world in which we now live”—Mark Mazower, Financial Times
“Pankaj Mishra has set out in this intelligent and thought-provoking study to present Asia’s role in creating the now-familiar configurations of the 21st century….One applauds the effort to effort to remind western readers that Asia was never merely a passive recipient of western trespass”—Richard Overy, New Statesman
“Mishra has no time at all for big, broad-brush accounts of western success contrasted with eastern hopelessness…From the Ruins of Empire gives eloquent voice to [the] curious, complex intellectual odysseys…of some of Asia’s most educated, thoughtful men”—Julia Lovell, Guardian
“Outstanding…Mishra wears his scholarship lightly and weaves together the many strands of history into a gripping narrative….Performs a signal service to the future—by making us read the past in a fresh light”—Tabish Khair, The Hindu
“Masterly…..The great value of Mishra’s study is that he goes with a fine tooth-comb through the peripatetic dreams and schemes of some of Asia’s most interesting characters, showing how the same man and his followers switched from reform to revolution and back again, dabbling now in fundamentalist primitivism, now in village socialism, now in capitalist modernisation as long as it has an Asian face”—Jonathan Steele, Red Pepper
“From the Ruins of Empire provides an enlightening, uniquely global rereading of modern history, one that is crucial for those seeking to understand the overwhelming ideological and political conflicts that blight today’s world”—Hirsh Sawhney, Brooklyn Rail
“Erudite and engaging…eloquent…gives a voice to characters often ignored by western historians…Mishra is an intellectual historian who can skilfully paint in background, simplify boldly to open up broad perspectives on the past, and popularise without condescension”—Ben Shephard, Observer
“Excellent study of the intellectual origins of…the emergence of a new Asia….A stimulating and original book..it incisively anatomises what George Orwell called the ‘slimy humbug’ of the white man’s burden”—Piers Brendon, Literary Review
“Meticulous scholarship…..History, as Mishra insists, has been glossed and distorted by the conqueror….[This] passionate account of the relentless subjugation of Asian empires by European, especially British, imperialism, is provocative, shaming and convincing”—Michael Binyon, The Times (London)
“Fascinating…a rich and genuinely thought-provoking book”—Noel Malcolm, Daily Telegraph
“A highly readable and illuminating exploration of the way in which Asian, and Muslim countries in particular, have resented Western dominance and reacted against it with varying degrees of success”—-David Goodall, The Tablet
“Mishra’s remarkable story, mostly untold in Western historiography, opens up important new vistas…..With uncommon empathy, Mishra has excavated a range of ideas, existential debates, and spiritual struggles set in motion by Asia’s rude collision with the West, leading to outcomes no one could have predicted but which, after his account, seem more comprehensible”—Namit Arora, 3Quarksdaily.com
“A timely corrective….To Mishra’s credit, this book is not a celebration of the East and Eastern thinkers in the way that some modern accounts of Western empires are – whether intentionally or not – tributes to marauding imperialists”—Nikhil Kumar, Independent on Sunday
“(An) immensely readable historical essay, it’s a worthy adversary to the Ferguson polemic it attempts to combat. Fight fire with fire”—James McAuley, Washington Post
“A masterly work…From the Ruins of Empire is undoubtedly a critique of the triumphalist, imperialist cheerleading history that [Niall] Ferguson has often been accused of. But the complexity and nuance in Mishra’s arguments and the richness of his narrative make it inaccurate, if not downright ridiculous and demeaning, to reduce the book to…a quarrel”—Aditya Menon, Mail Today
“Prodigious…Nuanced….and not triumphalist—a quality that imperialism’s cheerleaders need to learn. And they should look at the history they are choosing to ignore, so that they understand their own world better”—Salil Tripathi, Mint
“Mishra is a lovely writer, both clear and passionate even when his material is dense as porage; and this is a rewarding book, telling a story we ought to know…[He] has done something both fresh and immensely difficult”—Michael Pye, Scotsman
“Essentially an Eastern canon of political thought – linking Indian, Chinese and Arab/Muslim figures and ideas [and revealing] how their responses to the ignominy of colonialism were to shape their future nation-states….Not some simplistic paean to “Asian values”….this is a prophetic book that cannot be ignored by Asia”—Karim Raslan, Malaysia Star
“From the Ruins of Empire is perhaps the most important book in a long time, for India in particular, and Asia in general”—S. Raghottam, Asian Age
“Intellectually enthralling and beautifully written book…Emphasize[s) the complexity and plurality of the Islamic and broader non-Western worlds….The consistency of this history, which is so much at variance with the standard fare, should shock western-educated readers into asking how it came to be so relevant today”—Julie Wark, OpenDemocracy.net
“Sweeping summary and synthesis…One of the many feats of Ruins is to reveal the astonishing and busy world of connections that linked the [Asian] continent”—Kanishk Tharoor, The National
“Compelling and timely….Valuable antidote(s) to entrenched notions about the journey of political and intellectual decolonisation”—Shayan Rajani, Dawn
“Given the scale of the enterprise that the author has chosen to undertake and the scintillating manner in which he has achieved that, it would not be an exaggeration to say that From the Ruins of Empire is as important a book of our times as the recently published Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson”—Rajesh Singh, The Pioneer
“One can only be thankful for writers like Mishra. From The Ruins Of Empire is erudite, provocative, inspiring and unremittingly complex; a model kind of non-fiction for our disordered days….May well be seen in years to come as a defining volume of its kind”—Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday
“Scintillating”—Starred pre-publication review in Publishers Weekly, June 25, 2012
“A perfect springboard for many necessary ideas and historical characters to be studied in depth.”—Kirkus, July 1, 2012
“From the Ruins of Empire jolts our historical imagination and suddenly places it on the right, though deeply repressed, axis. It is a book of vast and wondrous learning and delightful and surprising associations that will give a new meaning to a liberation geography. From close and careful readings of some mighty Asian intellectuals of the last two centuries who have rarely been placed in this creative and daring conversation with each other, Pankaj Mishra has discovered and revealed, against the grain of conventional and cliched bifurcations of ‘The West and the Rest,’ a continental shift in our historical consciousness that will define a whole new spectrum of critical thinking. It is a remarkable sign of our revolutionary Zeitgeist that this book should appear at the time of transcontinental uprisings–from Asia to Africa to Europe and the Americas–to reveal the dawn of a new hermeneutic horizon of how we Asians, indeed how we humans, are to conceive ourselves.”—Hamid Dabashi, Professor of Iranian Studies, Columbia University
“After Edward Said’s masterpiece Orientalism, From the Ruins of Empire offers another bracing view of the history of the modern world. Pankaj Mishra, a brilliant author of wide learning, takes us through, with his skillful and captivating narration, interlinked historical events across Japan, China, Turkey, Iran, India, Egypt, and Vietnam, opening up a fresh dialogue with and between such major Asian reformers, intellectuals, and revolutionaries as Liang Qichao, Tagore, Jamal al-din al-Afghani, and Sun Yatsen.”—Wang Hui, author of China’s New Order and The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought and Professor of Chinese Intellectual History at Tsinghua University, Beijing
“A riveting account that makes new and illuminating connections. Pankaj Mishra follows the intellectual trail of this contested history with both intelligence and moral clarity. A deeply entertaining and deeply humane book.”—Hisham Matar