By Pankaj Mishra
Modernity's resentments fuel global rage
Subject
Themes
The modern world was forged through a fundamental conflict between two visions of human flourishing. On one side stood Voltaire, champion of commerce, reason, and cosmopolitan progress, who allied himself with enlightened despots and celebrated material prosperity as the highest human achievement. On the other stood Rousseau, the Genevan outsider who warned that commercial society bred competitive vanity, spiritual emptiness, and unprecedented psychological suffering. This intellectual battle, fought in the salons and coffeehouses of eighteenth-century Paris, established the template for every major political conflict that followed.
The modern world was forged through a fundamental conflict between two visions of human flourishing. On one side stood Voltaire, champion of commerce, reason, and cosmopolitan progress, who allied himself with enlightened despots and celebrated material prosperity as the highest human achievement.…
Published in early 2017, just weeks after Donald Trump's inauguration and months after the Brexit referendum, this work arrived at a moment of acute global disorientation. Conventional frameworks for understanding international politics had visibly failed. The liberal internationalist consensus that…
Ressentiment is not merely anger or frustration. It is a specific psychological condition that arises in societies founded on the principle of equality, where formal equality coexists with massive differences in power, education, status, and property. The concept was first identified by Soren…
Nationalism presents itself as the recovery of an ancient identity, a return to roots, a reassertion of timeless values. In practice, it is among the most modern of ideologies, invented in the late eighteenth century and exported globally through a process of imitation and adaptation that reveals…
The triumphalist narrative of Western progress, which dominated global thinking after the Cold War, systematically erased the violence that built the modern world. This erasure was not incidental; it was structural, woven into the very frameworks through which Western nations understood themselves…
A recurring pattern runs through the history of modernisation: cosmopolitan intellectuals advise autocratic rulers, who impose radical reforms from above while brutally suppressing dissent below. This pattern, first established by the alliance between Enlightenment philosophes and European monarchs,…
Contemporary terrorism is routinely treated as a uniquely Islamic phenomenon, or as something unprecedented in human history. Both assumptions are wrong. The 'lone wolf' attacker, the suicide bomber, the cell of conspirators plotting spectacular violence against civilian targets: all have clear…
In September 1919, the Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio led two thousand mutineers into the Adriatic town of Fiume, declaring himself 'il Duce' of a self-proclaimed free state. His regime became a laboratory for a new kind of politics built on theatrical gestures, pseudo-religious rhetoric, and the…
In 1992, a year after the Soviet Union collapsed, The Economist declared that no serious alternative to free-market capitalism existed. Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the 'end of history,' arguing that liberal democracy and market economics represented the final form of human governance. Think tanks,…
In 1736, Voltaire published 'Le Mondain,' a poem that amounted to a moral revolution. At a time when medieval ideals of poverty, pastoral simplicity, and a lost golden age still dominated European thought, Voltaire audaciously celebrated material luxury, global commerce, and conspicuous consumption…
The 'clash of civilisations' thesis, which frames contemporary conflicts as an eternal struggle between Islam and the West, collapses under historical scrutiny. Islamist movements did not emerge from some medieval theological tradition untouched by modernity. They arose from precisely the same…
On 30 January 1948, Nathuram Godse shot Mahatma Gandhi three times at point-blank range. Godse was a devotee of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the intellectual architect of Hindutva, the ideology of Hindu supremacism. Far from being rooted in ancient Hindu tradition, Savarkar's nationalism was a…
On the morning of 19 April 1995, Timothy McVeigh parked a Ryder rental truck packed with explosives in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The blast destroyed half the building, killing 168 people, including 19 children in a day-care centre, and injuring 684 others.…
Alexander Herzen predicted in the mid-nineteenth century that Europe was 'approaching a terrible cataclysm.' The masses, 'crushed by toil, weakened by hunger, dulled by ignorance,' had long been the 'uninvited guests at the feast of life.' Political revolutions had drawn them out of passivity but…
By Pankaj Mishra
Subject
Themes
The modern world was forged through a fundamental conflict between two visions of human flourishing. On one side stood Voltaire, champion of commerce, reason, and cosmopolitan progress, who allied himself with enlightened despots and celebrated material prosperity as the highest human achievement. On the other stood Rousseau, the Genevan outsider who warned that commercial society bred competitive vanity, spiritual emptiness, and unprecedented psychological suffering. This intellectual battle, fought in the salons and coffeehouses of eighteenth-century Paris, established the template for every major political conflict that followed.