Pankaj Mishra - The opinionated man with a cause

Pankaj Mishra  may well be the right person who  might set the wheels in motion

Source:   Welcome to the age of Anger  ( article - The Guardian)

PART I 

The insurgencies of our time, including Brexit and the rise of the European far right, have many local causes – ...

but it is not an accident that demagoguery appears to be rising around the world.

Savage violence has erupted in recent years across a broad swath of territory: wars in ....

The conflicts, not confined to fixed battlefields, feel endemic (+++ years?)and uncontrollable.

Hate-mongering against immigrants and minorities has gone mainstream;

figures foaming at the mouth with loathing and malice are ubiquitous on old and new media alike.

PART II 

There is much dispute about the causes of this global disorder. 

 
Many observers have characterised it as a backlash against an out-of-touch establishment, explaining Trump’s victory in a handful of ways: 

– in the words of French economist Thomas Piketty –  “primarily due to the explosion in economic and geographic inequality in the United States”

The Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman admitted: “people like me – and probably like most readers of the New York Times – truly didn’t understand the country we live in”. 

PART III 

Here, Indian author Pankaj Mishra argues that we need to look again at the ideals that underpin democracy. 

Why are people so angry? Blame modernity

   BBC video

In Age of Anger, published in early 2017, Pankaj Mishra answers our bewilderment by casting his gaze back to the eighteenth century, before leading us to the present.

TASK-  READ the short comments on his book and select four for next day. Below, my pick:

“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

“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