Quotes from Pankaj Mishra

Marx reproduced medieval and Reformation millenarian expectations in his utopia of a classless, stateless society.

Nationalism has again become a seductive but treacherous antidote to an experience of disorder and meaninglessness: the unexpectedly rowdy anticlimax, in a densely populated world, of the Western European eighteenth-century dream of a universally secular, materialist and peaceful civilization.

As Keynes wrote, with devastating understatement, 'The age of economic internationalism was not particularly successful in avoiding war.

Contra Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau refused to believe that the obligations to civil society could be derived from self-interest, the preservation of life or the enjoyment of private property. For socialized human beings were prone to deceive and to exploit others while pretending to be public-spirited.

equally eagerly from the nineteenth-century polymath Herbert Spencer, the first truly global thinker – who, after reading Darwin, coined the term 'survival of the fittest'. Hitler revered Atatürk (literally, 'the father of the Turks') as his guru; Lenin and Gramsci were keen on Taylorism, or 'Americanism'; American New Dealers later adapted Mussolini's 'corporatism'.

Everywhere and at all times, it is up to you to rejoice piously at what is occurring at the present moment, to conduct yourself with justice towards the people who are present here and now.4 Although

But, although the sramanas carried on much dialogue among themselves and before large audiences, they dealt primarily in assertion. Reality consisted of this and that; and there was no basis for morality. They lived in what the Buddha, commenting on the intellectual ferment of his time, later called the 'jungle of opinions'.

Al-e-Ahmad explored the ideas of Marx; he translated Camus, and brought an intense focus to his reading of Heidegger (to whom he had been introduced at the University of Tehran by an influential specialist in German philosophy called Ahmad Fardid, who actually coined the term 'Westoxification'). These very modern critics of modernity's spiritual damage turned out to be stops on Al-e-Ahmad's journey to a conception of Islam itself as a revolutionary ideology.

Writing during the heyday of Modernization Theory, the French critic Raymond Aron, though resolutely anti-communist, termed American-style individualism the product of a short history of unrepeatable national success, which 'spreads unlimited optimism, denigrates the past, and encourages the adoption of institutions which are in themselves destructive of the collective unity'.

Bloom wrote, 'there is nowhere else to seek it. I would suggest that fascism has a future, if not the future.' The English political philosopher John Gray warned of the return of 'more primordial forces, nationalist and religious, fundamentalist and soon, perhaps, Malthusian' that the Cold War had tranquillized; he pointed to the intellectual incapacity of liberalism as well as Marxism in this new world order.

Brought up into a life with little meaning, we had convinced ourselves that meaningful ways of being existed, and we would find them. In reality, this amounted to running this way and that, uncertain of our destination, and looking back enquiringly all the time.

The implications are sobering: the non-West not only finds itself replicating the West's trauma on an infinitely larger scale. While helping inflict the profoundest damage yet on the environment – manifest today in rising sea levels, erratic rainfall, drought, declining harvests and devastating floods – the non-West also has no real prospect of catching up with the West.

for the weak and the ineffectual, who cannot rise to the dignity and nobility of tragedy, or the luxury of irony, for whom even ordinary acts of will are impossible, melodrama is a substitute. People deprived of the capacity to change their fate can only repetitively lament this fact, and since they belong to the vast majority of the world's population, melodrama should be taken seriously for its world-historical impact.

Shaped by political considerations, and then driven by geopolitical urgencies, Khomeinism was always a hybrid: the beneficiary of an ideological account of Islamic tradition, which borrowed from modern idioms and used secular concepts, particularly those of Shariati, and also incorporated a Third Worldist revolutionary discourse. Islamists negating top-down modernizers ended up mirroring, even parodying, their supposed enemy, cancelling their own simple oppositions between Us and Them.

There is, plainly, no deep logic to the unfolding of time.

alternately on his thickly moustached face; he spoke with the unassailable confidence that a college-education in the midst of general illiteracy gives one.

And it sees ressentiment as the defining feature of a world where mimetic desire, or what Herzl called, approvingly, 'Darwinian mimicry', endlessly proliferates, and where the modern promise of equality collides with massive disparities of power, education, status and property ownership.

Rousseau alienated his aristocratic patrons; he quarrelled with most of his friends and well-wishers, including Hume and Diderot, many of whom also ended up deriding him as a madman. But he disagreed most violently – and productively – with Voltaire.

They encourage the suspicion – potentially lethal among the hundreds of millions of people condemned to superfluousness – that the present order, democratic or authoritarian, is built upon force and fraud; they incite a broader and more apocalyptic mood than we have witnessed before. They also underscore the need for some truly transformative thinking, about both the self and the world.

Postcolonial nation-building was an extraordinary project: hundreds of millions of people persuaded to renounce – and often scorn – a world of the past that had endured for thousands of years, and to undertake a gamble of creating modern citizens who would be secular, enlightened, cultured and heroic.

For Rousseau, 'the word finance is a slave's word' and freedom turns into a commodity, degrading buyer and seller alike, wherever commerce reigns. 'Financial systems make venal souls.' Their secret workings are a 'means of making pilferers and traitors, and of putting freedom and the public good upon the auction block'.

In other words, in 1919 relatively few people could become disenchanted with liberal modernity because only a tiny minority had enjoyed the opportunity to become enchanted with it in the first place. Since then, however, billions more people have been exposed to the promises of individual freedom in a global neo-liberal economy that imposes constant improvisation and adjustment – and just as rapid obsolescence.

How could, it was felt, people be so opposed to modernity, and all the many goods it had to offer to people around the world: equality, liberty, prosperity, toleration, pluralism and representative government.

It was easy to denounce that American vision of endless space and well-being and leisure as a deception; to accuse it of obscuring the inner cities and drugs and violence, and the ruthless suppression of remote and near enemies. But to people from tormented societies, America was the country whose nation-building traumas seemed to lie in the remote past, and where many individuals could afford to look beyond the struggles for food, shelter and security that still weighed upon people elsewhere.