Rousseau, the graceless outsider, could see straight through Voltaire’s cosmopolitan suavity — and he shredded him.

Image Jeering the press at a Trump rally, November 2016. Credit... Damon Winter/The New York Times

More to the point, he understood the underlying pathologies of the rising capitalist civilization that Voltaire championed. The market society, Rousseau warned, would dangerously unmoor individuals. He saw how humans aspired to surpass one another in wealth and status, which meant they were capable of great cruelty. The modern world weakened religion and the family, the emotional buffers that provided comfort. Without these supports, individuals came to depend on the opinions of others for their sense of self-worth, which inflicted terrible cases of insecurity, envy and self-hatred. This, in Mishra’s argument, remains the nub of the world’s problems: “An existential resentment of other people’s being, caused by an intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness, ressentiment, as it lingers and deepens, poisons civil society and undermines political liberty, and is presently making for a global turn to authoritarianism and toxic forms of chauvinism.”

There’s no doubting Rousseau’s prescience. His criticisms of finance and warnings about inequality are proto-Piketty. But he’s a troubling hero. Isaiah Berlin called him the “greatest militant lowbrow in history and guttersnipe of genius.” Rousseau celebrated militarism and xenophobia. He unabashedly held up Sparta as his ideal. Mary Wollstonecraft, and generations of subsequent feminists, have charged him with contributing to misogyny in its modern form. Mishra knows all this and should be far warier of his own attraction to Rousseau — but that would require him to admit a central lapse in his own argument.

Image

Mishra persuasively damns the arrogance of neoliberals, but let’s say a few kind words for neoliberalism. On the whole, thanks to the advance of capitalism, we live in a world with less abject poverty, less disease, less oppression and greater material prosperity. Mishra dwells in the realm of ideas and emotions, which get short shrift in most accounts of global politics. So it’s bracing and illuminating for him to focus on feelings, what he calls “the wars in the inner world.” But he doesn’t have much to say about the material reality of economics and politics other than angry bromides about the “Western model” and broad, unsupported statements about stagnation. (A sample of his glibness: He notes that “most people have found the notions of individualism and social mobility to be unrealizable in practice.” Why then, we might ask, do so many keep trying for it?) Mishra can’t find the redeeming qualities in liberal democracy and he can’t posit anything to replace it with — which explains why he must resurrect the repulsive Rousseau, brushing aside his least appealing ideas. Like Rousseau, Mishra sympathizes with traditional society. But it’s impossible to defend traditional societies without accounting for their misogyny and xenophobia, which are hardly incidental features. Mishra can’t bring himself to make the case, which means he has no hint of prescription for the crisis he dedicates his book to describing.

When the galleys of “Age of Anger” arrived, I dived for them. They slipped through the mail slot just after the Trump victory rocked my own faith in progress. Liberalism has no choice but to sincerely wrestle with its discontents, to become reacquainted with its moral blind spots and political weaknesses. Technocracy — which defines so much of the modern liberal spirit — doesn’t have a natural grasp of psychology and emotion. But if it hopes to stave off the dark forces, it needs to grow adept at understanding the less tangible roots of anger, the human experience uncaptured by data, the resentments that understandably fester. A decent liberalism would read sharp critics like Mishra and learn.