Age of Anger: A History of the Present. By Pankaj Mishra. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 405 pages; $27. Allen Lane; £20.

SOON after the Soviet Union imploded, Pankaj Mishra reminds his readers, The Economist felt able to assert that “there was no serious alternative to free-market capitalism as the way to organise economic life.” Yet today, the notion that a global capitalist economy hitched to a liberal internationalism can bring peace, progress and prosperity has taken a beating. That is evident not only in the violence in Iraq and Syria, where what used to be called the civilising hand has proven incapable of stemming the bloodshed. It is evident, too, in the vitriolic populism resurging at the heart of Western democracies—in Brexit, in the rise of Marine Le Pen in France and in Donald Trump’s tumultuous route to the White House.

Indian-born Mr Mishra divides his time between London and a retreat at the foot of the Himalayas. He earns a lot as a columnist for Bloomberg, and he sups at the tables of the Western intelligentsia. But he considers himself only a “stepchild” of the West, and that offers him a useful detachment. His iconoclastic new book, “Age of Anger”, will come as a blow to his many cosmopolitan friends.

In it, Mr Mishra shocks on several levels. First, he sees no hope that 2016 might prove the high-water mark of anger, cynicism and ugly nationalism. Indeed, he argues that the world will become only more divided and disorderly. As economies slow, more people will feel that powerful elites have dangled the fruits of material progress only to pull them away. More will feel a sense of displacement, either figuratively within their country, or literally, because they have been forced to leave their failing states. Some will take the spontaneous decision to vote for a populist who promises to tear down the system at great cost. Some will make a life-altering and fatal decision for jihad. Whether easy or extreme, angry reactions may be perverse, but they can feel exhilarating.

Mr Mishra sustains an angry assault on the notion—which in his depiction risks creating a straw man—that progress has led in a graceful arc from the Enlightenment to the liberal internationalism that prevailed until recently. One part of this attack is to argue how contingent was the path to free-market internationalism, how dangerously arrogant the idea that it was always the best of all possible worlds. Another part is to challenge the idea that the modern age’s episodes of unspeakable violence have been mere aberrations from the march towards emancipation, dignity and reason. On the contrary, war, slavery, imperialism, racism and the use of power to hoard the gains of enterprise: all have been part of the liberal project. Liberals who celebrate the project but cannot count the costs are slow to understand resentments that heat the cauldrons of anger today.

This argument leads to Mr Mishra’s most insightful point. Today’s anger and discontent—from Islamist nihilists murdering Paris concert-goers, to Trump supporters baying for Hillary Clinton to be locked up, to attacks on immigrants following Brexit—is hardly new. For many, such outrages are unfathomable at worst, or at best caused by economic dislocation or internet-peddled conspiracy theories. But Mr Mishra shows how violence, nihilism and hatred of the “other” have ample precedents among Western liberalism’s 19th- and 20th-century opponents, whether revolutionaries, anarchists or artists.

The grand tour of our discontents

These earlier foes of Project Enlightenment found themselves between the mute masses on one hand, and aristocratic elites ordering the world for their own ends (even as they preached freedom) on the other. Voltaire, the ultra-rationalist who argued that the perfectibility of man was the true paradise, also made a commercial fortune and urged the Russian empress, Catherine the Great, to teach enlightment to the Poles and Turks at the barrel of a gun. The spiritual godfather of today’s anti-liberals, on the other hand, was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Isaiah Berlin’s “guttersnipe of genius”. Humiliated by Paris society, Rousseau grasped the moral and spiritual implications of a world in which the old gods are gone, society is set in turmoil and people losing ancient fixities are forced to mimic the privileged rich. As Mr Mishra puts it, Rousseau “anticipated the modern underdog with his aggravated sense of victimhood and demand for redemption”. Many of the “isms” invented to heal the ressentiment (it sounds better in French)—romanticism, socialism, authoritarianism, nationalism and anarchism—can be traced back to Rousseau’s scribblings.

The molten core of Mr Mishra’s book, then, is an intellectual history of popular discontents. To him, Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iranian revolution owed much more to Robespierre than to the 12 Shia Imams. The 19th-century resentment so keenly described by Friedrich Nietzsche prefigures the homicidal dandyism of “Jihadi John”, Mohammed Emwazi, who broadcast his victims being executed. The selfie-narcissism of Islamic State, its rape of girls and destruction of Palmyra echo “The Futurist Manifesto” by Filippo Marinetti, a misogynist Italian poet, in 1909: “We want to glorify war…and contempt for women. We want to destroy museums, libraries and academies of all kinds.”

This history is usually very welcome, but sometimes infuriatingly meandering, the author’s century-spanning chains of associations stretching well past the point where many readers will want to follow. But it is nonetheless worth sticking with, as the early chapters are the worst offenders, and there is much rich reading.

It is harder to agree with his argument that modern liberalism “lies in ruins”. Does it? Mr Mishra associates liberalism with what he describes, in a related essay in the Guardian, as a “mechanistic and materialist way of conceiving human actions”, partly a consequence of the primacy of free-market economics. But this implies a misreading of liberalism. For one, liberalism does not suppose perfect rationality. Rather, it more modestly strives to reconcile seemingly irreconcilable preferences in order for people to live together and co-operate. It requires tolerance, argument and compromise.

Another hallmark is a belief, however much wrapped in doubt, in progress. Here, Mr Mishra is insufficiently generous towards liberalism’s own progress. Early liberals supported slavery, but then overturned it. Later a liberal state tamed market abuses in the form of America’s robber barons. Even democracy was not always liberals’ ideal system, but in the 20th century they came to embrace it. And out of liberalism grew a post-war emphasis on civil rights.

Today, the military interventions that tried to impose democracy—carried out by what Edmund Fawcett, formerly of The Economist and author of a history of liberalism, calls the “liberal warfare state”—are distortions of liberalism, not inevitable consequences of it. And just as overweening state power is not liberal, nor is ceding everything to the market. State and market exist in tension: sometimes rivals, sometimes accomplices.

Lastly, the conclusion in Mr Mishra’s essay—that it is “a profoundly fraught emotional and social condition—one which, aggravated by turbo-capitalism, has now become unstable”—is prematurely dark. Much of the conflict that he despairs of, shocking though it is, is not new. Indeed, liberalism grew out of a response to the upheavals of raw capitalism and revolution. It is not clear how his call to make more room for an understanding of the soul and its irrational impulses is to be accommodated in any other system. Politics is conflict: it will never reach the steady state that Mr Mishra seems to yearn for. Could the solution be lying under his nose? Ceaseless change gave birth to liberalism, which, for all the mistakes made in its name, continues to adapt. Despite those mistakes, it remains the best response today.