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. But, as Tocqueville warned, ‘to live in freedom, one must grow used to a life full of agitation, change and danger’. Otherwise, one moves quickly from unlimited freedom to a craving for unlimited despotism. As he explained:
When no authority exists in matters of religion, any more than in political matters, men soon become frightened in the face of unlimited independence. With everything in a perpetual state of agitation, they become anxious and fatigued. With the world of the intellect in universal flux, they want everything in the material realm, at least, to be firm and stable, and, unable to resume their former beliefs, they subject themselves to a master.
This particular experience of individual freedom in a void is now endemic among populations in the ‘developed’ as well as the ‘developing’ and the ‘underdeveloped’ world. And so many ‘modernizing’ countries with rising literacy and declining fertility rates find themselves at political and emotional conjunctures familiar to us from the history of the ‘modernized’ world. Suicide and depression rates, to take one revealing statistic, have shot up in countries with the fastest-growing economies. So has the number of young suicide bombers attempting their own version of podvig.
A moral and spiritual vacuum is yet again filled with anarchic expressions of individuality, and mad quests for substitute religions and modes of transcendence. The latter – mostly, some nonsense or other – were reflected once in Wagnerian myth-making on behalf of the Second Reich following German unification in 1870–71 and Dostoyevsky’s millennial fantasy of Moscow as the ‘Third Rome’; the search for solidarity and freedom is manifested today by the rebuilders of Hinduism’s lost glory in India as well as the fabricators of a Caliphate in the Middle East and North Africa.
Although ISIS may seem the most spectacular negation of the pieties of liberal modernity, the hope of creating prosperous societies with free and equal citizens, it is only one of the many beneficiaries of a worldwide outbreak of individual and collective mutinies. It is unlikely to last long. However, copycat pop-ups from San Bernardino in California to Dhaka in Bangladesh, and the success of racist nationalists and cultural supremacists worldwide, ought to make us re-examine our basic assumptions of order and continuity – our belief that the human goods achieved so far by a fortunate minority can be realized by the ever-growing majority that desires them.
The two ways in which humankind can self-destruct – civil war on a global scale, or destruction of the natural environment – are rapidly converging. Today, global warming manifests itself in not just a rise in ocean levels, the increasing frequency of extreme weather events, the emptying of rivers and seas of their fish stocks, or the desertification of entire regions on the planet. It can also be seen at work in violent conflicts in Egypt, Libya, Mali, Syria, and many other places exposed to food price rises, drought and declining water sources. The large-scale flight of refugees and migrants from damaged areas, which has already caused wars in Asia and Africa, is now creating political turmoil in the heart of Europe.
We must ask whether the millions of young people awakening around the world to their inheritance – which even for the richest among them includes global warming – can realize the modern promise of freedom and prosperity. Can the triumphant axioms of individual autonomy and interest-seeking, formulated, sanctified and promoted by a privileged minority, work for the majority in a crowded and interdependent world? Or, are today’s young doomed to hurtle, like many Europeans and Russians in the past, between a sense of inadequacy and fantasies of revenge?
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This book then is not offered as an intellectual history; and it cannot even pose, given its brevity, as a single narrative of the origin and diffusion of ideas and ideologies that assimilates the many cultural and political developments of the previous two centuries. Rather, it explores a particular climate of ideas, a structure of feeling, and cognitive disposition, from the age of Rousseau to our own age of anger.
It aims to reveal some historically recurring phenomena across the world, and their common underlying source in one of the most extraordinary events of human history: the advent of a commercial-industrial civilization in the West and then its replication elsewhere. It tries to show how an ethic of individual and collective empowerment spread itself over the world, as much through resentful imitation as coercion, causing severe dislocations, social maladjustment and political upheaval.
Consequently, I am not interested so much in detailing (yet again) Rousseau’s theory of social contract or its colossal political legacy as in reflecting on this prickly Genevan’s alienation from the Enlightenment philosophers’ cosmopolitan salons – the outsider’s severe isolation in the world of wealth, privilege, competition and vanity that seeded Rousseau’s often contradictory ideas and solutions. The ideas of German Romantics are not discussed here as much as their intellectually, culturally and politically fecund ressentiment of France. I am interested in how the educated young Russian, lurching between the artificial world of francophone Petersburg and the greater abject mass of pre-modern Russia, outlined the emotional and ideological spectrum that many young Asians and Africans inhabit today.
This alienated young man of promise, who appears in all modernizing countries, speaks on behalf of the illiterate majority, the educated minority, or himself – a self that turns out to be painfully divided. In all cases, he articulates a profound sense of inadequacy, and tries to draw an ambitious blueprint to overcome it. But this improvised programme of belief and action cannot be neatly mapped onto the classifications of ideas and movements (fascism, imperialism, liberalism, Bolshevism, Islamism, Zionism, Hindu nationalism), or the broad sectarian categories of ‘left’ and ‘right’, ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’, that commonly mediate our understanding of history and current affairs.