Summary

“Regaining My Religon” is the fifth chapter of Age of Anger, divided into two parts. Part I, “Nationalism Unbound” and Part II, “Messianic Visions.”

In “Nationalism Unbound,” Mishra begins by providing examples of elites around the world, such as in Russia, China, or India, who, “struggling with projects of national emulation also contend that they are uniquely gifted, accomplished and superior, morally and spiritually, to the West” (170). Today, he goes on to say, “the world of mutual tolerance envisaged by cosmopolitan elites from the Enlightenment onwards exists within a few metropolises and university campuses; and even these rarefied spaces are shrinking” (174).

Mishra outlines the history of the first nationalists of Europe, the Germans. German Romantics were a generation of thinkers who rejected the ‘Zivilisation’ (civilization) of what they saw as a shallow, decadent...