This summer sees the closing of the Political Economy Research Centre that I helped found in 2014, and led ever since. In this blogpost, I reflect on the 12 year history of the Centre, and our efforts to analyse the times we were living through.
I’ve reviewed Anton Jäger’s Hyperpolitics in the latest issue of the London Review of Books.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve been helping to coordinate members of the Economy & Society Editorial Board to produce a set of reflections on the changing face of ‘the state’. Following an event at UCL in February 2025 to prompt some short contributions, the journal has now published a combination of short pieces, with an Introduction by me and Andrew Barry.
Reflections on Britain’s Gorton & Denton by-election, and the fracturing of party politics in Britain, published in London Review of Books.
I discussed the success of the Right online for the New Economics Foundation podcast, following my London Review of Books article about Farageist Tiktok
A new essay in The Ideas Letter on how the politics of the face has grown more fractious, in context of smartphones, face-covering bans, facial recognition algorithms, ICE agents and protest culture.
The Guardian has published an edited version of my N+1 essay on stupidity and Trumpism as a Long Read.
I’ve reviewed When the Clock Broke by John Ganz for the latest London Review of Books, asking how the rise of Trump might change what we consider to be a ‘model case’ of a crisis, and its correlates in the UK.
I discussed the frightening new mutations on the reactionary Right and its economic conditions with the Smart Cookies podcast. Watch on YouTube below or listen on Apple podcasts here.
I have a (currently paywalled) piece in the new N+1, examining the charge of ‘stupidity’ that has been leveled so frequently against the Trump administration, and asking what are the background conditions of a ‘stupid’ age.
An essay in London Review of Books on ‘Faragist TikTok’, which explores the discontents of the algorithmic public sphere.
I have written the cover story for this week’s New Statesman, an essay on the new wave of anti-bureaucratic sentiment sweeping states around the world.
New (open access) article in Theory Culture & Society, on the genealogy of modern ‘anxiety’, the post-2008 surge in ‘anxiety disorders’, and their connection to the ‘asset economy’. This accompanies a previous article on similar themes, ‘Owning Towards Death’, that was published last year.
I discussed many aspects of my work, particularly focusing on rationalism and quantification, with Greg LeBlanc for his unSILOed podcast. Links to the audio podcast here.
This interview with Ash Sarkar covers lots of things, well beyond Elon Musk: the nature of the current conjuncture, crisis or ‘vibeshift’; the threat of the Trump presidency and authoritarianism; the state of neoliberalism; the challenges and contradictions confronting the Labour government; and more.
William Davies 