Enlightenment Now: The Case for Science, Reason, Humanism and Progress reviewed in The Guardian.
Review of Steven Pinker
‘The Neoliberal Spirit of Populism’ – 8th February
I’ll be giving a lecture, ‘The Neoliberal Spirit of Populism‘, at Wissenschaftszentrum fur Sozialforschung, Berlin, 8th February 2018. This is part of a series of lectures, Great Crisis of Capitalism – A Second Great Transformation?
Interview with the State of Nature blog, discussing happiness, wellbeing and the culture of neoliberalism.
Mental health and neoliberalism
What is “neo” about Neoliberalism?
Article in New Republic, excerpted from new edited collection, Liberalism in Neoliberal Times, published by Goldsmiths Press
Review of ‘The Rise of the Outsiders’
The Rise of the Outsiders by Steve Richards, reviewed for Guardian Books
Review essay of Strangers in their Own Land
Published in International Journal of Politics, Culture & Society, alongside a response from the author, Arlie Russell Hocschild.
Reasons for Corbyn
The coincidence of the Corbyn surge with the horror of Grenfell Tower has created the conditions – and the demand – for a kind of truth and reconciliation commission on forty years of neoliberalism. It is too simple to cast Corbyn as a throwback, but it is undeniable that his appeal and his authority derive partly from his willingness to cast a different, less forgiving light on recent history, so that we don’t have to carry on repeating it.
Comment piece on Theresa May
I have a new article in The New York Times, ‘Theresa May’s vapid vision for a one-party state‘
Go Home? The Politics of Immigration Controversies
Over the course of 2014-15, I was a member of an ESRC-funded team of researchers studying controversies surrounding immigration policy in the UK. Out of this research has come our co-authored book, Go Home? The Politics of Immigration Controversies, published in March 2017 by Manchester University Press.
Essay: Populism & the Limits of Neoliberalism
The surge in so-called ‘populism’ over the past year, largely of a right-wing variety, has provoked an ongoing debate as to how we should characterise its central driver. To put this somewhat crudely (though not much more crudely than some of the debate’s protagonists), the choice comes down to a simple binary: economics or culture? Class or identity? An awkward new category of ‘the left behind’ has emerged in political discourse to capture the unexpected supporters of Donald Trump, Brexit, Marine Le Pen and other nationalist movements. Continue reading “Essay: Populism & the Limits of Neoliberalism”
Writings on Brexit
Since the Brexit referendum result on 23rd June, I’ve written a series of blogposts and articles trying to make sense of this crisis for the UK, both its antecedents and implications. I’ve collected these below, and will continue to add to this post as more appear.
- The Protective State – PERCblog, 6th October
- Interview on Brexit, Trump and ‘post-truth’ – Wisconsin Public Radio, 21st September
- The Age of Post-truth Politics – The New York Times, 24th August
- Brexit: Views from Wales – BBC documentary I participated in, 19th July
- Liberalism after Brexit – PERCblog, 13th July
- Brexit will make things worse: is that why people voted for it? – Washington Post 1st July
- What sort of crisis is this? – PERCblog, 29th June
- Thoughts on the Sociology of Brexit – PERCblog, 24th June (generously translated by readers into Greek, Italian and Spanish )
Long Read on statistics
‘How statistics lost their power – and why we should fear what comes next’, published in The Guardian, February 2017.
This is also available as a podcast.
‘The Big Mystique‘, a review of The Courage to Act by Ben Bernanke and The End of Alchemy, by Mervyn King, published in London Review of Books in January (paywalled).
William Davies 