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.
‘Repeal the 20th century’
‘TV meets fruit machine’
An essay in London Review of Books on ‘Faragist TikTok’, which explores the discontents of the algorithmic public sphere.
‘Bonfire of the bureaucrats’
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.
‘Left Behind: the failed revolutions of the 2010s’
I discussed my recent article, ‘The 2010s: a decade of revolutionaries without a revolution’, on the New Statesman podcast. Listen on Acast or iTunes.
‘The 2010s: a decade of revolutionaries without revolution’
A review essay for The New Statesman, examining two new books on the 2010s, If We Burn by Vincent Bevins and The Populist Moment by Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger.
‘Why Weber?’
Review essay on Wendy Brown’s Nihilistic Times: Thinking With Max Weber and the crisis of higher education, published in the London Review of Books.
‘Post-Neoliberalism?’
Nicholas Gane and I have co-edited a special issue of Theory Culture & Society on the theme of ‘Post-neoliberalism?’. It features articles by Melinda Cooper, Quinn Slobodian, Dorit Geva, Roger Burrows and Harrison Smith, Alan Finlayson, Nicholas Gane and me, on various aspects of the challenges to neoliberalism, especially those from the political Right. The special issue was accepted and the pieces commissioned prior to 2020, so they don’t confront the most recent upheavals and challenges to the political-economic order. However, the Introduction (which is open access) does address the significance of the Covid-19 pandemic, and what it means for the status of ‘neoliberalism’.
‘Peter Thiel: Big Tech’s dark prophet’
I reviewed Max Chafkin’s book on Peter Thiel, The Contrarian, for The New Statesman
The decline of the ‘state effect’
Comment piece on the crisis of trust in British government, originally drafted in October, now shared on the PERC blog.
How did we get here? – RSA dialogue
In advance of the publication of This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain, I discussed the themes of the book with Katrina Forrester, hosted by the RSA.
New journal article
‘Anti-equivalence: pragmatics of post-liberal dispute’ , looking at the fractious and warlike character of contemporary political discourse, is now published online by European Journal of Social Theory.
The politics of like and dislike
Essay in the London Review of Books, on how media and new technologies are harnessed to trigger ‘culture wars’.
William Davies 