Adam Tooze on approaching history, polycrisis, the contemporary USA, Batman… and many other things

Thank you. It's an absolute pleasure to be here. I'm a big fan of the show, an avid listener. So it's a real honor, and it's particularly so because obviously philosophy and theory are your central preoccupations. I mean, I'm fascinated in critical theory, have been since my youth, but practice history, so it's a real honor for me to be in conversation with you guys. I think the early formative influence was certainly growing up in West Germany at the time of the 70s, 80s, early 90s, where history took on this critical function of coming to terms with the past, as the Germans called it, and quite deeply absorbing that mission of history as a critical project within limits, of course, because it's defined by its object: the Holocaust, national socialism. It was a historical culture relatively immune to Marxism, so it's not the same as say the British Marxist or the French or the Italian Marxist historical traditions, but it's a kind of liberal criticism which is about truth, the refusal of denial, all of those kind of things. So that was an important formation, but this was also the Germany of the Historikerstreit, the conflicts that Habermas was a key protagonist in, so also again a rather highfalutin kind of late classical experience of European public intellectual life, cross-cut then in my case because I returned to the UK in the 80s with Marxism Today, you know, Birmingham School, the revival of Gramscian Marxism in Britain in that period. And then a kind of French dose which came through my fascination with the history of knowledge, power-knowledge complex which sort of took me towards Foucault, Latour, and those kind of people. So at some level a fairly standard mixture for my generation, I guess, but then fused with economics, which I think is perhaps the relatively unusual part of this. Not now, because since 2008 there has been such a flourishing of the convergence of economics. But generally generationally there was a gap here. I mean, notoriously in American humanities departments there was no one who could teach the history of capitalism. That's no longer the case, mercifully, but in this hiatus it was a question of sort of bricolage, of putting the different bits together. You know, odd spaces would emerge like the accounting department of the London School of Economics included people like Peter Miller who were early interpreters and readers of the Collège de France lectures on governmentality, you know, and were hybridizing the knowledge of the internal of power-knowledge and accountancy with critical theory. The miners' strike in Britain played an important dynamizing role in this because it forced the question of how we assess efficiency and profitability to the center of the debate. And it's really in those interstices between the broad perspectives of critical theory and the sweep of historical narrative which is something I kind of habitually engage in, and technical knowledge, that I really, you know, that's really where I found my niche and my home. And the change in media is important for this because the social media space, FinTwit, critical macro finance, all of these strands have emerged in the weird interface between academic thinking, market thinking, journalism, and critical commentary. So my home now above all I think is in that blogosphere, newsletter, Substack space which, you know, is anchored in books on the one hand and in academic activity on the other, but that's really the milieu. So I think of myself now as very much shaped by that, and the last two books and the one I'm currently writing on climate are all very much in that space rather than the project of critical history that was the work of the 70s, 80s, 90s.

I take very seriously those sociologies of expertise which say that in some senses we need to move away from the figure of Sartre who for me is nevertheless a huge inspiration, to the figure of somebody like Foucault who at least performatively will tell us about how prison mechanisms operate. I would argue that we've taken that one step further, and there are people who are really doing ethnologies of wealth management who trained to be wealth managers, where in my case, you know, a really quite serious formation in economics as a foundation for trying to do critical approaches. You know, another way, a tried formula would be the Marxian one, right? So it's German philosophy, it's British economics, and it's French politics/history as the trio that we're trying to combine.

Yes, even before we knew any details about this, that was the vibe in my this of my maternal grandparents, and it was absolutely the informative space for me. That's I would consider their home to have really been, because I had a rather checkered childhood, moved around a lot. That was really my home there. Their breakfast table, which was a space of cosmopolitan intellectual politics, was what shaped me. I often think that the blogosphere is really for me a re-enactment of their breakfast table. It's you wake up in the morning and there's something in Le Monde that's really interesting, and so you have to have out, you know, Le Monde's take on the Sheinbaum presidency in Mexico. It was like a fairly typical early morning conversation. And at some point you begin to wonder why, you know, what milieu this comes out of, and then Macrakis' journalism in the '80s, it was The Spy Catchers, a book that really broke the story, and it's been confirmed by American academic scholars since, and I've had it confirmed to me in Moscow. I've actually seen the recruitment letter that was sent from the Moscow Embassy in '36. So, yes, basically he has the distinction of being at both Trinity Oxford and Trinity Cambridge. And the KGB thought they would build an Oxford network to match the very successful and famous Cambridge network, and he was one of the linchpins in that. It goes back to his period in the Weimar Republic, so he went to study agronomy, the peasant question, in Berlin in the early '30s. Was there when the Reichstag burned. He was working with the liberal economist Ehenstein. Wrote one of the first studies of agrarian policy in the Hitler regime for the Economic Journal, then edited by Keynes. Married, I believe it's Lucy Ostrowska, so going by the family name, she is the daughter of Otto Ostrowska, who was, believe it or not, the SPD mayor of Prenzlauer Berg. So, he was the boss of Prenzlauer... I can't confirm exactly, but, you know, what are the odds that there's two left-wing families called Ostrowska in Berlin? You know, they're not zero, but it's fairly probable. She turned out to be hell on wheels, apparently, divorced her, and then married my grandmother, who was a significant social researcher in her own right, wrote the first studies of fatherless families in Britain, major figure in family law, family policy. And so, yeah, no, they were for me, and I unknowingly dedicated Wages of Destruction to them. For me, they are emblematic of a kind of, well, a British cosmopolitanism. So, they were multilingual, which for their version of the English elite in their period was not uncommon, but had become very uncommon by the '70s and '80s. So, again, this question of echoes, Frank, of different modes of public intellectualism, and they were a link between my British identity and my European existence, because my grandfather, unsurprisingly, was fluent in German and a little bit of Russian and a little bit of Bulgarian and some Spanish, and he had literally been in all of those places. He'd been in Madrid in '36 and Berlin in '33, and Sofia. I mean, it's a classic Communist International story. And so, that did undoubtedly shape my understanding of what public engagement should look like. It also, however, had this distinctive British twist, which is it was radically empirical. So, I think they were engaged in a long-term struggle with eugenics, which of course was one of the besetting ideas of left science from the interwar period onwards. And they ended their days—he died over his word processor, I mean, literally, like happily making lists of new projects he was going to do. And they were working on antenatal care and the development, so biosocial issues, which I think is where quite a lot of the British left went after their god died. They so, then they would focus on child poverty. They worked with Frank Field, left wing of the Labour Party. Ken Livingstone, that kind of milieu in London was where the continuities around. So, there is a but it had that distinctively British insistence on poverty measurement, you know, and their struggle it wasn't with the questions of biological determination.

Uh, so many different angles to pick up on there. I mean, I'm quite interested in, quite fundamentally interested in where we get concepts from, right? If the fundamental challenge of dealing critically with modernity is to kind of keep up with the pace of change, where is it that we get the conceptual armature with which to deal with this challenge? And I take it to be really a profound problem, not one that can be fixed by modifying some pre-existing theory or where we can have any confidence at all that the classical traditions of critical theory inherited from the 19th century and passed down and developed provide us with the tools that we need. And instead, you know, and I've been watching Stuart Hall videos a lot recently. I taught Policing the Crisis this term. And I find in him precisely this kind of relentless, our problem is not to rehash existing theory. Our problem is to be at least as smart as the conjuncture. And that will involve a kind of magpie activity of desperately appropriating whatever handles we have for understanding the world that might be there. This I take to be the gesture of Marx as well in the 1850s. Like, where do you go? You take scraps of British political economy and German philosophy and patch them together. And it's all pretty much of the moment stuff, right? Marx doesn't really have a deep classical tradition to draw on in putting those things together, and we shouldn't pretend to ourselves that we do. Now, having said that, polycrisis for me is not the key term that does that. It's more a reminder of the fact that this is the challenge, right? The term is not in and of itself of much content at all. Where did I get it from? Jean-Claude Juncker, God help us, was like tossing this concept around. So, it's almost a kind of found object type approach. Like, it's like the urinal. Like, hey, this might be our condition is the kind of gesture. He using the phrase. At this point, don't we at least have to acknowledge that this is the kind of world that we're in. And it's a standing reminder to me, I describe that also, and I live it, I feel, I hope, as a kind of almost practice of self-destabilization. Like, any on any given day, in any given moment, you know, am I facing, are we facing, is this thinking that we're engaged in facing the true destabilization of concepts and realities that we have to deal with. This is a struggle, I think, in interpreting a figure like Musk and Trump. We'll come on to that maybe later in the conversation. So, for me, it has that kind of it's as Thurnwald would say, a Stachel, right? It's an Ansporn. It's something that digs into you and goes, this is awkward. How on earth can I be using this term? It's that kind of a provocation. It's the sand in the oyster. It's that kind of jarring idea. Yes, it does have for me an origin, perhaps, in thinking with the social theory of somebody like Latour, above all against any Procrustean bed, any kind of prior assumption that we know already what the balance between the micro and the macro, what the context of this is that we're trying to analyze. It's an insistence that it will be multifarious. That's one of the things that I think poly does do for us, without further specifying, and I actually see that as a productive, generative idea rather than a deficit because I think many friends on the left say, this is basically just a cop-out. You're refusing to follow analysis to its ultimate conclusion, and the ultimate conclusion will of course be some capitalocentric reduction of the conjuncture to some ultimate termination. And I find, you know, that is something that I want quite deliberately to resist or erect obstacles to. I mean, I would read it, and there is in that sense a link to Latour's concept of the hybrid. And but I would read it slightly differently in that my read of Latour is that, you know, the hybridity is the logic of modernity. The hybridity is not an answer to modernity. The logic of modernity is the constant creation of these weird objects which modernist social theory says don't exist, right? And the real function of Latourian critique is to actually allow us to see the hybridity which generates the incredible motive power and development of modern societies. And what he then wants to do by means of clarifying the hybrids we're dealing with is slow us down, and I'm not sure I would subscribe to that politics at all. There's a kind of liberal accelerationist in me that is not down with that, but the function is certainly, as you suggest, Agramon, of the polycrisis term, its useful function to me is to insist on the hybridity as the essential governing dynamic. And the repeated recurring repetition of these kind of conjunctures. I mean, for me, there were these moments during the COVID epidemic where we would have accelerated summer wildfires in California driven by climate change, which are normally put out by fire teams recruited from California's overcrowded prisons who couldn't be mobilized under these circumstances because the prisons were shot through with COVID, right? That for me is a ghastly demonstration of the kind of reality. You invoke the uncertainty term, and I'll just, this is another way in which polycrisis functions for me. If it's less deterministic than your capitalocentric left analysis which just simply says, well, that situation in California is just neoliberal capitalism gone wrong, you know, dum dum dum dum dum dum all of the things falling into place. It's also much more able to diagnose the situation than the sort of metaphysical gesturing to radical uncertainty, Knightian uncertainty, all of this kind of thing which became so very fashionable in the smarter amongst the smarter talking heads after 2008, right? One of the ways in which people addressed the 2008 financial crisis was to say, oh, silly us, we thought we could regulate this easily. Actually, this is instance of radical uncertainty. Read Frank Knight, read Keynes. Like this is where we need to go, and that to my mind is a really very transparent evasion of all the responsibility that we have thinking about causality and because after all the financial crisis of 2008 was in no way unpredictable. In many ways in fact the question ought to be why it hadn't happened sooner. The same is true with the pandemic, right? And so for me the polycrisis term is an intervention at the meta level in the politics of interpretation, in the power plays around the interpretation between the predictable and the unpredictable, the explicable and the inexplicable. And it's this Stachel. It's this burr to thinking harder about that.

Well, I was involved in an argument with Ryley about my book Wages of Destruction in which he says there's a sense of a vacuum at the heart of this explanation, and for me, I mean, he think, I think he meant that as a criticism, and to my mind that's actually a compliment about, you know, because I think there is a void when it comes to the explanation of Nazi Germany, we shouldn't pretend otherwise, right? And so that the determination in the final instance never arriving is not, it's a structural condition of a little bit like the void in democratic political theory, right? That void is not an accident and it's not a deficiency of analysis. It actually expresses that's our best bet at somehow enclosing conceptually a space we can't enter.

Mhm. Yeah, no, I love this question. I mean, what are the res? I mean, and then there's the other question of like how on earth would we know whether we were in medias? Like in the middle, it's such a presumptive claim, a presumptuous claim, right? I mean, typical white guy kind of phrase. It's like, oh, you know, the entire world organizes around myself and like I'm in the middle of those things. You know, you're so vain you think this song is about you. Like it's it's I just I just I honestly, I mean, my simple answer and it's just the standard answer of any existentialism or life philosophy back to the late 19th century which then of course has its origins in idealism is like we simply don't have any alternative. Where do we even get off imagining that there's any alternative to this? It's like I totally get why on any given morning you might wake up and espouse some structuralist social theory that will tell you where things started and where they ended up. Like fine, but like it's just what you did before coffee. Like you didn't it's not, you know, I and of course lots of people have done this and it's a powerful tradition and you can quote your Charles Tilly and your Marx and your Perry Anderson and all these people and it's great, but like all they all any of them ever did was get up in the morning and make coffee and write a book, right? So it's for me it's not so much a choice as just a sort of self-consciousness and self-awareness about the thrownness of where we're at and then, as it were, employing whatever methodologies work in any given moment in quite an open-ended way to help us stabilize, frame, crucially establish collective meaning to, you know, this isn't after all just, I mean, we're not in a voluntarist kind of situation. Like the number of thoughts in our head is extremely limited. LLM models are giving us a humbling demonstration of how constrained actually the sphere is of options. How then do we establish meaningful community with other people engaged in the same business? Those are the relevant questions for me, not, you know, this doesn't it doesn't to me it's not when you're honest about our situation, it's not even a choice. It's really just a matter of coming to consciousness. And with the point of view of where we start, you know, you could follow a school. In other words, I don't know. You know, we've decided the central problem is the origins of capitalism in Britain and we can take, you know, the Brenner position or somebody else's position and that's fine, but that is what we're doing before coffee on any given day, right? That's what we're doing. Or I know and I've spent years in analysis, you start with the odd sensation you had as you said hello to your analyst that morning or something that happened on the subway. And it is again just simply absurd to imagine that you're better off starting above you're starting off talking with your childhood trauma. You know, that's the useful thing to do in your analysis that morning. That's just for the vast majority of people, certainly in my experience and certainly in the view of my analyst, that isn't the effective way to start, right? It may be that you end up there. And of course, it's not stupid to have ideas about that, but the problem is precisely what is the relationship deeply between this immediate experience, this immediate contingency, this immediate reality and those deeper structures. Well, no one's going to deny that they're there. It's just that the thought that we can immediately access them in a straightforward way is superficial. I mean, ultimately it's superficial and quite likely to be self-deluding, quite likely to serve as various types of a form of kind of structural escapism in the end. Whereas the real challenge is to be... This was the other kind of puzzlement for me is like you think being in various res is easy. This is like the liberal cop-out. Whereas the hard thing is to do the structure. Have you ever even been to a single yoga session? Have you ever actually tried to be in the moment, just calmly in the moment for even 30 seconds and seen how difficult it is? That for me is the, you know, this is the challenge of any serious existential philosophy of, you know, across all of the familiar names that you folks and your usual I guess address so deeply. That is the challenge and it's utterly non-trivial and you can't get there by way of some simple social theory. That isn't an answer to this problem in any serious way. And so from that point of view, you know, you just go to a coaching position. All history is contemporary history because sure it's history, but it's anchored around your given moment and our need for orientation in that space. Yes, there is a kind of affinity for pragmatism, the Deweyan pragmatism. Chuck Sabel is one of my best friends and soulmates at Columbia. Like he and I like really do vibe very well, though though I'm coming from a slightly different, his is very much an American pragmatic tradition. That's not too much my cup of tea. But yes, that recognition of the profound difficulty of this problem. And to that extent, there is, it's not an anything goes, but it's rather more, you know, in terms of the starting point, it's rather more can we find a way in? Jamie Peck had, you know, wrote this rather good essay recently about conjunctural analysis and he picked up this phrase from Stuart Hall about breaking into the conjuncture. And that strikes me as a very, very... And I think that, you know, this is what the way that analysis works as well, right? You find the seam, you find the telling itching difficult, the point that you can put your finger on, not in an obsessive and formulaic way, but that's what we're gently trying to find a space to enter into the problem. And I think that to me is, you know, again, if we thought we knew a priori where those points of entry would be, then we wouldn't have the problems we have. You know, if it was obvious, then we're back in some the glorious days of the Comintern and you know, we all just know it's a problem of the geometry of different types of class factions and so on. Like that's wonderful if you think that actually works. Like the track record ain't great. But you know, so that for me that idea of the present and history being this mysterious object that we need to find ways of breaking into. That humility of analytical position really structures everything I do, and I'm that's what all my books have been written around moments where I thought, ah, here's a way in. Like and it's more often than not some graph or some data I think ah, like this is something that we can work on and widen and then see what. So it's also it is tactic, methodology. One could also here go to the language of military theory. You know, I'm very much of the Foucauldian generation in that respect. Clausewitz is somebody I teach. I teach military history because I think it's an interesting body, not just because it's you know, materially important, but because theoretically the military, this is, you know, Lenin's thinking in these terms is also interesting because he's so much and Althusser picks this up with the Machiavellian stuff. Like the tactics is itself, the fact that tactics matter tells you something about strategy and even ontology, right? It tells you something really fundamental about the world that the way in which we engage with it has this tactical dimension. We can smooth that out and call it methodology as much as we like, but you can also talk in terms of breaking in in terms of the military logic of tactics. Like finding the point d'appui, right? And having this coup d'oeil, being able to see the thing, being able to preserve your calm because as we all know from analysis and everything else, like this is emotionally unsettling when you do this kind of work. So how can you maintain the calmness? What sort of checklist do you use to orientate yourself? All of that military stuff all of a sudden, which is also interesting from the point of view of financial crisis management and so on because that's a field of analogy that they employ. I mean, this is a very long answer, but the tactics of navigating that space is yes, I mean, it's really, you know, it's the greatest gift that, one of the greatest gifts intellectually that criticism from Perry Anderson is, one of the greatest gifts I received in my adult life intellectually is that it forced me to recognize that that is what we're up against. Certainly I feel we're up against. This is the New Left Review review of my work that just for casual listeners that is a New Left Review a few years back and it was out of the blue and quite shocking at the time and disorientated me, but it contains this phrase and I mean, it's proved very, very generative.

Oh, I mean, I don't I mean, the answer is emphatic. I don't know whether salvaging is the thing I would want to be doing. It's that kind of, you know, build your repertoire of bits and pieces, but I still don't think there's any more important test for social theory than to measure itself against the ambition of the great Marxist thinkers from 19th century onwards all the way down to, you know, the recent generation. Žižek and people like this if one can categorize him in that way, right? If you're not doing that, you're not really in the game to my mind. Whatever your other politics may be, this is the whetstone. This is the standard against which we have to measure theoretical endeavor. And so I mean, I would, you know, if you ask me like Lenin is, anyone who's serious about thinking about politics and history must read Lenin and must read Lenin carefully. You just don't understand. Not only because of what he did, but because of how he thought about what he was doing. I mean, it's I sometimes I think this is taken as a facetious comment, but it was reading Lenin day by day for writing this book Deluge that I think raised for me the possibility that really the most challenging form of intellectual endeavor might be blogging. It might be daily analysis. It might be this challenge of thinking the real as it happens before your eyes. And I indulge what I above all I know the deeper level was trying to do was to think through philosophies of history, right? The one of the thesis of the book essentially is that the early 20th century breaks all of the 19th century philosophies of history. I'd spent a lot of time teaching philosophy of history at this point. And starting with, you know, struggles over Fukuyama and Anderson's really rather good review of Fukuyama and, you know, what's so fascinating about Lenin, you know, Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and German social democrats in the period is that they are having to think through the logic of history and how it operates and how political agency functions in that space. And there are just these passages in Lenin, I mean you're on a day-by-day basis. I mean the book is written on the backdrop of a giant literally day-by-day chronology of events from 1916 on through 1931 and the subtle shifts in the position within the Bolshevik party in the spring of 1918 as they struggle over the ratification of Brest are moments of real profound depth thinking about philosophy of history. I mean, you know, Weber's Politics as a Vocation not for nothing starts with what is in fact a made up quote from Trotsky at Brest and we my great friend Stefan and I were able to establish that he had actually traduced Trotsky to produce the standard barbarian account of politics. So for me a little bit like in the Cambridge tradition of the history of political thought I see a minute day-by-day attention to the development of political thought in time as profoundly generative. So let me just read you these passages from Lenin. The course of history, this is Lenin in May 1918. The course of history that Marxist theory had naturally imagined as straight and which we must imagine as straight in order to see the beginning the continuation and the end was in real life never straight. It was incredibly involved, huge zigzag and gigantic complex turns were unleashed as millions began the agonizing process of making their own history. So this from an economist point of view is out of equilibrium, right? Once we're off the path of determination and we move from prehistory to history what sort of logic actually is engaged at the point where, you know, the underlying structural determinations become weak. And then there's this incredible phrase as Lenin put it in a truly astonishing statement to the party at the end of April 1918 which is actually only republished in certain editions of his work. If we as a single troop of the world proletariat as the first troop have moved into the lead it's not because this troop is better organized. It is moved to the first place because history is not developing rationally. Like, you know, that's this is a profoundly, this is worthy of a Žižek, right? This is why Žižek, you know, loves Lenin so much. It's like he's basically saying that the condition of our success is that the theory on which we profess to rule is in fact losing its internal grip, right? These are the sorts of things which fascinate me and that the maker thinker like Lenin so essential to revisit. You know I am currently learning Mandarin and so I'm actually reading Mao quite a lot for those purposes to like just energize the project and his thinking about contradiction is obviously really profoundly fascinating. So no I see lots in that tradition to re-appropriate. I teach Marxism and philosophy of history, Marxist philosophy all the time. It's not so much a specific set of ideas as the determination to think thoughts like the ones that I just read out from Lenin to their logical conclusion and the imperative that imposes on people to then elaborate what their underlying philosophy of history is. This is again what makes some of the, like Stuart Hall his thinking of the crisis in Britain in the 70s and 80s so endlessly generative. I mean really I can't recommend a reread of Policing the Crisis in the current conjuncture highly enough. It is so utterly resonant of our current moment. You know you can substitute slogans like anti-semitism for mugging in that book and you have a radically relevant read of our current situation. We might come on to talk about Columbia later on, which struggles with all of the problems of the reality of actual, you know, the actual abuse of Jewish people and the meaning that that anti-semitism takes on in a broader context in brilliant ways. It's full of all of the equipment and that is of course generated out of the struggle to make a Marxist analytic work. So long answer, had a period in a Trot party common in Britain in the 80s. I learned a lot in the process. I've done Marxism a couple of times in London in extraordinary kind of festival of radical thinking. Can't claim any long-term personal party affiliation myself but, you know, there's no you know in that sense it doesn't die in that sense it just becomes it changes its relevance and meaning and its reference points.

I mean I I I think the chair is really in its modern form right it's a 19th century conception of what history does. Like, you know, on the right it's somebody like a Treitschke, on the left it's the entire canon of Marxist historiography which and you could extend this feminist historiography, black radical historiography is always simultaneously an act of interpretation and an act of reinterpretation and by virtue of reinterpretation an intervention. So that distinction puzzles. I mean, it's you know, I'm not sufficiently steeped in classical Greek philosophy to really appreciate the depth of that but as a modern person that distinction puzzles me. I have to say. Like I don't I'm not sure I quite even understand how you would imagine that that would be the case. I mean there are very, very naive understandings of history as chronicle that would get you somewhere there maybe. But that does require a kind of very stringent understanding of what chronicle is. Once we're in the business of narrativizing and plotment and so on we've got direction we've got telos we've got the motivate, you know, we've got the idea of changing our media our readers' minds or catering to their preconceptions feeding their existing identity. At that point all of these

Things take on a very concrete reality, and I would push that further. And I've been surprised, but you know, if you write a book like Crash that was very, very widely read, you are simply naive if you think that doesn't shape the way in which people think about the problems that then face them. And in the case of that book, because it summarized a very powerful critique of the Obama administration, it had a direct impact on the thinking of folks in the Democratic Party when they won the congressional majority.

Was it the book's impact? You alluded to something to do in the US with the fact that it appeared in the fall of 2018, just before the Democrats won back the House and the Senate, and just before therefore the mobilization began to happen. Very much a social process, a lot of money in the background moving the pieces, but out of that came the Green New Deal, out of that came the left wing in New York which puts a lot of pressure on a very important politician, Chuck Schumer. Those people, his staffers, are all over this stuff. They think of themselves self-consciously as historical actors in the American liberal tradition. It's about saving the Republic and making it a more perfect Republic. They refer to history incessantly as a guide to what they're doing.

And so books like this — it took me very much by surprise, I have to say. I mean, intellectually I could recapitulate how I started, but the actual impact of it was much wider and much deeper than I ever imagined. And so at that point, we're really talking about almost postmortem, after-the-battle learning from history in a staggeringly direct way, like where you have a senior politician sit opposite you and say, 'So you're telling me the next time we ought to go big.' And what can you say? Yes, that's what you're saying. Yeah, next time go big.

Um, so yeah, at that point it's totally monstrous. No, I mean, I don't even disagree — it actually feels monstrous on several different levels, and the weight of responsibility is quite heavy. And I'm not a team-transitory guy on inflation for nothing. I take this also to be — I mean, the link there is that if you went big on fiscal policy and then inflation emerged from that and inflation causes Trump, then your policy prescription has — you know, you're carrying a pretty heavy burden. So it drives your thought. Your thought becomes highly motivated.

And even if you were in the other mode of writing history, I would insist that at least for one moment in your life, you ought to do this kind. Because otherwise, you literally don't understand what it means to be the sort of person which more often than not history books are written about, namely engaged people. There are some history books about people who float through history or ordinary normal non-historical figures. You can imagine writing that kind of book. But it takes a kind of willful construction of the world to remove people's agency. And as soon as you recognize the agency, little and large, then all of a sudden all of these issues of personal responsibility and the do-or-die quality of choice really enter in.

In a history book which is written — any account of human existence which is written whilst abstracting from that — is in one way or another stunted, right? It's failing to actually recognize what a certain sort of historical existence means. So it's been, I think, profoundly healthy to experience the shock of responsibility that follows from this kind of writing. But you know, anyone who does policy takes this risk every single day of the flipping week. Anyone who runs anything, anyone just as minor as a university department, takes a view, makes a choice. And so yes, that monstrosity is one that I think in the modern period we have to take as a given. I think that historicization — I'm willing to live with that.

Yeah, I mean, Andreas and I both wrote books about COVID and climate politics, or I'm in the business of writing that book right now. So I, like him, do find it very instructive to compare the two moments. And we underrate COVID so seriously, it's unbelievable, because it utterly dominated our lives and changed the way we live, and yet it's as though it never happened. And yet it clearly is highly instructive as to what is possible. And the contrast is telling.

I guess for me though the interest in writing the climate book is actually more detached. For me, I'm more in the kind of Bonneuil and Fressoz approach. These are two brilliant French historians of science who wrote a book about the Anthropocene and Fressoz's most recently one about the idea of the energy transition. They make the move of saying — and you could relate this to the perspective of a Noir effect for instance — what does it mean about society that we agitate ourselves with something as remote and abstract and deep in the future and subtle and complex in the first instance as the climate crisis? What does this tell us about our society?

Because Andreas and other activists immediately go to the impatient gesture which is: why don't we do enough about it given what the science tells us? Whereas my approach is more: well, hang on. Science of various types has told us about endless huge problems. Like we don't do anything about the vast majority of them. Sure, we did something about COVID, but if we were actually serious about keeping children alive, we wouldn't allow the current circumstances. Medical science tells us what's necessary to keep African children alive, and do we do anything about it? No. Have we ever done anything about it? No. Can we do something about it? Yes. In due course things happen. So for me, the book is really an effort to historicize climate governance and the climate episteme, the climate frame as a way of thinking about governance.

And the basic hypothesis is that in the wake of the collapse of socialism and the classic question of capitalism and democracy of the twentieth century, the question of the ability to self-regulate around climate became the emblem for Western European and American liberal elites of the challenge of the era after socialism. This became the real touchstone, the real acid test. And so there is an arc that runs from the early climate science of the eighties through to Paris and the Sustainable Development Goals, which were both agreed in the fall of 2015. And that we are now exiting. I think that paradigm has collapsed. It's broken and it's no longer serving as a powerful organizational tool.

And I want to write — I don't want to write — I feel we need a history of the rise and fall, I think we have to say at this point, of that rupturing. Apart from anything else, because it was so recalcitrantly — and this is a criticism Andreas knows I would make of his work — it's so recalcitrantly Western-centric. It centers the West as the major source of climate crisis, which it no longer is. Historically, yes, but no longer as the main driver, not by a long chalk. It centers the dilemmas of democratic politics when in fact the big players are authoritarian emerging-market players versus bubble China. And it centers solutions in the West when in fact the reality staring us in the face is that China's investment in renewable energy is now running multiples ahead of the West.

And so this brings us back to the Stalin problem in my view. In terms of my biography, this is the Stalin problem of our generation. This is the Soviet modernization problem of our generation. The T-34 of our generation is the Chinese photovoltaic panel. And that for me is the challenge. And I don't say that flippantly. I don't say that in an easy way. It poses really profound challenges for our thinking about modernity, and particularly for liberals. But I also think the left basically has a void where China politics needs to be. And you can see why it's not developed on the left. It's been a long time since anyone on the left thought seriously about China. The last was the great infatuation with Maoism. There was a brief moment of interest in the Chinese new left, but that I think is the generational challenge.

So for me, that's where I want to move. Whereas I see Andreas mobilizing all his brilliance around essentially reviving, you know, the real classics like war communism for heaven's sake as a paradigm for thinking about the current moment. And yeah, he just does the trot state-capitalism thing when it comes to China. It's a cop-out in my view. It doesn't grasp the challenge. So the book is like the other two in this mode — so The Shutdown and Crash — an effort to, from within the mainstream, try and jar us into the world in which America's going to be responsible going forward for the next century, perhaps, for somewhat less than ten percent of global emissions. It isn't — the future of the world is no longer ours to decide. And that's not a matter of choice or moralism or anything else. It's just a reality of this particular problem. And that's what makes it so fascinating to me.

So here materialism bites in an extraordinarily direct way. And we can simplify it to this one variable, right? So this was for me a breaking moment when I saw the graphs for Chinese CO2 emissions and coal emissions. It's like, okay, we start from here. When we're in a world in which China's responsible for a third of global CO2 emissions and it's happened in twenty years, this is the thing that we need to center our thinking around and see how it moves and shakes us.

Three years. Three years of the big stimulus. Three years as much cement as the United States in the twentieth century. Yeah. And that's quite an indicator of a changed role. And that means, if what you're just calling grasping the challenge in its historical specificity, and that means in its very constitution, this must have something to do with what is, I think, on a lot of people's — at least in the Western minds these days — and what we wanted to talk to you about, namely, the results of the most recent elections in the US.

Yeah, I mean, I'm tempted to — This is unfair, Frank. So, just as we've got this fast-flowing conversation, there's so much to talk about, but it's almost to my mind that move from talking about China emerging as the world's dominant economic force in material terms to this over-worry about Trump and how does this affect Trump is almost one of those evasions. The immensity of that shift, I think, overwhelms our capacity really to grasp. The implication in theoretical terms, after all, could be that the entire history of economic development in the West is really just a prelude to what now happens in China. It's not that China is some version of it. It's literally just a preface. It's the overture. The next thing is the real thing.

This is the wager of twenty-first-century Marxism amongst Chinese theorists. If we take them seriously at all, their claim is basically that the beginning, the precursors, all of that thing we like to call the Big Bang, which is all the little states of the emerging markets in Europe, are literally just fragmentary experience, and it will be the lessons learned from the massive development of 1.4 billion people under leadership of the Party that actually tells us how history is made. So, if you look at the history of manufacturing or the history of steel or cement, that's why they're so telling. In the entire history of American modernity, this city I'm looking out at, New York, is literally just a blip in China's recent development. So this is the reorientation that brings about. And I do think it totally blows the mind of the American political elite.

The shipbuilding thing right now is the thing that's blowing them — America doesn't build any ships at all, none other than naval vessels, and they somehow imagine they're going to synthesize into existence an American shipbuilding industry because they realize things move in ships, and America ought to be able to. It's truly an almost hallucinogenic state.

There is something — Larry Summers wrote a great op-ed almost ten years ago now saying that the fundamental question of the future would be: would the American political class even be able to name this phenomenon, even be able to explicitly recognize it? And one answer to your question of what is Trump the name of is: it's essentially the inability of the American political class to do that. They cannot, and he then provides them with the object around which all of the Democratic Party elites organize their thinking rather than actually having to think about the thing which does profoundly challenge.

But I have a kind of more deflationary reading as well. One will be to say this is a huge storm in the American teacup unleashed by this massive Chinese development. Another one will be to say: is it really a storm in the American political system? Really, at what level is it that? And again, going back to that book Deluge that I wrote about the early twentieth century, which could be read as setting up the classic Arno Mayer, Wilson versus Lenin kind of clash. Another way of reading it would be to say that the American exceptionalism, both as an ideology and as a reality of politics — namely, a society profound, what was absolutely the dominating reality of the early interwar period, and American hegemony, America's role as a central global player — was peculiar, amongst other things, because America's internal political history is so convulsive and violent and difficult.

I mean, it's not Yugoslavia, but it sort of is a Yugoslavia. There is this profound problem of race and slavery. There is this profound sectionalism, this highly incomplete process of state formation, a persistence of religiosity of an evangelical kind, a deep skepticism about the power of science and its logics, a sovereignism that is unbounded in certain crucial ways and is underpinned by a radical ideology. And in some ways, Trump is a sort of predictable degenerate form of all of those features, plus with some twenty-first-century characteristics. In fact, you could say characteristics from the eighties and nineties translated forward into the present.

And in a highly divided polity in which a third don't vote and two-thirds do, and they're split fifty-one to forty-nine percent and then forty-nine to fifty-one percent, his side won through a highly technical, highly expensive election process to deliver this outcome. And that would be the most deflationary result. Then, of course, he's in power and can churn things up and generate this endless shitstorm of excitement. But then in reality, what does it deliver? This humming and hawing over trade policy, huge announcements and then retreat on tax. It looks like a rerun of the 2017 tax giveaway. On deregulation, it'll be the standard business story of a rather brutal variety, fairly familiar to places with right-wing conservative populist governments with majorities.

All of this could disappear in the midterms, which is what the Democrats are hoping for when they lose their ability to legislate. That's what many people are hoping for. So you could see this as a significant moment in the process of the hollowing out of American political culture. But as a long-term process with a fairly familiar telos. But of course, Trump is a sui generis phenomenon. He has rather personal attributes which are unlike anyone else we've seen in American politics. But he's a familiar figure from American political culture. There are men like him doing his kind of thing in many different roles in American life.

And he's representative of an American reality which is just all too present if you step outside the metropolitan centers and the college towns. He's not actually an outlandish figure in the world of the American gentry, in the world of Mar-a-Lago. This is a social reality which we may have been closing our eyes to, but it's been there.

To come back though and to offer an explanation which in some ways ties to other things we've been saying: I think it's clear that the mediation within the American political elite between major centers of power — whether it's military, financial, industrial, energy, and political authority — which previously was secured by way of the GOP as the mechanism of hegemony that secured majorities for NAFTA and then for Chinese accession to WTO, that has really come apart. And the most surprising thing about economic policy right now is its lack of motivation.

So it's less that we can see a social crisis to which this is a policy response, so much as the crisis consists in the fact that the policy is not an obvious response to any crisis. That's actually the more striking thing about the current moment. Biden and Trump 1 fit more squarely into the model where we say, classic masculine blue-collar working class in crisis, China shock, therefore connect the dots. And people like Jennifer Harris and Jake Sullivan and Biden himself are explicitly articulating this as their historical logic.

The astonishing thing about Trump 2 is that it's a kind of surreal freak show in which it's virtually impossible to show any serious lobby group of labor or business which actually asked for this trade war. And this is bamboozling because modern political science in its American form — the science-y bit of American political science — was literally born in the late nineteenth century to explain tariffs. That's the early experiments in American empirical political science are very much of the atomistic interest group: A makes tariff, B argues with interest group C who wants tariff D, what comes out of the process is tariff E. That's how this is supposed to work.

And the surreal quality of the current moment is that you can't specify whose interests these are in. And so you end up in a sense in which policy is being made almost as a form of performance. Which, you know, all policy has a performative aspect, but in this case it seems to be purely that. And that's what the crisis, I think, ultimately really consists in. So it becomes very difficult to answer questions like: so what is the China policy? Who knows? Honestly, who knows? And under Biden we had a much clearer idea and it wasn't reassuring. So I would see Trump as the kind of escalation into the surreal of tendencies that were very pronounced and already well developed in the sequence of Trump, Biden, and then Trump 2.0.

So it's not a synthesis in Hegelian terms. It's a thesis and then another kind of — there's no good dialectic here.

Yeah, I mean, I thought this is a very interesting piece, the Taylor and Klein piece in the Guardian. People should check it out. It took the whole fascism debate in this like extreme direction, right? Because they basically say Trump is nihilistic fascism. So it has all of the authoritarianism and racism of fascism, but they literally say the original fascism had this optimistic upside when for the right people it was about making a people's home. And Trump doesn't have that even, right? So Trump becomes this worse, more nihilistic fascism. And I have my issues with the whole fascist diagnosis, but at the very least you got to recognize this is a novel — they've added an extra twist to this.

And when you think about some of the Palantir people, Thiel and so on, there is a bleak, dark social vision there that is quite fascinating. And it's that exit — they link this to the idea of exit. People like Quintus Curtius have been doing all this interesting work on the role of exit in extreme right-wing thinking. That's I think the line they want to take. I have two problems with it. One is the Elon Musk question. And the other is the tariffs question, which they don't really address.

They bend Musk into an end-times guy by basically saying that he's all about Mars. And I think that underestimates what Musk is about. But they just don't talk about the tariff politics. And the radical thing about the tariff politics is that it's almost classic future-oriented politics. I was thinking here of the work of Jonathan White, the political scientist at the LSE, who's written rather interestingly about the question of the long run and the future.

For him, the logic of future-oriented politics — which he fears is becoming hollowed out — is that it organizes a critique of the present, that it binds the community of those who are committed to an idea of the future, and that it justifies sacrifice because you have a trade-off between the present and the future. And we can all see in the tradition of the left how that works. And if you apply those criteria to the JD Vance, Trump, tariff people, that's exactly what they're doing. They criticize the present in terms of a future of an imagined reconstruction of American industry. They bind themselves together against those who don't get it, which will be all the liberal elites who are committed to neoliberalism. And they demand that in the short run — and this was the thing that really just blew my mind — was a president on American television saying outright, I actually think you need less stuff. You don't need all of this stuff that you're buying from China. You'll be better off without it and the future will be better off if we make it at home.

He then added, of course, this misogynistic gendered stuff about your little baby girl and how she doesn't need her Barbie dolls. But that's a whole different subject about the underlying masculinism of all of this. But the idea that they don't have a future politics just seemed to me to be entirely at odds with this. The embarrassment for the American left is that faced with the same dilemma when it came to the Green New Deal, the answer of the Biden people was: there's no way we can put the president on TV to say something like, right now you need to have a car that consumes less petrol. You can't be driving your truck anymore. This was untouchable. Even at the level of details of policy, we couldn't do carbon taxes in the US because it was unthinkable to ask people to actually curb their gas consumption.

And there we have Trump out there in front saying this. So I again took this to be a shielding reaction where basically the left was somehow projecting onto Trump problems in their own politics which they couldn't really come to terms with. And that I think stands up. Of course the problem is that Trump's politics is a huge bundle — it's a crude bundle of different themes — and so this is only one strand and I'm not going to deny that there are some end-times people who may really be thinking these kinds of pessimistic fascism. But I don't think it — and it's a real problem for the left if we think that will be a helpful way of diagnosing this.

I mean, this has been obviously a matter of really thinking it on our feet in real time with colleagues in media studies, right? Because Columbia has been at the center of this. It's been a very difficult place to work for the last couple of years. Speaking to you folks coming from a European background, I often say to my American colleagues: wake up, smell the coffee, this is the reality of the vast majority of people in academia the world over. You don't have to love the place you work, you don't have to approve of its administration. Most academics hate the university they work at. This is actually our structural condition in most places, but it comes as a shock to the Americans, it really does.

Because I think there are three vectors which really define the history of the modern American university in the form that we know it. It's quite recent, compared to — there's a long tradition of university education in the US but it was largely a college-based liberal arts model close to theology. It moves in the twentieth century along, I think, three lines that really matter and have all come into play in Columbia. This is just my effort to historicize and actually in quite a structural way. One is the role of the university in the Cold War was absolutely essential, and this is the thing that's most bamboozling to us. Who are you kidding? Universities are about the American military-industrial complex first and foremost. Hey, hey, wake up, this is what it's about. That's number one assumption. It turns out also powerful reality. Big budgets, billions of dollars in research funding that hinge on this.

The next element is that the universities genuinely did become — always have been for women, because American higher education for women extended much deeper into the nineteenth century — but have also been, of course, real vectors for a kind of — well, we could pejoratively say PMC liberalism, but we can also describe it as projects of liberation for an increasingly wide variety of people, of sexual experimentation, of the emancipation of black people, increasingly also of other minorities in American society, and they are at the forefront of that process. And it's in its own terms very real, but also constrained to a social reality which doesn't exhibit massive social mobility.

So what they are is this strange combination of extremely radical in their cultural politics, significantly shifted in their demography, and yet on the other hand demonstrably part of the reproduction of inequality in the United States. There are few places in the world where it matters more — China would be another case, and Korea, where which university you go to is decisive. And then the third element is the globalization of American universities, which is key for Columbia. A million foreign students studying in the US. Thirty percent plus of our student body is foreign, and so we're entangled with global politics. The Middle East is not a long way away. This is a reality that is present on campus through the city that we're in and through international mobility.

The other big shoe to drop still is the Chinese presence. Over twenty percent of our students are Chinese. Mainland Chinese, that is. And so these are difficult realities that we're dealing with. And the radicalism of our current moment — this is another one of these moments where we have to have a priest of conscience — is that on the one hand Vance clearly is a cultural warrior, and before him people like Barr, who was attorney general in the previous Trump administration. I mention him because he was active on Columbia campus during Vietnam War. So there is a tradition of rapid, full-blown conservative backlash in the US. There is really a culture war. And that's part of the unhinging here and it's deliberate. They really do intend — they want to create, as they say, fear. They actually want to intimidate and destroy certain complacencies.

The other thing which is the radicalism we really have to encompass, which is the Musk phenomenon, is a grassroots, foundational, bottom-up critique of that science complex. For them, the ultimate liberal myth is that big world-changing science has to be done through government-funded universities. This is the Californian myth of the fifties and sixties, and the new generation of Californian innovators don't think that's correct. They don't think that university funding is the central route to go. They're fundamentally privatizing the production of knowledge and innovation. And it's Musk's — not the Tesla, but SpaceX — that really demonstrates this. If you can go into space essentially driven by a private project, then all bets are off, right? I mean, you can as a party try as hard as you like to demonstrate that ultimately the patents come from somewhere else, but they're not buying it. They don't buy the story, the pattern of R&D spending since the eighties. They see that argument and answer it. And unless we recognize this, endlessly saying 'oh well, don't you understand,' they fully understand our position and simply reject it.

And the third element that has come together in the Columbia case is that, of course, we are at the crossroads in New York of the entanglement of the United States with the politics of the Middle East since the foundation of Israel in the nineteen-forties. And it's just a reality that bites in our town, on our university, but not just on ours by any means. In a way that is incredibly direct, because of the significance of Columbia as a center of Jewish learning, the significance of New York as a center of Zionist mobilization.

And this really is the space I think where a Hallian analysis really comes home, because as I was saying earlier on, read Policing the Crisis and substitute anti-Semitism for mugging and you have the text for understanding the dynamics of the panic that has been unleashed, the moral panic, the strategies of escalation — his spiral of escalation applies directly to our circumstance in which individual cases are taken as representative of larger themes which are then turned into matters of emergency.

And that is the place that we find ourselves in. And the strategies within this right now are humble — they're strategies of survival, of continuity, of pastoral care for colleagues and care for students. But I mean, it's no secret, it's all over Twitter. I'm on like two of the watch lists. There was a minor campaign to have me deported just before I got my citizenship. So this — it's not a circumstance I ever imagined to find myself in, but these — this engagement, it sucks you into a configuration of power that I think we have to accept and understand.

And this goes back perhaps also to the polycrisis term. The polycrisis term for me is not a diagnosis of immediate collapse. We're not expecting — in the old SPD terms — the big bang where everything is going to fall down and the world ends. Looking at America, any reasonable person looks at the place and goes, this cannot last, this cannot go on, it's bound to fall, this cannot happen like this. And yet it does. And so this is the reality that I think we also need to understand and live with. And this is one of the mistakes, I think, also in a certain catastrophist climate politics that is always waiting for the big bang that's going to shift parameters. And the remarkable thing at being at Columbia is we've kind of had the worst case in some ways, and life continues. And so then the challenge really is to shape a progressive politics, a progressive pedagogy, a mode of being with each other, which is one of the big challenges on campus — that continues in the face of these kind of disruptions.

I mean, it's a microcosm and it's a tiny, privileged, incredibly well-upholstered microcosm of the real nightmare that is unfolding — it's an echo, a distant echo of the horror that's unfolding in Gaza and in so many other places around the world.