many of the classics – Marx, Hirschman, Arendt, Foucault, Weber. In scurrying back and forth between my Twitter feed and my bookshelves, the hope is that we can understand what’s going on, without either wishful thinking or denial of the genuine conjunctural novelty.
There are obvious risks attached to theorising events like this. You can make a bad call, miss the wood for the trees, be duped by hype or by paranoia. I’ve never pretended to be much good at predictions, which I leave to the quantitative political scientists (my estimations of Theresa May’s electoral prowess were as wrong as anyone’s). But I think it’s important that we at least try to relate the flux of the present to the underlying conditions, which are more durable. When everything appears to be changing and unprecedented, it’s all the more important to find the continuities and precedents, without downplaying the shock of the new. One of the most dramatic transformations to have taken hold of public life in Western democracies in the twenty-first century is the way it potentially becomes ‘consumed’ as a constant ‘stream’ of content, relying on a combination of outrage and humour to hold and sway its audience. All academic disciplines offer a pause button of sorts, because they necessarily require slow and careful consideration of a moment in time, and can’t dwell in perpetual flow. But only sociology helps to explain where the acceleration arose from in the first place, on the assumption that something must be driving and structuring an apparently chaotic and reckless process.
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