>From the Crisis and Critique podcast : an interview <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W0uYt3Gi_Y> with Tooze.
>From The Guardian. Scrolling down two excerpts. "...In the US, meanwhile, Schumer continued to use Crashed as a policy playbook. “In the spring of 21, I started getting these texts from friends on the left wing of the Democratic party going, ‘You’re not going to believe this. I’ve just been in a meeting with Schumer and he said, we all have to read this guy, Tooze, on going big. Schumer was going, like, do you know this guy? T-O-O-Z-E?”..." "In another conversation, in October, Tooze noted that he had done “a lot of activism around green politics and central banking and naming and shaming the IMF economists”. His voice rose to an exasperated pitch as he imagined a conversation with Anderson: “It’s like, ‘Show me your cards. Where the fuck have you been on any of these issues? What’s your position on climate? Where were you with the Green New Deal? Where have you been on Gaza?’”... .Near the beginning. ." It was not until 70 minutes into the conversation that a discordant note was sounded, when Adam Tooze joined the panel remotely. Born in London, raised in West Germany, and living now in New York, where he teaches at Columbia, Tooze was for many years a successful but largely unknown academic. A decade ago he was recognised, when he was recognised at all, as an economic historian of Europe <https://www.theguardian.com/world/europe-news>. Since 2018, however, when he published Crashed, his “contemporary history” of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, Tooze has become, in the words of Jonathan Derbyshire, his editor at the Financial Times, “a sort of platonic ideal of the universal intellectual”... It was notable, then, that after joining the Brussels panel, Tooze didn’t waste much time before stating flatly that the Biden team had “failed in its absolutely central mission, which was to prevent a second Trump administration”. Not only that, he argued, but the dismantling of the liberal world order – something discussed with much rueful lamentation at the conference – had been hastened, not hindered, by the Biden veterans on stage. As he’d written <https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n21/adam-tooze/great-power-politics> a few months earlier*, *Tooze saw Biden no less than Trump aiming “to ensure by any means necessary” – including strong-arming allies – “that China is held back and the US preserves its decisive edge”... The early days of Biden’s presidency saw what appeared to be a new rapprochement between centrist liberals and the rising left. Tooze, a self-described “left-liberal”, was perhaps the representative intellectual figure of this development. Some of this had to do with Crashed, which established him as a leading economic commentator and found an admirer in Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Senate Democrats. Some of it also had to do with Tooze’s longstanding interest in climate policy, which was shaping up to be a central focus of the Biden administration. And some of it, too, had to do with a belated but intense engagement with Twitter, which he joined in 2015 at the urging of his daughter (then a teenager) when he was in his late 40s, where he soon gained a huge following. Five years after Biden’s inauguration, the political atmosphere in the US could not be more different. Yet Tooze remains no less relevant as an intellectual force. Whereas once he had personified the appeal of high-technocratic expertise – the feeling that if you could just read widely enough and understand deeply enough, you might be able to chart a sensible approach to crises like climate change – today Tooze stands as one of the more eloquent analysts of a new and confusing world order... In Tooze’s view, what he calls the “radicalism of the present” keeps many people, including policymakers, from seeing the world as it actually is. Hence his argument to the Brussels panel that Biden and his staff were not the defenders of the liberal world order that they imagined themselves to be. Hence, too, the claim he made <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/10/war-middle-east-ukraine-us-feeble-biden-trump> in this newspaper, a few weeks before the 2024 election, that “Bidenomics [was] Maga for thinking people”. And hence his belief that – even though the past year has seen the darkest warnings of the Biden and Harris campaigns come to gruesome fulfilment – the American liberal obsession with Trump is too often framed in terms borrowed from decades past. “Why can’t we have new bad things?” he asked me at one point. “Like really new, really bad things?”.. glance at Tooze’s family tree or his sterling CV makes it tempting to imagine his career as an untroubled glide among warm updrafts carrying him along from the day he was born. In conversation he does not obscure his many privileges: the fact, as he puts it, that he is “the product of five generations of university-educated women”, or that his mother’s parents were wealthy cosmopolitans who published influential reports on nutrition and took Le Monde as their daily newspaper, or that his father was a prominent molecular biologist. Yet Tooze’s upbringing was more complicated than that sketch implies. His maternal grandfather, Arthur Wynn, was a civil servant who had also been – as Tooze and his family learned alongside the public in the 1980s – a Soviet spy. Tooze still speaks fondly of Arthur and his wife, Peggy; they are the joint dedicatees of Wages of Destruction, his 2006 book about Nazi economics. But he also describes Arthur as “a tough, tough, mean son of a bitch”. Tooze describes his father, John, as “a guy that got shit done” and also as someone with a well-deserved reputation for what we now call toxic masculinity: “I regularly would have people come up to me in life-science centres and say, ‘Does your name mean what I think it means?’ And then the reaction would be, ‘I’m sorry,’ or, ‘I hate your father.’” It was John’s work that took the family to Heidelberg in 1974, when Tooze was six years old. West Germany was reckoning with its Nazi past, and Tooze says that the ambient political atmosphere weighed heavily on his youth. “I spent a lot of time identifying with the perpetrator, asking myself what kind of a Heydrich I would have been.” At that time in that place, the question was far from abstract. “I went to school with Albert Speer’s grandson. We were the big science dignitaries that arrived in the little village outside Heidelberg where the Speers lived, and they made us welcome. My parents were invited to dinner, and the Speers said, ‘Do you need some furniture? Here’s a table.’ Literally the whole time we were in Germany we were eating off Albert Speer’s table.” The difficult legacy of the difficult men in his family ultimately steered Tooze away from economics, his first academic love. Though he was fascinated by the field, and good at it, he also recognised in it “an absolutely toxic culture”. By the time he graduated he knew he had to leave the discipline. “I had a terrible relationship with my father, and I couldn’t be around that kind of academic man,” he says... It was John’s work that took the family to Heidelberg in 1974, when Tooze was six years old. West Germany was reckoning with its Nazi past, and Tooze says that the ambient political atmosphere weighed heavily on his youth. “I spent a lot of time identifying with the perpetrator, asking myself what kind of a Heydrich I would have been.” At that time in that place, the question was far from abstract. “I went to school with Albert Speer’s grandson. We were the big science dignitaries that arrived in the little village outside Heidelberg where the Speers lived, and they made us welcome. My parents were invited to dinner, and the Speers said, ‘Do you need some furniture? Here’s a table.’ Literally the whole time we were in Germany we were eating off Albert Speer’s table.” The difficult legacy of the difficult men in his family ultimately steered Tooze away from economics, his first academic love. Though he was fascinated by the field, and good at it, he also recognised in it “an absolutely toxic culture”. By the time he graduated he knew he had to leave the discipline. “I had a terrible relationship with my father, and I couldn’t be around that kind of academic man,” he says... In the US, meanwhile, Schumer continued to use Crashed as a policy playbook. “In the spring of 21, I started getting these texts from friends on the left wing of the Democratic party going, ‘You’re not going to believe this. I’ve just been in a meeting with Schumer and he said, we all have to read this guy, Tooze, on going big. Schumer was going, like, do you know this guy? T-O-O-Z-E?” Tooze says that Schumer’s staff stayed in contact with him throughout the drawn-out negotiations over what would become the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate bill. In 2022, he was summoned to the White House for consultations. He accepted the invitation – largely, he says, because “it’s the one and only time I’ll ever get to the White House, so whatever, let’s go and see.” The encounter was disillusioning. Already by that point Tooze had been frustrated with Biden on a number of fronts, including the compromises of the Inflation Reduction Act, which was vastly smaller than originally intended, “conservative in its political framing”, and “larded with concessions to fossil fuel interests”. Yet nothing seems to have disturbed Tooze quite as much as seeing what he calls the “narcissism” of the Biden team at close proximity. In all his many years of therapy, he told me – he has been seeing a therapist multiple times a week for a decade – there were only two occasions on which he sought help specifically in response to political incidents. One was Brexit – “if there’d been an armed-resistance wing I would have wanted to be Michael Collins,” he says – and the other was his encounter with the Biden administration. “Part of what motivated the unhinging of my relationship with the Biden people was being invited on to calls with their climate team,” he told me. He cited a conference call with Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, that took place in 2023, not long after a Chinese balloon drifted into US airspace and sparked an international incident that Tooze described in Chartbook as “the first, bona fide war scare of our new era of Sino-US confrontation”. On the phone call, he said, “It was just, ‘Oh Jake, you guys are rock stars.’ This was in the middle of the balloon incident, where we were sliding towards war and everyone in DC knew it.” One of Tooze’s friends, the novelist Zoe Dubno, told me that Sullivan is often “enemy number one” at Tooze’s dinner parties, where many of the guests, like Sullivan, are products of elite Ivy League educations: “He hurts everyone because they’re like, ‘That could be me. If we decided to be completely compromised fuckheads, that’s the kind of evil that is available to me.’” Despite his political flirtations on both sides of the Atlantic, Tooze says he has “a very ambiguous relationship to power”, an uneasiness he traces back to his lifelong effort not to be like his father. “The thing that haunts me is that I know perfectly well that I could be that kind of person in the world,” he said. For these reasons, he has tried to maintain an “obliqueness” and a “distance” from power. “I look at myself and say, a system which puts somebody like me in charge is a bad system.” Not everyone thinks this effort has been successful. In 2019, in the New Left Review, Perry Anderson, the venerable leftist historian, published a scathing 16,000-word review-evisceration of Tooze that took for its formal targets the loose trilogy comprising Wages of Destruction, The Deluge and Crashed, and ended up attacking his entire modus vivendi. The fiercest aspect of Anderson’s essay addressed Tooze’s politics. All three books, Anderson argued, share a telling fault: namely, a failure to reckon adequately with the deep forces that gave shape to the events he described. In Wages of Destruction and The Deluge, Anderson says Tooze approaches each of his subjects “*in medias res,* dispensing with a structural explanation of its origins”. Anderson is a Marxist, and so it’s not particularly surprising that he was unimpressed by Tooze’s self-description as a “left-liberal”, a compound phrase that, he noted, “has often, perhaps typically, proved unstable”. Nor was it difficult to see how someone with Anderson’s theoretical views would decide that Tooze was no true leftist at all. By the end of the essay, however, that latter judgment has expanded well beyond the content of Tooze’s books into a sneering indictment of his whole public existence. The breadth of interests, audiences and sympathies that for so many of Tooze’s admirers mark his signal virtue stood for Anderson as proof of his political unreliability. “Tooze spreads himself widely, and his accents and formulations vary from place to place,” Anderson wrote. “That’s often the price of a growing reputation [and] shouldn’t be taken too seriously. To criticisms of inconsistency, he can in any case reply quite reasonably that nothing he has written falls outside the parameters of a basic commitment to liberalism as it has developed in the west from the time of Wilson and Lloyd George to that of Geithner and Macron.” (In the context of the New Left Review, these points of comparison could hardly be more damning.) Anderson’s implication that Tooze is essentially keeping two sets of books – one set of accounts for his lefty graduate students, another for his discussion partners at Davos – becomes the basis for his essay’s bitter final judgment: “In today’s world, the question can be asked: how far does that differ from running with the hare and hunting with the hounds – indignant sympathy for the hare, awed admiration for the hounds?” Tooze does not hide the devastation he felt on reading Anderson’s essay, or the fact that he still thinks about it often. He told me that his disorientation had much to do with his longstanding admiration for his antagonist. Tooze has subscribed to the NLR since his 20s, has written for it several times, and says he always read Anderson’s essays “religiously”. Perhaps predictably, Tooze rejects much of Anderson’s critique. He is also plainly offended that his attempt to be honest about who he is, and where he’s coming from, was taken by Anderson as a kind of shiftiness, or even hypocrisy. Over the past decade or so, Tooze’s politics have shifted notably leftward. Yet Tooze still feels it imperative to acknowledge “how deeply I am the product of the circumstances I was raised in”. As he put it to me at his office, last April, “I take that more seriously than the average academic leftist. Because I don’t imagine that by virtue of thinking a bunch of radical thoughts, I can get more than a little bit of the way towards escaping my professional upper-middle class identity. I’m a senior professor at an immensely rich private university. Where do I get off kidding myself about this?” In another conversation, in October, Tooze noted that he had done “a lot of activism around green politics and central banking and naming and shaming the IMF economists”. His voice rose to an exasperated pitch as he imagined a conversation with Anderson: “It’s like, ‘Show me your cards. Where the fuck have you been on any of these issues? What’s your position on climate? Where were you with the Green New Deal? Where have you been on Gaza?’” More surprisingly, Tooze said that Anderson’s attack helped him clarify his own principles and practices. Anderson used the phrase “in medias res” as a jab at Tooze’s neglect, as he saw it, of the deep political and economic forces that shaped his narratives. Yet Tooze has come to embrace in medias res both as “a very succinct summation of the challenge that I’m particularly interested in” and as a simple but profound description of the basic human situation. In his view, there is no escaping the middle of things: every one of us is born, lives and dies in a rushing flow of events that precedes us and will outlast us. He told me that he is not a Marxist in part because he thinks treating a body of theory produced in the middle of the 19th century as “the be-all and end-all” – a stable point from which one might stand outside history and discern its hidden forces and patterns – is “a lazy way of dealing with reality”. To accept the radicalism of the present, he says, means acknowledging that you can’t understand history before it happens: “If you’re in the middle of shit, you don’t actually know what the shit is that you’re in the middle of.” ------------------------------ Last spring, Tooze became an American citizen. The decision predated Trump’s return to office and had mostly to do with the precarity Tooze felt previously: “If you’re in a green-card situation, you do not want to be arrested. And it is remarkably easy to get arrested in this country.” Nevertheless, he admits that he considered leaving the US after Trump was re-elected. He was particularly frustrated by the situation at Columbia. On the one hand, he was not eager to watch, as he had during Trump’s first term, another “ding-dong battle between Trump and indignant New York Times-reading liberals” on the faculty. On the other hand, he’d been appalled to see how many of his colleagues, including serious leftists, had gone quiet during the Gaza turmoil on campus. Tooze himself has been vocal in his defence of the rights of both Palestinians and pro-Palestinian protesters; an online watchlist featured video screenshots that showed him in an orange faculty vest at a 2024 Columbia protest. He acknowledged that he felt a freedom to speak his mind for “thoroughly bourgeois reasons”. Thanks to Chartbook, he said, which brings him more income than his salary at Columbia, “If I get fired from this job, I walk away. I’m totally fine.” Still, he was dismayed at how much the fear of losing their accumulated academic privileges had “constrained people in what they’ve been willing to say. They are so fucking scared of losing that. It’s disgusting how scared they are.” Tooze says he decided to stay in the US in large part because his daughter lives here. He was confirmed in that decision, however, by news that three of his former colleagues at Yale, Timothy Snyder, Marci Shore and Jason Stanley, were moving to Canada. “Their decision just radically clarified it for me. Because it’s absolutely the wrong decision in every respect: it’s wrong politically, it’s wrong ethically. Even if, as Tim Snyder has claimed, it has nothing to do with politics, the optics are terrible. They should have deferred the move for 12 months.” Tooze is still reluctant to use the word “fascist” to describe Trump’s government, even as he recognises “the possibility of a kind of escalation here towards something truly catastrophic”. Tooze told me that his increasingly lonely resistance to that term has much to do with not wanting to shoehorn the present into the past. When I pressed him on the question, though, he also admitted a frustration with the kind of people who invoke the analogy, and the reasons they invoke it. He allowed that “fascist” might be a useful way to emphasise the radical character of Trump’s rule but said he still didn’t like the way the analogy encouraged the kind of smug moral satisfaction that he came to despise in the Biden administration. He noted that he keeps several models of Soviet T-34 tanks in his office at Columbia to remind himself, and his visitors, that it was not high-minded western ideals like democracy and freedom that defeated the Nazis in the second world war. “If you’re willing to admit that it was the Red Army that beat fascism,” Tooze said, somewhat grudgingly, “then you can have your fascism analogy.”<SNIP> https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/15/the-crisis-whisperer-how-adam-tooze-makes-sense-of-our-bewildering-age -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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