Celebrating Ralf Dahrendorf - and others

I vividly remember reading Ralf Dahrendorf’s Class and Class Conflict which came out in 1959 at University and being sufficiently impressed to write a letter about it to the local newspaper in the early 1960s – hardly endearing me to the local party. So I was delighted that when a couple of Germans wrote this marvellous biography of the Liberal who ran the LSE and was active in both the German parliament and also the House of Lords - Ralf Dahrendorf – between social theory and political practice O Kuhne and L Leonardi (2020) While Olaf Kühne’s introduction focuses strongly on Dahrendorf’s terminology and contribution to sociological basic concepts and is very closely related to Dahrendorf’s writings, which are mostly initially published in German, Laura Leonardi’s introduction is more strongly oriented toward the late phase of Dahrendorf’s work and more strongly oriented toward the influences and effects of Dahrendorf’s writings. Due to the strong complementarity of the two introductions and the lack of such an introduction to the ‘classic’ Dahrendorf in the English language, we have decided to synthesize our books to complement the more recent literature and to publish them in English.

This volume on the topicality of Ralf Dahrendorf first deals with the biography of Ralf Dahrendorf, which was marked by scientific, scientific political, and political activities (Chapter 2). The following chapter (Chapter 3 dedicated to Ralf Dahrendorf’s basic understanding of the theory of science as well as his ideas on the conception and practice of sociological science. Chapter 4 presents a topic that has (co)shaped his publications from the very beginning: the (productive) power of social conflicts. As explained above, Dahrendorf has dealt intensively with democracy and society in the United States as well as in Germany. This is addressed in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 deals with the interface between society and person: the social norms and roles as well as the possibilities of enforcing their observance. This is followed in particular by a discussion of the political/philosophical consequences of his theory of conflict and roles, as well as an introduction to his explanations of political liberalism (Chapter 7). Chapter 8 focuses on his remarks on life chances, rights, and civil society, as well as on a topic in which his scientific and political thinking is mutually supportive—the civil right to education. Chapter 9 deals with the social and political challenges that Ralf Dahrendorf dealt with in his late work.

Addressing, for example, the crisis of the labor society, the transformation processes in East-Central and Eastern Europe, how to deal with the financial crisis, but also with questions about the future of the European Union. In Chapter 10 we deal primarily with the critique of the concepts and political ideas of Ralf Dahrendorf, but also to some extent with parallels to the approaches of other current thinkers from the liberal spectrum.

Contents

1 Introductory Remarks

2 Biography Between Social Theory and Political Practice

2. 1 An Eventful Childhood and Youth

2. 2 The Rise of an Ambitious Young Scientist

2. 3 The Politician Ralf Dahrendorf

2. 4 Between Politics, Science, Science Administration, and the ‘Public Intellectual’: The Time After Professional Politics

3 Ralf Dahrendorf’s Understanding of Science and the Position of Sociology in the Sciences

3. 1 The Role of the Scientist in Society

3. 2 Sociology as Science—Fundamental Approaches

4 Conflict and Society

4. 1 Basic Considerations on Ralf Dahrendorf’s Conflict Theory

4. 2 The Confrontation with the Conflict Ideas of Talcott Parsons

and Karl Marx

4. 3 Domination and Conflict

4. 4 The Nature of Conflicts and How to Deal with Them

4. 5 The Transformations of Social Conflict in Modernity

References

5 Dahrendorf and the Democracies in Germany and the United States

5. 1 Dahrendorf and the United States of America

5. 2 Dahrendorf and the German Society

6 The ‘Annoying Fact of Society’: Norms and Roles in ‘Homo

Sociologicus’

6. 1 The Regularity of Society: Norms and Roles

6. 2 The Human Being as Carrier of Preformed Roles—The ‘Homo

Sociologicus’

7 Individuals and Social Institutions: Contributions to Political

Liberalism

7. 1 The Relationship Between Theory and Practice

7. 2 Dahrendorf’s Understanding of Liberty

7. 3 The Loss of Democratic Participation: The ‘Homo Sociologicus’

and Social Inequality

7. 4 Social Development and the Danger of Bureaucratizatio n

7. 5 Citizenship and Market—The Difficult Balance Between

Redistribution and Growth

7. 6 The Defense of Liberal Society

8 Ligatures, Rights, and Opportunities: The Development of Civil

Society

8. 1 The Achievements of Modern Society and the Loss of Ligatures

8. 2 Rights and Duties

8. 3 Life Chances and the Norm of Their Maximization

8. 4 Democracy and Capitalism: Progression and Regression of Life

Chances

8. 5 Civil and Authoritarian Society

8. 6 The Civil Right to Education

9 Social Upheavals and the Precarious Conditions of Intellectuals and

Domination

9. 1 The Labor Society in Crisis

9. 2 Western European Democracies Transform: The British Case

and the German Case

9. 3 The Observations of Transformation in Eastern Central and

Eastern Europe

9. 4 The Vulnerability of Intellectuals

9. 5 The Challenge of Globalization

9. 6 The Europe of a ‘Skeptical Europeanist’: Opportunities and

Constraints of European Integration

9. 7 After the Financial Crisis: Visions of Time and Economic Ethics

References

10 Dahrendorf’s Critics and Parallels to Other Liberal Thinkers of the

Present Day

10. 1 Criticism of Dahrendorf’s Work

10. 2 Parallels to Other Liberal Thinkers of the Present Day

References

11 The Topicality of Ralf Dahrendorf: A Conclusion

Life Chances Ralf Dahrendorf (1979) - an early opus

Shaped by the State – toward a new political history of the 20th C ed B Cebul, 
Mason Williams et al (2019) 

The Divide – a brief guide to global inequality and its solutions 
Jason Hickel (2023)

For decades we have been told a story about the divide between rich

countries and poor countries. We have been told that development is working: that the global South is catching up to the North, that poverty has been cut in half over the past thirty years, and will be eradicated by 2030. It’s a comforting tale, and one that is endorsed by the world’s most powerful governments and corporations. But is it true?

Since 1960, the income gap between the North and South has roughly tripled in size. Today 4.3 billion people, 60 per cent of the world’s population, live on less than $5 per day. Some 1 billion live on less than $1 a day. The richest eight people now control the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world combined. What is causing this growing divide? We are told that poverty is a natural phenomenon that can be fixed with aid. But in reality it is a political problem: poverty doesn’t just exist, it has been created.

Poor countries are poor because they are integrated into the global economic system on unequal terms. Aid only works to hide the deep patterns of wealth extraction that cause poverty and inequality in the first place: rigged trade deals, tax evasion, land grabs and the costs associated with climate change. The Divide tracks the evolution of this system, from the expeditions of Christopher Columbus in the 1490s to the international debt regime, which has allowed a handful of rich countries to effectively control economic policies in the rest of the world.

Because poverty is a political problem, it requires political solutions. The Divide offers a range of revelatory answers, but also explains that something much more radical is needed – a revolution in our way of thinking. Drawing on pioneering research, detailed analysis and years of first-hand experience, The Divide is a provocative, urgent and ultimately uplifting account of how the world works, and how it can change.

Rule of the Robots – how AI will transform everything Martin Ford (2021) 178pp Less than a quarter the size of the next book

Why machines Will Never Rule the World – AI without fear B Landgrebe and Barry Smith (2025) 680pp

Stolen Revolution – betrayal and hope in modern Iran Y Torbati and B Sharafedin (2026)

We tell this story of a country through the eyes of six people who have lived through and shaped these events. They come from different social classes and ethnic backgrounds, with varying views on the Islamic Republic and the reasons behind its failure. Some of them helped to strengthen the government at times, or were complicit in some of its crimes, while others have a hardened, uncompromising stance on the regime. Each of them ended up challenging a system that sought to subjugate them. They have diverging visions for Iran’s future: the total overthrow of the Islamic

Republic, its reform from within, or the return of the monarchy. In their nuances, they reflect the astonishing diversity of contemporary Iranian society, which has simultaneously resisted and been forced to make do with its rulers.

Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian writer forced to leave Romania in 1966 
and now settled in the US and has given us a variety of novels – 
with oceanpdf offering 4 
The Blood Countess Andrei Codrescu (1995)
Wakefield Andrei Codrescu (2004)
Casanova in Bohemia Andrei Codrescu (2005)
Whatever Gets You Through the Night Andrei Codrescu (2011)
Dementia – how the West has lost its history and risks losing everything else David Andress (2018)

This book argues that recent political events place the UK, France and the USA in a state of catastrophic cultural dementia. That is a very strong term, and I mean it absolutely seriously. It is not an image to be deployed lightly. My own father died of Alzheimer’s in May 2015; most people’s families now include at least one similar story of terrible decline. It is precisely because what confronts us now risks being an equally horrifying slide into dissolution that the term is warranted here. And because a culture, unlike an individual, may hope to recover from its dementia, before it is too late.

Our current dementia takes the form of particular kinds of forgetting, misremembering and mistaking the past. In that sense it is not nostalgia, which is at root merely a form of homesickness for the remembered past. Nor is it, any more than an individual’s dementia, a simple matter of amnesia. In most cases, the amnesiac is aware that they do not remember; and knowledge of that lack – and of the potential to fill it from external information – is something to cling to. The dementia sufferer is denied the comfort of knowing they don’t remember.

By disintegrating a person’s coherent recollection of their personal history, dementia strips them of their anchorage in the past. Who they were and who they are become muddled; their own identity and those of their loved ones become confused and dissonant. Situations cease to make sense, erupting unexpectedly into a mind that thinks itself in another time or place and cannot hold itself lucidly in the present. Anger, bitterness and horror coexist with fond illusion and placid self-absorption. Practical action becomes impossible. For many, there is a lapse into hallucination, delusion and paranoid suspicion of all around them. Le Pen. Brexit. Trump. These might once have been the punchlines to a joke. But no more. The processes that have brought these names to global attention are nothing less than symptoms of rising cultural dementia. The former great powers of the historic ‘West’, now old in ways that cultures have seldom been before – actually old, demographically speaking, in previously unthinkable terms – seem to be abandoning the wisdom of maturity for senescent daydreams of recovered youth. Along the way they are stirring up old hatreds, giving disturbing voice to destructive rage and risking the collapse of their capacity for decisive, effective and just governance.

At the core of this is an abandonment of political attention to history, understood as a clear empirical grounding in how we reached our present condition. Historical stories abound; but as deployed in public debate they are often little better than dangerous fantasies, constantly at risk of abrupt and jarring collision with reality. Unlike Germany, for example, these countries have never undertaken the painful process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung: the coming to terms with the past that ceases to treat it as a comforting inspiration, and wrestles with the evils it conceals. Not even Germany, of course, has completed such a process irreversibly and entirely happily. Chancellor Merkel’s noble decision to open the nation’s borders to refugees in 2015 created a backlash that helped the anti-immigrant, conservative-nationalist Alternative für Deutschland party to a poll breakthrough in the 2017 Federal elections. However, as has been the case with many far-right movements across Europe, the AfD’s ‘breakthrough’ only netted them one in every eight votes –well below the almost one in five shared by the major forces at the other end of the spectrum, Die Linke and Die Grünen. The presence of groups such as the AfD is an unpleasant component of the ‘new normal’ of global politics, but so far has not produced any dangerously disruptive systematic consequences. Until these groups and their toxic messages are able to claim 30 per cent or more of the vote, we can still reasonably hope that the centre in Germany and elsewhere will hold. By the same token, looking further afield, the manipulation of democratic structures and aggressive chauvinism that Russia regularly deploys is, in the long term, more normal than not for a state that has struggled to tolerate a real civil society at any point in its history. Much like the ruthless control still exercised by the Chinese Communist Party, we can consider it to be deplorable but not catastrophic.

France, the UK and the USA, however, are supposedly the collective cradle of Western democracy, the nations that, quite literally, created the culture of codified constitutions and rights on which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was based. Even if, as we shall see, such a self-image has often been little more than an illusion, it has been a uniquely powerful one – not least in fuelling unhesitating global military and political interventions by all three countries. The current condition of these nations, challenged by powerful bottom-up movements that question all their previously assumed values of openness, does have the potential to be uniquely catastrophic, at least for those of us trapped within these states if not more widely still. How any part of the world would sustain support for democracy if all five permanent members of the UN Security Council were to become open, convinced and militant chauvinists is a question that does not bear too much reflection. Until recently, continued global economic and cultural leadership spared politicians in Washington, London and Paris from the need to confront where their national wealth came from, or how their languages came to dominate the world. Comforting illusions of progress concealed worsening symptoms of relative decline and internal divisions amounting to gross injustice. As economic progress has so visibly come to a halt in the past decade, stripping away that illusion of inexorable improvement, delusion has taken its place. Declarations that immigration can simply be halted, that long-dead industries can be restarted, that crumbling infrastructure can be replaced overnight, and a generous welfare state upheld and extended for the right sort of citizens, have abounded.

These claims, coming from the right and the far-right of the political spectrum, draw the natural condemnation of others further to the left. But it is important to recognise that this is not merely a continuation of old ideological struggles: these developments are even more dangerous because they are self-destructively mistaken. They are detached from the actual history of how our societies took on their current social, economic and cultural forms; and they are wrong about where those societies fit into the world around them. They make no more sense than a dementia sufferer demanding that his carers let him get the train to work in his pyjamas. Just as a confused eighty-yearold cannot bend the world to his perception, so a Brexiting Britain or ‘Great Again’ America cannot return old prosperity to their rustbelts by willing it to happen. This dimension of sheer wish-fulfilment is often neglected in the anguished debates that have raged on the liberal left over what to do for, with or about the ‘working class’ that has voted for such things. A language that articulates ‘legitimate concerns’ about the negative impacts of immigration and globalisation has often resulted, while often neglecting the extent to which such concerns are rehashings of tabloid myths and undisguised racial prejudice. But whether or not the anxieties and desires of these groups are justified in anyone’s eyes by their current experiences matters not at all. They are the deluded product of a detachment from historical context that renders them almost literally meaningless. Following through with these ideas will produce only an ever-accelerating spiral of crisis and suffering, even for those who support them most ardently.

A Couple More

Rutger Bregman is an interesting Netherlands guy who has so far given us “Utopia for Realists”, “Humankind” and “Moral Ambition” . Recently he wrote a fascinating article about AI

So. What do we do? Let me start with what we should not do. There is a temptation to look at all of this and conclude: shut it down. Pull the plug. Bring in the Luddites. Smash the machines.. And I get the impulse. When you stack up the scale of risk, the disregard for democracy, the hubris of the people in charge, the cleanest response feels like a moratorium. Just say no. It is, I think, the wrong answer. The reason is brutally simple. It doesn’t work. Stop the data centers in California, and they get built in Texas. Stop them in Texas, and they get built in Abu Dhabi. Stop them in democracies – the places with civil liberties, with judicial review, with a free press, with worker protections – and you hand the future to autocracies.

My point is not, absolutely not, that we have to let AI rip. My point is that abandoning the field is not the same as stopping the technology. This is the left’s version of climate denial. Refusing to engage seriously, on the assumption that if we just shout no loudly enough, the future will go away. It won’t. So what does work? Three things, at minimum.

• One: State capacity. We need way, way more AI expertise and talent inside the government. The UK was early on this. They built an AI Security Institute: a serious arm of the state that actually evaluates frontier models, the way the FDA evaluates new drugs. I think every serious country needs a well-funded institute like that.

• Two: International coordination. We have been here before. In 1949, the United States and the Soviet Union both had nuclear weapons, and humanity briefly looked extinction in the eye. Out of that came treaties. Imperfect, yes, but they bought us decades of survival. We need something equivalent for AI.

• Three: The free world has to build.. The US – with its increasingly fascist government – currently owns 74% of the world’s compute, China has 14%, Europe less than 7% and all other countries combined less than 5%. I’m really worried about the middle powers, and Europe in particular. So far, Europe has been pretty good at regulating AI, but terrible at building it. In fact, all the American giants – Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Alphabet – are individually worth more than the entire German or French stock market.

The good news is that Europe does have more leverage than it often thinks. The company ASML for example is less than an hour from where I am right now in the Netherlands. It makes the lithography machines without which TSMC in Taiwan cannot fabricate the chips, without which Anthropic and OpenAI cannot train their models. The democratic countries, working together, still control significant chokepoints in this supply chain. That is real power. But my fellow progressives in Europe really need to understand that our welfare state, our way of life, is at stake. Just think it through. If AI does much of the work, but the profits flow to a handful of American giants that we barely tax – while European workers lose their jobs – then the tax base that funds our healthcare, our pensions, our unemployment insurance just… evaporates. There’s one thing I can’t emphasize enough: democratic, liberal and humanitarian values are wonderful, but they are worthless if you don’t have the strength to back them up. And in this new world, compute is the new power. So no more NIMBY-ism. We need massive investments and fast permitting of data centers to keep up, or we’ll be digitally colonized. Anyone who’s not at the table will be on the menu. Now, none of this works – none of it – without a positive vision. And this, I think, is where liberals and the left have most badly failed. Twelve years ago, I wrote a book called “Utopia for Realists”. I complained that the left mainly knew what it was against. Against austerity, against the establishment, against homophobia, against racism, against billionaires. But it lacked a positive vision of where it wanted to go. My argument was that we should stop being so timid in our political imagination. I argued for a universal basic income, for the complete eradication of poverty, and I argued for a goal that the brilliant economist John Maynard Keynes laid out almost a century ago, in 1930…the fifteen-hour work week. Keynes thought it was inevitable. He looked at the trajectory of productivity growth and concluded that by 2030 his grandchildren would be working a quarter as much as he did, because the machines would be doing the rest. The strange thing is, he was right about the productivity, but he was wrong about who would benefit. The fifteen-hour work week was technically achievable by the 1980s, but it didn’t happen because the productivity gains were captured. By capital, shareholders, and a rentier class. So wages stagnated, hours rose, and inequality exploded.

If we let AI play out the same way, this is what we’ll get: a handful of trillionaires who will own the tools that do most of the world’s productive labor. Everyone else will be redundant – not in the dignified, retire-early-and-take-up-gardening sense, but in the cruel, anxious, gig-economy sense. Universal poverty in a world of unimaginable abundance. And yet, I believe there’s another path. The path some of the greatest thinkers actually promised us. Benjamin Franklin predicted that four hours of work a day would eventually be enough. John Stuart Mill thought technology should be used to shorten the workweek as much as possible. Karl Marx imagined a world where we could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and discuss philosophy after dinner. And Oscar Wilde looked forward to the day when intelligent machines would become, in his words, “the property of all.” The whole point of building the most productive economy in history was that we would no longer have to spend our lives doing work that bored us, just to put food on the table. So I think we should demand much more than just AI safety. We should demand AI that’s built to help us flourish. That dream, the real dream of modernity, is finally within reach. Universal basic wealth: every citizen with an automatic stake in the productive infrastructure of their society. Full unemployment, in the original meaning of that phrase: freedom from forced labour. The zero-hour work week, finally. That was the promise. But none of it happens automatically. Remember: the eight-hour workday was not given to us, we took it from the robber barons. Twenty years ago, Al Gore stood on his scissor lift and showed us a line that went off the chart. The world he warned us about did arrive, but the political response was so weak and so half-hearted, that we are now living with consequences. We are about to make the same mistake, perhaps even worse, because this timeline is shorter. In 2005, climate denial was a problem of the right, and the left rolled its eyes. In 2026, AI denial is a problem of the left, and the oligarchs are laughing. So I want to be very direct, especially with the people who think of themselves as my political family. Stop the denial. Stop pretending this is hype. Stop calling it a lumbering stochastic pattern-matching parrot. Wake up and pay attention. Vote for politicians who aren’t in the pockets of big tech. Build state capacity. Push your governments into international coalitions that actually have leverage. Demand transparency. Demand safety standards. Demand a share of the wealth. And dare to fight for a wildly better future.

What is Economics For? - rethinking a discipline in crisis is an excellent book by 
Richard Murphy (2026)

Economics is supposed to explain how the world works. It does not. Or rather, it explains how a particular version of the world works, which is one that suits those who benefit most from the arrangements it describes and defends. This book is an attempt to do something different. Over the past fifty years, since I first sat down to study economics as an undergraduate, I have been wrestling with a discipline that seemed to me, even then, to be asking the wrong questions in the wrong way for the wrong reasons. The intervening decades have not changed that view. If anything, they have confirmed it.

What I have done here is return to the questions that economics should always have been asking but largely has not. I have done so by taking fifty thinkers economists, philosophers, historians, scientists, and moral reformers, who have in come way influenced by own thinking for better or worse over that time and asked what the most important question raised by each of them might be, and what answering it honestly would require of us today. These are not comfortable questions. They are questions about justice, power, money, democracy, and the limits of the planet we inhabit. They are questions about why;

• we tolerate poverty in wealthy societies,

• why we allow finance to destabilise the lives of ordinary people,

• why we pretend that the household budget of a currency-issuing

government is the same as a family trying to make ends meet at the end of

the month, and

• why we have built a global economy that is consuming the conditions of its

own survival.

The thinkers gathered here span millennia and traditions. Some are celebrated insiders; others spent their careers as awkward voices that mainstream economics found it convenient to ignore. Some I agree with almost entirely; others I have included precisely because I believe their errors are instructive. All of them, in their different ways, illuminate something that the dominant economics of our age prefers to leave in the dark.

The book is organised as a journey — from the moral foundations of economics, through its origins as a discipline, through the realities of capitalism and the failures of the frameworks designed to manage it, to the thinkers who have tried to imagine something better. It ends with me. That was not my original intention. It was suggested by colleagues whose judgment I trust, and I have accepted their case, not out of vanity, but because this series, in the end, is about where fifty years of thinking has led, and it seemed honest to say so. Each chapter asks a question. I believe these are the questions that matter most. Whether economics, as currently practised, can answer them is another matter. My view, which will become clear enough as you read, is that it mostly cannot — not because the questions are too hard, but because answering them honestly would require the discipline to confront the interests it has spent too long serving. That is what this book is for.

More Books

Autocrats Can’t Always Get What They Want ed Brown et al (2024)

In this book, we choose to investigate authoritarianism from the inside out in order to make distinctions that better explain when and how authoritarian institutions can manage their own activity, develop and pursue their own political interests, and exhibit a distinctive agency that warrants independent

consideration. We look within the sprawling body of the authoritarian state to better appreciate how its institutions operate and, further, to draw attention to the possibility that authoritarian institutions might serve themselves just as much as their political masters or public clienteles.

The point of departure in our project is conceptual. This introductory chapter explains why a new theoretical approach to authoritarian politics is not just warranted but necessary. Our task here is to examine why existing conceptions of authoritarianism so commonly seem to obscure the analysis of state institutions as autonomous entities, even though those entities can sometimes—but certainly not always—carry tremendous weight in policymaking and enforcement across the heterogeneous swathe of today’s authoritarian countries.

• We begin first by developing our account of how authoritarianism operates in broad strokes—and, specifically, by outlining our argument on the conditions that allow state institutions (the operating machinery of authoritarian politics) to achieve real autonomy when performing their roles.

• Second, we work to establish conceptual clarity by detailing how this book defines “authoritarianism” and “institutions,” as well as by highlighting how the ways in which we fall in line with existing definitions (and why) are just as intellectually provocative as the ways in which we diverge.

• Third, we show why conducting institutional analysis in authoritarian systems has become so tricky and why there is a strong impulse (which we wish to resist but not fully abandon) to place much of the analytical spotlight on autocrats—as opposed to the institutions themselves.

• Finally, we explore how forging a new path forward will require renewing our efforts—and recovering some older efforts—to tease out the boundaries and distinctions among rulers, regimes, and states in authoritarian settings.

How Does Authoritarianism Work—for Those Who Work It?

Much of the current interest in authoritarian politics has inherited an intellectual genealogy taken from the quirks and interests of a scholarly community that grew very interested in democracy, democratization, and transitions in the late twentieth century. Scholars have since developed some very good tools to understand how long authoritarianism lasts and what happens when it breaks down. But these tools do not always lend themselves to good answers when our question shifts from explaining regime change and persistence to asking how authoritarian governance operates most of the time—the quotidian life of authoritarian rule that occupies the attention of most such regimes and the people they rule the vast majority of the time.

The End of Violence Gary Slutkin (2026)

I am a scientist by training, an internal medicine and infectious disease physician and then an epidemiologist. I have spent a large portion of my career working to contain epidemic outbreaks in many areas of the world, from tuberculosis in San Francisco to cholera in Somalia to AIDS in Africa and Asia, and I have seen many diseases up close in city ERs, rural clinics, and makeshift field hospitals. I’ve had the opportunity to lead teams to stop the spread of disease in

refugee camps, villages, and cities and even helped design some strategies

for global containment at the World Health Organization.

And what I began to see that summer of Yummy’s killing in Chicago and what I can tell you now with certainty is this: Violence is a contagious disease. I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean that violence infects a population via the same rules and processes as other infectious diseases: Exposure leads to infection, which progresses to disease, which leads to transmission and further exposure. Violence is often thought of as a social disorder or a moral problem. Some people believe it is inherent in human nature, that it has always been with us and always will be. I do not see it that way at all. It makes sense that in trying to better understand violence, we would focus on the morality of those engaging in it or the social context that might make someone more likely to do so. But these discussions obscure the scientific reality that violence is a disease state, one that infects our brains and bodies, impairs and alters their functions, and spreads on exposure from one person to another. Like other infections, those who come into contact with violence are at risk of contracting it. And in the absence of the right care, those who contract it are at risk of progressing to severe disease. Current versions of the International Classification of Diseases include violence, and there are over a hundred studies showing that violence is contagious like TB, influenza, smallpox, polio, cholera, and COVID. It can spread just as rapidly and be just as devastating—if not more—for individuals, families, and communities. Like many diseases, it strikes every person and community differently and exacerbates existing inequalities. And all too often, it completely overwhelms attempts to contain it.

Underground – my life with SDS and the Weathermen Mark Rudd (2009)
Just as the sub-title says, a rather self-indulgent account of a US young 
man’s memoirGlobal Justice – a plan for equality and prosperity within planetary boundaries World Inequality 
Lab (2026) 

The Global Justice Report describes desirable future scenarios combining two key goals: socioeconomic equality (including full equality between countries, full gender equality in labour hours and pay, sharp compression of within country income and wealth scales, combined with fair access to education, health and political voice), and planetary habitability (aligning global resource use within ecological boundaries, including a limitation of global temperature rise below 2°C).

To avoid climate catastrophes, we show that sufficiency is required: a structural transformation of the economy involving shorter working hours, a lower material footprint, a shift from material-intensive sectors toward relatively immaterial sectors such as education and health, and major changes in food systems and land use. Rapid decarbonization of energy systems is also necessary, as is the sharp compression of income and wealth inequality. This compression is both a social justice objective and a condition for financing necessary climate investment and human capital expenditure and for sustaining political support from bottom- and middle-income classes in both the North and the South.

About Normality

 Last month “Peripheral Vision” saw the highest number of clisks – 260,297 of them. I am indeed very flattered to have received so many….meaning we must get something right...

Richard Murphy is an interesting British economist/tax expert who has just 
released a fascinating post about “normality” which is one of the best things he’s 
written.

From description to prescription

What had begun as a statistical description gradually acquired social significance. The average person became defined as the normal person. The normal person then became the desirable person. Before long, institutions began to organise themselves around assumptions about what such a person should be. What had started as mathematics slowly became morality.That tansformation occurred at exactly the moment when industrial society was emerging:

• Governments were becoming larger and more sophisticated.

• Public education systems were being created.

• Factories were employing vast workforces.

• Cities were expanding rapidly.

• Entire populations were increasingly being organised through institutions that depended upon standardisation.

And for all these new organisations, the idea of normality proved extraordinarily useful. Schools could be designed around assumptions concerning how children learned. Employers could make assumptions about how workers behaved. Administrators could create systems based on expectations about what citizens might do. Doctors could compare patients against established norms.The concept of the normal person provided a benchmark around which an increasingly complex society could organise itself. Let me stress, this was not necessarily or entirely a bad thing. Large-scale institutions do require generalisations. No education system can funct ion without assumptions about learning. No healthcare system can function without assumptions about health. No government can function without categories and classifications. An issue did emerge, though. The problem arose when averages ceased to be descriptive and became prescriptive. An average tells us what is common. It does not tell us what is desirable. Yet the distinction between those two ideas became increasingly blurred. The normal person was no longer simply a statistical construct. The normal person became an aspiration. As a result, people increasingly came to be judged according to their proximity to a norm. Those who approximated to it were regarded as successful. Those who diverged from it increasingly became subjects of concern. The consequences of this shift can be found throughout modern society:

• Educational systems identify those who do not fit expected learning patterns.

• Labour markets classify those who do not participate in expected ways.

• Public policy increasingly categorises citizens according to their relationship with social norms.

Sometimes this has undoubtedly been beneficial. Public health programmes, mass education and social security systems all relied upon the capacity to understand populations at scale. But the same process also encouraged a particular way of thinking about human beings:

• People increasingly became problems to be solved.

• Differences increasingly became deviations to be explained.

• Variation increasingly became something that institutions sought to manage.

The more I look at modern politics, the more I think we still live within the world Quetelet helped create, with all the problems that have flowed from it The language might have changed, but the assumptions that flowed from Qutelet’s work remain remarkably familiar. For example, when politicians talk about:

• working people,

• hard-working families,

• productive citizens,

• employability,

• social mobility or

• educational attainment, they are frequently doing more than describing reality. They are implicitly comparing people with an imagined norm. They are invoking a model citizen against whom success can be measured.

That model citizen is rarely described explicitly. Most of the time, we are simply expected to know who they are. The reason this matters is that much of twentieth-century politics can be understood as an argument about how best to create that model citizen. The political right and the political left might have claimed to disagree profoundly about ownership, markets, the state, and the distribution of power, and maybe they did disagree in that way in my youth. Despite that, they have shared a surprising amount of common ground when it came to assumptions about expertise, administration and social improvement. Both have always believed:

• that society could be improved,

• institutions could help achieve that improvement,

• outcomes of change could be measured, and

• progress involves bringing more people closer to an accepted social norm.

That common thinking has shaped almost every major political movement of the last century. It also helps explain why so many of our current political debates feel simultaneously intense and strangely unsatisfactory. The argument is presented as a conflict between competing visions of society. In practice, I now wonder whether it is actually a dispute between competing definitions of normality.

Gates, Fabianism and the management of society; The more I have thought about this issue, the more I have come to suspect that much of twentieth-century politics was conducted within a framework that neither side seriously questioned. The great political battles of the age were real enough. There were arguments about:

• ownership,

• taxation,

• welfare or social security (depending on perspective),

• public services,

• labour rights, and

• economic management.

They still matter. But beneath those disputes lay a deeper agreement about the nature of society itself. Both left and right increasingly came to believe that society could be improved through expertise, which meant that:

• social problems could be identified through research,

• institutions could be designed to produce better outcomes,

• progress could be measured, and

• there were broadly accepted norms against which that progress might be judged.

The differences between the sides in the debate concerned who should undertake this work, through which institutions it should be undertaken, and to whom that work should be accountable. The right increasingly gravitated towards a model associated with Frederick Taylor Gates. Gates, like Quetelet, is now largely forgotten, but in many respects, he was one of the architects of modern philanthropy. He worked with John D. Rockefeller. Doing so, he helped pioneer the idea that private wealth could be used systematically to reshape society through large-scale institutions devoted to education, medicine, public health and research. This resulted in the Flexner Report, which has shaped the history of modern medicine since its publication in 1910. I have already considered the consequences of that report here. The significance of Gates lay not simply in his belief that social problems could be solved. Many people believed that. What distinguished him was his conviction that solutions could be designed, tested and implemented by experts operating through carefully constructed institutions. This was not charitable in the traditional sense. It was deliberate social engineering. The argument he and Rockefeller put forward was that their purpose was not simply to alleviate suffering but to improve society itself, albeit in the way their philanthropy desired. They defined the terms. The theme remains familiar today. The beneficiaries of this approach were often real enough. Universities expanded. Medical research was advanced. Public health improved. There is no point pretending otherwise. Yet the underlying assumption remained that experts could identify desirable outcomes and then create institutions capable of delivering them. The Fabian tradition, founded in the UK in 1884, shared much of this outlook. Sidney and Beatrice Webb are often remembered as architects of the welfare state and important influences on modern social democracy. Their politics differed profoundly from those associated with Rockefeller philanthropy. Yet their intellectual assumptions were often remarkably similar. The Fabians also trusted expertise and research, and believed that institutions could be designed to improve society, whilst believing that social progress could be planned.There was, however, a difference between their thinking. Where Gates looked to foundations, philanthropy and philanthropists as those to whom those promoting social change should be accountable, the Fabians looked to the state. Where Gates relied upon private wealth, the Fabians relied upon public authority. But both traditions saw society as something that could be managed. Both believed that intelligent administration could improve outcomes. Both placed extraordinary faith in the capacity of institutions to shape human behaviour. The similarities and differences can perhaps be summarised like this:

There's then a fascinating table which I'm not allowed to reproduce - so please look at it yourself

The table is, of course, a simplification. No historical tradition is ever quite as tidy as a table suggests. Nonetheless, I think it captures something important. The great political argument of the twentieth century was often not about whether society should be administered. It was about who should administer it. The right trusted philanthropic institutions and private expertise. The left trusted government and public expertise.

Hyperpolitics – extreme politicisation without political consequences 
Anton Jaeger (2026) 

reviews
https://cosmonautmag.com/2026/03/against-civil-society-a-review-of-anton-jagers-hyperpolitics/ 
https://jacobin.com/2026/02/hyperpolitics-jager-institutions-media-review 
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/anton-J%C3%A4ger-palmer-daniele-pope-francis-hyperpolitics-review

ON EDGAR MORIN

Morin died on 29 May at the glorious age of 104 – for those who don’t know Morin, this is his Wikipedia entry and this wonderful short article does him justice

For those wanting more I recommend this recent collection of  his essays 
The Challenge of Complexity Edgar Morin (2023) edited by Amy Heath-Carpentier

Edgar Morin is a thinker for our times. In a rapidly changing, interconnected world, full of uncertainty, facing what he has called “a crisis of the future,” Morin’s work provides a guide for the complexity of the challenges before us. How can we make sense of this new world, in the throes of a transformation, a world that seems to hover perilously close to the abyss? Morin is fond of quoting the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset: “No sabemos lo que nos pasa y eso es precisamente lo que nos pasa”. We don’t know what is happening to us, and that is exactly what is happening.

And yet there seems to be an overwhelming desire for certainty. Wherever we turn we see the return of fundamentalisms, absolutisms, and the anxious, at times delirious search to have the feeling of certainty that neuroscience suggests is even more important to us than actually understanding what is going on (Burton, 2008). In many countries, the level of public discourse has become so polarized and profoundly disturbing precisely because in this cauldron of change, punctuated by the horrors of terrorism, pandemics, racism, bombings, wars, poverty, injustice, and hopelessness, so many voices seem to speak with absolute certainty and such unwillingness to listen to other perspectives. It is so tempting to fall back on simple solutions, on scapegoating, on the certainty of solutions whether technological or political. It is so easy to ignore the global and local complexities and reduce multidimensional, systemic problems to one single answer. And it is so frightening to admit we don’t really know what’s going on. In the face of complexity, the great temptation is to simplify to the point of simplification, to seek simplistic interpretations, and simplistic solutions. But simplification abstracts and isolates. It hides the relational nature of systems, their interactions and interdependencies with their environments, with other systems, with time, with the observer (Morin, 1981). And in an interconnected, interdependent world that is rapidly changing, that is at the heart of the problem. A new world cannot be created with the same way of thinking of the world that is dying.

Homeland Earth – a manifeso for the new millennium Edgar Morin (1999)

How to Change the World EBA anthology (2022)

Complex Thought – an overview of Edgar Morin's 
Intellectual journey Mortuori


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