Only 38,000 clicks so far this month – compared with some 450.000 last month. That’s less than one tenth of last months’. So far, so bad! Hopefully I’ll be able to reach 45,000 by the end of the month?
An Honest Day Mark McVitie (2026) An unusual pamphlet (with 100 odd pages)
which argues that
Britain has built an economy where holding position or owning things pays better than putting in an honest day’s work. Holding scarce assets, occupying protected market positions, navigating process, gaming broken systems and capturing profit from state‐created scarcity have become safer routes to reward than working, building, investing, teaching, caring, manufacturing or taking productive risk.
Conclusion
Britain does not lack people willing to work, build, care, teach, invent, manufacture, serve, take risks or do the right thing. It lacks a settlement that rewards them.
For too long, the country has asked people to keep their side of the bargain while quietly withdrawing the rest. Work no longer reliably buys a good life; the state taxes heavily but cannot deliver visibly; markets in essentials reward scarcity; and the institutions of common life have thinned. The public knows the rules are rigged, and mainstream politics has too often offered either denial, compensation or management.
Nostalgia will not do. The post‐war settlement cannot be restore. The Thatcher settlement cannot be unleashed again. The New Labour settlement cannot be revived by wishing the world of the 2000s back into existence.
Austerity has left no hidden reserve of state capacity to draw on. The country needs a new and actively forged settlement. This begins by naming the moral line: work and initiative against extraction. It then names the institutional truth: extraction persists because the state has lost capability. The governing task then being to rebuild a democratic state able to choose, build, enforce and be held accountable, so that the conditions of productive life in Great Britain are restored.
This is a pro‐market argument: competition where competition is possible, hard obligations where competition is not, and public authority willing to confront rent‐seeking, capture and monopoly position. It is also a pro‐state argument, but for a state that does fewer things than the current state pretends to do and does the things only it can do seriously.
It is a demand for multiple economic engines, not an attack on London; and it is a demand that success follow from action, contribution and risk rather than position, scarcity and gaming. The fight will be hard because the winners from the present settlement are organised. Landholders, incumbents, process industries, extractive owners, regulatory moats, consultancy dependency, parts of the political‐ administrative class and the populists who thrive on decline will resist. That resistance is not a reason to retreat. It is proof that the line has been drawn in the right place.
The people who sustain Britain have waited too long for politics to take their side in more than language. They do not need another account of how difficult everything is. They need a government willing to say who the country is for, what must be confronted, and what must be built.
An honest day's work should once again lead to security, agency and dignity. That is the promise. The machinery of the old settlement will not deliver it. This one, if we have the courage to deliver it and the will to believe in it, will.
Europe 2031 (2026) a short, interesting pamphlet (only 68 pages) which argues
that we in Europe are indeed facing revolutionary change with Artificial Intelligence
but does so using a highly personalised approach. Ideal for the cynical me! America’s AI Action Plan (2025) an even shorter (just 28 pages) document Invitation to a Banquet – the story of Chinese Food Fuschia Dunlop (2020) Shaped by the State – toward a new poitical history of the 20th century
ed B Cebul et al (2019)
The chapters in part 1, “Building Leviathan,” point to the emergence of the New Deal state and its discontents as they were constructed and reconstructed through the crises of depression and war. The essays suggest that as state builders confronted structural realities and limitations inherited from earlier eras as well as broader contemporary social and structural realities, the state they built entrenched and developed certain governing logics—accommodation with Jim Crow, techniques of surveillance, public-private partnerships, cultivation of highly contingent labor markets, and profound but obscure interventions on behalf of maintaining the fiction of free markets. These chapters emphasize not only the expansive and pervasive dimensions of the New Deal state but also the ways in which Americans understood and grappled with the reality of this powerful and diffuse, yet increasingly distant national government. They beyond red and blue also emphasize the overlapping and often constitutive relationships between modern liberalism, modern conservatism, and phenomena associated with neoliberalism.
Connolly offers important insight into the troubling history of African Americans’ relationship to midcentury liberalism. In Connolly’s telling, liberalism often cultivated African American partners in its recourse to markets, its endorsement of state violence, its pragmatic embrace of paternalistic alliances, and its reliance on brokered rather than direct democracy. The result was the maintenance of white supremacy that transcended the ostensible high-water marks of the civil rights era. In his exploration of these dynamics, Connolly locates striking lines of continuity between the seemingly distinct political crises of black disfranchisement and modern neoliberalism, which is too often defined as a crisis of the white working class.
In their chapter on the complex legacies of New Deal federalism, Brent Cebul and Mason Williams argue that red-blue binaries, which often took on regional dimensions (e.g., the “conservative” South and the “liberal” North), have led scholars to miss the centrality of the New Deal in creating not only urban liberalism but also Sunbelt conservatism. By mapping the New Deal’s reliance on loosely regulated fiscal relationships between national and local governments and public and private actors, Cebul and Williams excavate the importance of local politics in shaping the day-to-day realities of the New Deal and postwar state. In their recounting of New Deal federalism, the legacies of Progressive Era reform, the contingent brent cebul, lily geismer, and mason b. williams development of mass democratic publics, Jim Crow, the subtleties of fiscal federalism, the long history of public-private partnerships, and the fierce competition between local elites over the spoils of federal spending emerge as significant factors shaping not only what the New Deal accomplished but also how local actors—urban progressives and Sunbelt boosters alike—remembered and misremembered the importance of the New Deal as they constructed and reconstructed their political ideologies.
Far from snuffing out the centrality of the market and market actors in Americans’ political and cultural imagination, the development of the leviathan state proceeded through market forces and ironically redoubled Americans’ recourse to markets as alternatives to increasingly unwieldy or undemocratic governing institutions. As David M. P. Freund argues in his study of New Deal era financial policy, a new economic orthodoxy emerged around public debt and the money supply that justified unprecedented state interventions between 1932, when Herbert Hoover signed the first Glass-Steagall Act, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s passage of the Banking Act of 1935. Yet as Freund reveals, politicians and economists from across the political spectrum masked the implications of the government’s new stake in finance, arguing that it mattered not whether public or private assets “stood behind” the currency’s value. Instead, Freund argues that the “U.S. state fundamentally remade the financial landscape in the twentieth century by collateralizing it with public resources,” and that the state’s new powers would be essential to financing unprecedented postwar growth. Freund ultimately contends that policy makers and economists, liberals and conservatives, have been complicit in obscuring this transformation by portraying the value of modern money as purely market driven, further submerging the role of the state and helping maintain fictions of free markets and limited government.
In part 2, “Crisis and Continuity,” the chapters explore the ways in which earlier techniques of governance and experiences of citizenship became renegotiated and amplified through a subsequent period of crisis, the 1970s. The essays identify not only deep continuities between historical techniques of what we might call neoliberal governance but also continuities and convergences between the experiences of contingent forms of citizenship and citizens’ perspectives on the state itself. To be sure, changes in the global political economy and the rights revolutions of the 1960s refashioned the relationships between state and society, state and market, and the lived experience of the leviathan state. But they did not rewrite these relationships on a clean slate. Rather, through a particular emphasis on the 1970s, the chapters suggest ways in which these relationships became recast in the context of earlier state developments and dependencies.
Expanding on themes introduced by Connolly, Andrew Kahrl reveals that racial and ethnic depredations of the U.S. political economy extended and intensified after the Great Society. By focusing on state and local tax-policy administration, Kahrl uncovers a variety of bureaucratic and administrative practices used to punish and exploit the poor and politically disfranchised. Providing a new way to think about the tax politics of the 1970s, Kahrl maps unseen sites of discrimination and chronicles the double injury that myths about black tax delinquency and the undemocratic state have perpetuated: abetting a misguided radical anti-tax, promarket, and antigovernment mood that infects both parties and which simultaneously enforces a locally based, regressively redistributionary tax regime. In his chapter, Suleiman Osman reveals that the “politics of scale” that emerged in the 1970s cut across the ideological and partisan divides and reflected a yearning for both a return to the local and a quest to harness new globalizing capacities. Osman points out the existing limitations in many of the historiographical understandings of that “pivotal decade” and instead calls for an approach that attends to the codevelopment of global and local political outlooks. Through close attention to varieties of political expression and experience on the ground, Osman roots the emergence of neoliberal policy prescriptions not only in the crisis of the national state but also in a multivalent quest to cultivate governing local and global capacities capable of maintaining continuities of rights and opportunity.
Stuart Schrader suggests that looking beyond national boundaries can provide new ways of understanding how the New Deal state evolved over time and ultimately generated what is perhaps the fundamental social and political crisis of our time: the crisis of black, male incarceration. Like Freund, he explores the way political narratives can obscure forms of state power, and, like Igo, he uncovers roots of the neoliberal surveillance state in New Deal and postwar state-building projects—in his case, abroad. Schrader examines the literature surrounding the “carceral state” and spotlights how the turn toward transnationalism or “the U.S. in the world” has been notably absent. By tracking institutions both inside and outside the state, including law-enforcement agencies and professional organizations, Schrader demonstrates the need beyond red and blue for close empirical attention to the transnational dimensions of the carceral state, suggesting that key aspects of the construction of a postwar U.S. empire have come home to roost. The final essay in the volume, by Rachel Moran, also challenges prevailing ideas of culture wars politics of the last decades of the twentieth century. Moran demonstrates shifting cultural perceptions of the state, following as liberals moved from subsidizing a mass consumer economy in the postwar years to regulatory policing of the family-consumer economy in the 1970s. While scholars have illuminated the gender dynamics of specific policy regimes, Moran reveals how gendered metaphors for specific policies, in this case the Federal Trade Commission’s efforts to regulate commercials targeting children, shaped the language Americans used to describe the state itself. While these terms have surely taken on partisan valences, Moran reveals how such gendered metaphors were animated by anxieties about big government that also emerged across the Atlantic in other Western democracies in crisis, and in the process reshaped the very meanings of liberalism and conservatism at home.
The volume ends with two synthetic conclusions. In the first, Kim Phillips-Fein offers a more sharply delineated appraisal of the promise and perils of the emerging neoliberalism paradigm, suggesting as well auspicious new sites of historical study and analysis. In the second, Matthew Lassiter explores how the kind of political history suggested by this volume (and the works that inspired it) will provide ways to move beyond the emphasis on critical elections, partisan realignment, polarization, and totalizing narratives of neoliberalism. Lassiter’s is also an implicit call to unify the flourishing if fragmented fields of inquiry concerned with the relationship between state power, capitalism, and the experiences of citizenship—of uniting disciplines attuned to both crisis and continuity in political history.
Country ot Lords Kim Phillips-Fein (2026) an interesting critique of the
The historian Kim Phillips-Fein’s new book is published amid celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the declaration of independence and its truth “self-evident, that all men are created equal”. Country of Lords, however, is a history of Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America.
Concise and hard-hitting, the book arrives at a time of glaring social and
economic inequality, Phillips-Fein seeing Elon Musk “emerging as a trillionaire
very much on people’s minds, with a deep level of discomfort, both fear and anger
about what this portends”. “It’s always hard to know what’s going to be happening when you have written a
book,” she said. “But I think those questions about economic equality and the
impact of extreme levels of economic hierarchy and concentration, and the
questions, ‘Can you still have a democracy any longer? What are the ways that
you can counter that? What alternate visions are there if you want to live in a
world that’s not characterized that way?’, are present.” Phillips-Fein studies conservatism and “questions about capitalism and democracy”.
Her first book, Invisible Hands, was a study of businessmen who fought the New Deal
of the 1930s. Her second, Fear City, about the New York economic crisis of the 1970s,
was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize. Hers is a major voice. It’s also unique.
Not many books start with founder John Adams and end with Peter Thiel of Palantir,
Musk’s fellow techno-fascist. Might such company seem unfair on Adams, the Boston
lawyer who was part of a great revolution but feared what was unleashed? “I hope this comes through,” Phillips-Fein said. “Adams is very different from
[steel magnate] Andrew Carnegie and [Yale professor] William Graham
Sumner and the late
19th-century social Darwinists, and the pro-slavery advocates. He’s also definitely
very different from people who are saying extreme levels of economic inequality
are good.” Adams, however, was “very ambivalent and skeptical of egalitarian claims
… during and after the French Revolution: a deep sense of you can have too much
egalitarianism. “In his writing, he does also give a strong kind of conservative temperament and foundational sense of the problems of arguing for greater equality and a deep wariness and sense of pessimism about a politics that claims to do that.”
And so Adams takes his place in Country of Lords. Other subjects include
preachers of race-based inequality from George Fitzhugh, a Confederate
theorist of slavery as natural good, to Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, a hack
journalist who had a huge bestseller in 1920 with The Rising Tide of Color
Against White World-Supremacy, “part of a larger intellectual subculture of
‘scientific’ racism … in the aftermath of world war one”. There is also
Carnegie, the Scottish-born tycoon who flourished in the Gilded Age of the
late 19th century. “What makes Carnegie so interesting is that he at least allows himself to
have some sense of ambivalence,” Phillips-Fein said. “He says that while
the concentration of wealth is absolutely necessary and inevitable, and
the people at the top … should have the ultimate say over resources, he is
deeply aware that this is politically dangerous, that … it creates an unstable
society in which the poor and the working class might actually hate the
wealthy, and that’s not in the interest of the wealthy in the long run. Also,
he has a sense that human brotherhood is lost, or some kind of community
that had existed.” Carnegie’s father was a Chartist, seeking working-class rights. Carnegie’s
major outlet for doubts about his wealth came through philanthropy,
prominently the construction of libraries for working people. “He had a very deep sense of paternalism,” Phillips-Fein said. “He was
very invested in the idea of business as a romance and kind of a space of
adventure and conquest and feudal benevolence. I think Carnegie’s answer
was ultimately that the wealthy should have their money but they shouldn’t
bequeath much to their descendants, they should invest it in massive
philanthropic projects, and this was better than raising wages or other things
like that … It is his level of guilt and ambivalence that I think does make him
appealing, if also troubling. I think it raises a set of questions that he certainly
was never really able to resolve.” The 1892 Carnegie Steel strike and its
violent suppression devastated Homestead, Pennsylvania, and left
Carnegie disillusioned. Country of Lords is also a primer on modern
inequality. Invisible Hands – the business men’s crusade against the New Deal Kim
Phillips-Fein (2016) These Wild English – a family, a class, a country on fire Nicola Wilding (2026) An amazing and powerful memoir written by someone who is a documentarist
by trade and which focuses largely on her mother’s membership of the English
League and her participation in its protests.
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