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


This month at 12 noon I hit 255,000 clicks!

WHY READ?

I was struck by this post but even more so by the comment from one of its correspondents 

Part of the issue is that many nonfiction books feel overextended now. A great 5,000-word idea gets stretched into 250 pages because that’s what publishing economics rewards. At the other extreme, Twitter/X is usually too fragmented and performative to provide the kind of sustained mental stimulation I actually crave, which is probably why I use it less than I once did.

Substack essays hit a surprisingly good middle ground. A strong essay often contains more intellectual density per minute than the average nonfiction book. In my youth I used to joke that the average person wasn’t as interesting as the average book. Now I’m tempted to say that the average book is not as interesting as the average Substack.

So why do I insist on “reading” so many books? – if that is the right verb for the 
flicking I normally do to books. Obviously I hope to learn something from them 
– but I have been disappointed so many times, I should know better by now. 
But still I persevere.. why?

Seven Myths about Democracy J Moeller and SE Skaaning (2026). Looks an interesting read
Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel – intellectual biography and critical balance-sheet 
ed Domenico Losurdo (2020) I’ve always wanted to know more about the guy
The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium Martin Gurri (2018)

My thesis is a simple one. We are caught between an old world which is decreasingly able to sustain us intellectually and spiritually, maybe even materially, and a new world that has not yet been born. Given the character of the forces of change, we may be stuck for decades in this ungainly posture. You who are young today may not live to see its resolution.

Famous landmarks of the old regime, like the daily newspaper and the political party, have begun to disintegrate under the pressure of this slow motion collision. Many features we prized about the old world are also threatened: for example, liberal democracy and economic stability. Some of them will emerge permanently distorted by the stress. Others will just disappear. Many attributes of the new dispensation, like a vastly larger sphere for public discussion, may also warp or break from the immoveable resistance of the established order. In this war of the worlds, my concern is that we not end up with the worst of all possible worlds. Each side in the struggle has a standard-bearer: authority for the old industrial scheme that has dominated globally for a century and a half, the public for the uncertain dispensation striving to become manifest. The two protagonists share little in common, other than humanity—and each probably doubts the humanity of the other.

My thesis, again, is a simple one. The information technologies of the twenty first century have enabled the public, composed of amateurs, people from nowhere, to break the power of the political hierarchies of the industrial age. The result hasn’t been a completed revolution in the manner of 1789 and 1917, or utter collapse as in 1991, but more like the prolonged period of instability that preceded the settlement of Westphalia in 1648. Neither side can wipe out the other. A resolution, when it comes, may well defy the terms of the struggle. None is remotely visible as I write these lines. If my thesis is true, we have entered a historical period of revolutionary change that cannot achieve consummation. Institutions are drained of trust and legitimacy, but survive in a zombie-like state. Governments get toppled or voted out, but are replaced by their mirror images. Hierarchies are brought low, but refuse to yield the illusion of top-down control. Hence the worship of the heroic past, the psychology of decadence—the sense, so remarkable in a time of radical impermanence, that there’s nothing new under the sun.

The Technocratic International – experts and the making of a world from nowhere 
Jan Eijking (2026) reviewed here   
Global Warming – a very short introduction Mark Maslin (2004) 
I’m a great fan of these short Intros – even if this one is 177 pages!
The Pursuit of Equallty in the West Aldo Schiavone (2022) One of the books which 
deserves the crit in the first post
The Return of Political Patronage? How special advisers are taking the place of civil 
servants and why we should worry about it Alasdair Palmer (2015) 
A suitably short (at 96 pages!) pamphlet
Hothouse Earth Bill McGuire (2022)

afterword If you have made it this far, I suspect you may either be seething 
at what you perceive to be gratuitous alarmism or biting your nails with worry. To
those who feel that what I have had to say is alarmist, I say this:
in the sense of drawing attention to how bad things can get as the
planet continues to heat up, I am certainly raising the alarm, and I don’t 
apologise for this. But alarmist? No. There is no exaggeration of the 
dangers here, no hyperbole. All the material included and addressed in this
book is rooted in hard science, underpinned by meticulous observation
and careful modelling. Raising the alarm, in our current circumstances, 
is a good thing. It fits with the precautionary principle and also with the idea 
that we need to really know our enemy – in this case global heating 
– and how well it is armed, if we want to defeat it. 
My view is that, currently, most members of the public, and indeed most 
world leaders, simply do not. The fact that the word ‘cake’ was mentioned
ten times more than ‘climate change’ on UK television in 2020
says it all about how true appreciation of the nature and scale of
the climate emergency has yet to break through. The
truth is, playing down the potential worst effects of global heating and
climate breakdown is far worse than raising the alarm and amounts to
what I like to call climate appeasement. It does nothing to help spur
the urgent action that is required, and by underplaying the climate
threat it works – intentionally or not – to encourage a grudging
and cautionary approach to emissions cuts that we can no longer
afford. On the other hand, if you have been worried or frightened by 
what you have read, that’s good, you should be, especially on behalf 
of your children and their children. But don’t let fear feed inertia. Fear
does not have to be paralysing. Indeed, it is often the driver of
effective action. No one ever won a war while knowing no fear, and
make no mistake, this is a war. Wherever we live on this magnificent
planet, we all need to do our utmost to try to keep it that way. The
fact that the future looks dismal is not an excuse to do nothing, to
imagine it’s all too late. On the contrary, it is a call to arms. So,
if you feel the need to glue yourself to a motorway or blockade an
oil refinery, then do it. In his book How to Blow Up a Pipeline,
Andreas Malm argues convincingly that, such is the scale of the
climate crisis, sabotage and property damage are absolutely justified
in the battle against fossil fuel companies and others working
against the public good. I understand that this is not to everyone’s 
taste, but there is plenty more you can do. Drive an electric car or
, even better, use public transport, walk or cycle; stop flying; 
switch to a green energy tariff; eat less meat; spread the word 
about the predicament we find ourselves in among your friends 
and family; lobby your elected representatives at both local and 
national level; and use your vote wisely to put in power a 
government that walks the talk on the climate emergency. The
problem is, though, even the greenest administration is not entirely
free to ensure that the right measures are in place to kick global
heating into the long grass. Within a political–economic system
predicated upon competition and profit rather than the greater good,
it is always going to be challenging and problematical – even with
the best will in the world – to bring down emissions rapidly enough
to avoid the most severe impacts of global heating. Many high-profile
activists argue, then, that what’s needed to tackle the climate
emergency effectively is system change, and they are absolutely
right. Our climate is being destroyed by unadulterated, 
free-market capitalism –an ideology that simply cannot be sustained 
on a small planet with limited resources. It is a system that has no i
interest in the greater good and that rewards inordinate capital 
and the few that have it, rather than the majority who don’t. 
It cares nothing for the environment or biodiversity and doesn’t give 
a fig about the fate of future generations. In fact, it is exactly the 
wrong economic system to have in place at a time of global crisis. 
The bankruptcy of the system is especially well upheld in the 
grossly asymmetric partitioning of carbon emissions between the 
rich elite and everyone else. One quick way of making a serious 
dent in emissions would be to take away what seems to be a free 
pass to pollute from the richest 1 per cent, who were responsible 
for 13 per cent of emissions in 2013. By 2030, this tiny elite is 
predicted to pump out 16 per cent of global emissions, 
70 tonnes of carbon a year per person, when each of the poorest 
50 per cent of the world’s population – those who will bear the 
brunt of climate breakdown – are responsible for one measly tonne. 
For comparison, each UK citizen emitted 8.4 tonnes of carbon 
dioxide in 2021. Looked at individually, the annual carbon footprints 
of some of the world’s mega-rich are staggering, uplifted to 
extraordinary levels –nearly 34,000 tonnes in one case
– by their monstrous playthings: fleets of high-performance cars,
homes on every continent, private jumbo jets, super-yachts and the
like. Emblematic of an economic system that is not fit for the 
purpose of transforming our society to one that matches the size 
of our world and its resources is the new rich person’s toy – 
the spaceship. Weighing in at around 75 tonnes, 
the emissions expelled by a ten-minute flight on Branson’s 
Virgin Galactic rocket are equivalent to an entire lifetime’s emissions 
of one of the poorest billion people on Earth.
At the height of a planetary emergency, this is plain wrong. The
measure of the maturity of any society must be how well it looks
after the needs of every one of its people, and how it cares for the
planet and all life thereon, by which metric we are little more than
toddlers flailing about aimlessly in the dark. This will continue to
be the case until the penny finally drops that we will never see off
global heating without embracing a new way of doing things, which has
nothing to do with the number of super-rich we can launch into space.
There needs to be a sea change in the way economic success is
measured, so that the accumulation of wealth is subordinated to how
little carbon we emit or how much we manage to soak up. Currently,
the success of a national economy is measured in terms of its gross
domestic product (GDP), which, in turn, is based purely upon the
country’s wealth. Other considerations, such as the health and
wellbeing of the population, inequalities between the rich and poor,
environmental issues and success in bringing down carbon emissions,
form no part of it. Although not perfect, one way of changing this to 
help tackle the climate and ecological emergency – which has 
been flagged by enlightened economists for some time – would be 
via a switch to a so-called quality adjusted GDP metric. 
Under this metric, good things, such as carbon-reduction measures, 
are rewarded, while bad stuff, for example, those products or services l
inked to high emissions or which are environmentally damaging, 
are marked down. A GDP metric that operated along these lines 
would benefit everyone by linking the money in people’s pockets 
to national and global indicators of progress on emissions reductions 
and ecological improvements. Transitioning to such a system would 
not be easy, but it can be done provided the will is there. 
Without it, making serious inroads into the dangerous and growing 
levels of carbon in the atmosphere is likely to be all but impossible.
At the time I wrote this, on the last day of 2021, the UK was basking in
record-shattering late December warmth, with the temperature climbing
to 16.5°C in Bala, north Wales. A few days ago, on the other side of
the world, the mercury touched 19.4°C in Alaska, compared to an
average December daily mean temperature of around zero. In some of
the Italian ski resorts it is too warm – at an extraordinary 15°C
– for even artificial snow. Meanwhile, high up in the Colorado
Rockies, unheard-of winter wildfires in the past 48 hours have
destroyed more than 900 buildings and forced thousands from their
homes. As I tie up loose ends in March 2022, eastern Australia has just
experienced record rainfall, driving some of the worst ever flooding
across the region, while more than 700 wildfires are raging across
Texas. In Eastern Europe, meanwhile, the continuing conflict in Ukraine
provides a tiny foretaste of the migration problems and commodity
shortages to come, as climate breakdown ramps up. For many, as we
head further into 2022, it is already a different world out there.
Soon it will be unrecognisable to every one of us. We may no longer 
be able to give dangerous climate breakdown the slip, but we still have 
the means to fend off a climate cataclysm that may threaten the very 
survival of human civilisation. In the decades since the first UN COP 
Climate Change Conference in 1995, we have used up an entire bale 
in prevarication and inertia, so all we are left to clutch at is the last straw. 
We cannot fail to grasp it.

BROKEN PROMISES

For the 4^th month running – the highest monthly clicks – this time 170,000 – and still counting. I liked this book – and also Branko Milanovic’s comment on it - The Triumph of Broken Promises – the end of the cold war and the rise of neoliberalism Fritz Bartel (2022)

This book argues the Cold War began as a race to make promises, but it ended as a 
race to break promises. Democratic capitalism prevailed in the Cold War because it 
proved capable of breaking promises and imposing economic discipline. 
Communism collapsed because it could not. Neoliberalism rose as the Cold War 
waned because its promarket, anti-statist rhetoric provided governments with an 
ideological framework for breaking promises. Electoral democracy and neoliberal 
ideology gave Western states the political and ideological tools to meet the challenge 
of breaking promises. Lacking these tools, the communist states of the Eastern Bloc 
democratized their political systems and reformed their ideology in the 1980s as a 
means of imposing economic discipline. 
The end of the Cold War, then, was a triumph of broken promises because it was the 
challenge of imposing economic discipline that ultimately brought the conflict to its 
end and gave rise to the neoliberal global economy of the late twentieth century.

Branko Milanovic has one of the best blogs and wrote this about the book 

The book can be summarized as follows. Faced with unprecedented economic 
shocks that made the continuation of post World War II policies impossible, 
both types of government had to resort to disciplining of labor and to 
“breaking of promises” with the citizenry.  
Western government were able to weather the storm because they had the 
support of capitalist money and  enjoyed domestic legitimacy obtained through 
elections. Eastern government that heavily borrowed in order not to have to 
break promises, couldn’t repay the loans in the 1980s and found themselves 
at the mercy of world capitalism, and by extension of capitalist governments 
that controlled the international financial system.  
Now, why were communist governments so keen not to break promises, 
while Thatcher and Reagan did break them? And survived. 
The answer is politics. Governments in communist countries knew that their 
legitimacy could be maintained only so long as they provided numerous 
social services and did not insist too much on hard work. 
But that equation “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us” could not 
continue forever. The economies sputtered, the rate of growth declined, 
social services deteriorated. The only answer was disciplining labor. 
In the West, that medicine was applied by Margaret Thatcher as she 
repressed organized labor and in particular the miners’ union 
(Scargill, any memories?), and in the East, by Edward Gierek and his 
numerous successors in Poland. Margaret Thatcher won because she 
had the support of other segments of society and labor found itself isolated. 
Communist governments could not extract concessions from labor since 
society at large did not see the governments as legitimate.
Poland and the UK provide almost template cases of the two systems  
and Bartel follows them closely. They are natural experiments where many 
variables are the same, but one, crucial (political legitimacy) is different. 
It did not escape the attention of Mieczyslaw Rakowski, the last 
(and ultra reformist) Prime Minister of communist Poland that under 
Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the first non-communist Prime Minister, workers 
accepted without demurring such significant cuts in real wages and the 
standard of living that could not be imagined by any communist 
government. In fact, the reforms tried by Vice Premier Sadowski 
in Poland in 1987, and those of Leszek Balcerowicz in 1989-90 were 
almost identical in their macroeconomic aspects: drastic cut in subsidies, 
mopping up of the so-called “liquidity overhand”, increased unemployment, 
liberalization of the exchange rate. 
But the Sadowski reforms floundered at the first step; the Balcerowicz 
reforms survived the difficult period, and established the basis for  
Poland’s future growth. It was indeed, in a famous phrase attributed 
to Balcerowicz, the short window of “extraordinary politics” that made it possible.
There is one aspect however that Bartel overlooks in his, at times overly 
eager, search for parallelism between the West and the East. 
Communist government were theoretically workers’ governments. 
This was their most important, and often sole, claim to legitimacy. 
Western governments were/are, despite all democratic sugarcoating, 
governments dedicated to the preservation of private property, and hence 
de facto capitalist governments. It was ideologically very difficult for 
communist governments to go against labor. 
The fact that Poland’s government had to fight its own workers showed 
its ideological bankruptcy. But for Western governments to go against labor 
was ideologically acceptable, even when it was politically difficult in countries 
where trade unions and socialist and communist parties were strong (France, Italy).
On the other end of the world, Paul Volcker’s “disciplining” caused a 
deep recession in the United States and hurt labor. 
But by increasing confidence of capital owners that the US would be willing, and 
able, to take a strong stance against labor and in favor of capital, they brought 
back confidence of the financial markets and stimulated large international capital 
inflows into the United States (“Volcker’s willingness to impose unprecedented 
economic discipline on the American people showed global capital holders that 
American policy makers could, and would, ultimately protect the interests of 
capital over the interests of labor”, p. 340). 
Those money inflows allowed the US to run forty years of uninterrupted current 
account deficits —a thing no other country in the world can dream of.
The structural difficulties, described in the case of Poland above, were magnified 
for the USSR. Because the USSR not only had to deal with similar internal 
economic problems as other East European countries, but also bore the burden 
of an inefficient empire. In several fast-pacing chapters Bartel describes the 
dilemma of Gorbachev and the Soviet leadership. They realized that there was 
a trade-off between domestic economics on the one hand, and military spending 
and subsidization of the Empire on the other (“We are at the limit of our capabilities”, 
told Gorbachev the Politburo in 1986, p. 178). Gradually, they reconciled themselves 
to the loss of the Empire provided they could “sell it” for hard currency with which 
to shore up domestic economy. But Gorbachev, Bartel argues, never really bit 
the bullet by reforming the economy. He talked and talked, promising that if 
money were forthcoming, he would use it to deepen and accelerate the perestroika. 
But even when the money came (as in the case of West Germany giving to the 
USSR aid and loans to the tune  of 15 billion DMs), the reforms were not undertaken, 
and the fate of money is unclear. (The end of Chapter 10 which tells the story of 
this unseemly bargain is riveting. It is a grand bazaar. Gorbachev begins by asking 
DM 20 billion in order to remove Soviet troops from East Germany. 
Kohl comes with only DM 5 billion. He asks Americans to help: they refuse. 
Kohl then scrambles to find a total of DM 8 billion, the offer that Gorbachev rejects 
as a “dead end”. Kohl moves to DM 12 billion. Still no good. In desperation, 
Kohl offers an additional DM 3 billion of interest-free loans. Deal.)
The last chapters leave us with tantalizing questions, particularly today. 
Why was Gorbachev so inept, both in negotiations and policy-making? 
Why was there such a disconnect between what Gorbachev rightly saw he 
needed to do and what he did? If the empire was to be sold, why was bargaining 
so badly done? Was it the lack of knowledge and sophistication from the leaders, 
shortage of time, inability to grasp consequences? 
It is unclear, but Bartel’s book, particularly in the  chapters on the Soviet Union, 
will prompt many readers to ask these questions. 
When comparing Gorbachev endless chatter followed by begging for money 
with the exceedingly rational, cool, and measured Kohl (as well as George Bush senior) 
one is struck by the difference in the quality of statecraft. 
But surely individual differences cannot be a full answer for what happened. 
Gorbachev worked under the conditions where (perhaps because of the policies 
he adopted too) the ground was constantly shrinking: his room for maneuver 
was getting tinier and tinier by the day. Kohl, on the other hand, buoyed by 
the inflow of East German citizens, quasi bankruptcy of GDR, and “deep pockets” 
(to quote James Baker) of the Federal Republic, had a permanently expanding 
space for negotiation.
The book ends with a pertinent reflection on the two empires: the American Empire 
was/is a net gain to the United States, as the US managed to have members 
of the Empire fund its deficits and increased military spending. 
For the USSR, on the other hand, the empire was a net cost: it had to subsidize it, 
keep its military ever poised to intervene, and trade it off for domestic prosperity. 
(“After 1980, the American empire became an enormous material asset to 
Washington, while the Soviet empire remained an enormous burden for Moscow”
, p. 341). One empire was/is composed mostly of voluntary adherents, 
the other was composed of countries that were roped in. 
But the real difference was that one was economically successful and the 
other was not.  

REFORM – AGAIN

There is a good chance that Reform will win the next election in Britain and I’m indebted to Matin Stanley for alerting me to Fixing the Centre (2026) by Reform MP Danny Kruger which draws on an earlier paper he had written the previous year.

For some reason, I prefer critiques to the genuine article. So I appreciated this 
article dealing critically with a pamphlet from Demos - 
Treating the Symptoms not the causes Political Quarterly (2026) 

A recent report by Demos is the latest in a series of think tank analyses of Whitehall’s problems. In what follows, we argue that the report’s focus on culture risks treating the symptoms of governance problems, not the causes. Academic literature has shown that systemic structural reform of the state is necessary to grasp the nettle of Britain’s governance issues. Because of this failure to get to the nub of Britain’s political malaise, the report exhibits limitations typical of a genre of think tank critique of Whitehall. We maintain that think tanks tend to offer narrowly drawn, incremental reform initiatives aimed at Whitehall. We argue that these are not only unlikely to bed in without broader structural reforms, but they might also deepen the crisis they aim to address.

The Human Handbrake is subtitled: How Whitehall Culture Holds Back Public Service Reform, Demos’s report argues that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’.

Culture is defined as ‘the shared basic assumptions learned by a group as it solves its problems’. The report identifies five obstacles to the adoption of a reforming culture in Whitehall:

(1) An outsized focus on risk in politics, which leads to cautious and defensive behaviour

(2) Incentivisation of an individualistic ‘policy hero’ culture where only those in frontfacing policy roles rise to the top

(3) The separation of people into tribes, undermining trust and collaboration

(4) A preference for standardisation and simplicity, at the expense of adaptive and messy solutions

(5) An impatience for quick, discernible results, at the expense of enduring change. Considering these cultural obstacles, the report suggests several commensurate solutions which include:

• The use of iterative methods and risk stratification, alongside stronger leadership to mitigate against risk aversion

• Altering performance frameworks and changing ministerial role model behaviour to combat individualistic hero cultures

• Building shared identities across institutions to combat tribe forming

• Creating a tolerance for complexity and unevenness alongside improving data systems to overcome the desire for simple and standardised policy

• Telling better stories to combat impatience

Liberated Public Services Demos (2024)  
Another Demos pamphlet whose saving grace is that it quotes from real, live cases which 
 prove its argument “So the limitations of the current approach to public service 
delivery have become more and more apparent by the day; yet we have failed to transition,
 at least at a national level, to a new operating model for public services. 
We believe one reason why is the lack of a credible, coherent and complete alternative. 
This report seeks to define this alternative and, crucially, to show its rigorous 
intellectual foundations and how it coheres as a system. 
In doing so, we are greatly indebted to other recent attempts to develop the concept 
of a ‘new paradigm’ in public services, both at Demos and elsewhere, including the 
Centre for Impact, Collaborate CIC, the IPPR, New Local, the RSA and many others, 
not least Hilary Cottam”. 

Diamond’s “Hyperactive Incrementalism” is an article reflecting on the 
British State’s inclination for reform

The Return of Political Patronage? How special advisers are taking the 
place of civil servants and why we should worry about it Al Palmer (2015)
Should be read with the above.

 
Elites and Democracy Hugo Drochon (2026) Given my interest in elite 
theory this book seems just up my street. These are the contents -

Introduction 1

I: Elite Theory 4

II: Democratic Theory 7

III: Dynamic Democracy 11

Movement 12

Dynamism 17

Regimes 25

Pessimism 28

IV: Book Structure 36

1 Mosca and the Ruling Class 39

I: Sicily 45

II: Making Italians 52

III: The Ruling Class I 58

IV: The Ruling Class II 69

Conclusion: Dynamic Democracy 78

2 Pareto and the Circulation of Elites 82

I: France, Italy 88

II: Lausanne, Economics 94

III: The Application 98

IV: The Treatise 101

V: The Transformation of Democracy 112

VI: Fascism 116

Conclusion: Dynamic Democracy 120

3 Michels and the Iron Law of Oligarchy 122

I: Germany, France, Italy 123

II: The Iron Law 128

III: Michels and Weber 133

IV: Michels and Mussolini 138

V: Democracy’s Two Palliatives 141

VI: Dynamic Democracy 145

Conclusion 149

4 Schumpeter and Elite Competition 154

I: Elite Competition 158

II: Economic Competition 163

III: Economic Democracy 166

IV: The Conditions of Minimalism 168

V: Pareto 172

Conclusion: Dynamic, Transformative and Oppositional Democracy 174

5 Dahl and Mills, Polyarchy or Power Elite? 182

I: The Power Elite 188

II: Minorities Rule 192

III: Conspiracy Theories 195

IV: Muncie or New Haven? 199

V: Radical or Conservative? 202

VI: Mosca, Pareto or Michels? 206

Conclusion 209

6 Aron and Divided Elites 212

I: Machiavellians 216

II: Pareto and Burnham 220

III: Divided and Unified Elites 224

IV: Political Sociology 226

V: The Centre Raymond Aron 230

Conclusion 236

The Strategists – Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, Mussolini and Hitler – how war made them and how they made war Phillips O’Brien (2024)

O’Brien is an American contemporary commentator on war now working in Scottish Universities

The Death of Consensus – 100 years of political nightmares Phil Tinline (2022)

The consensus whose death we’ll trace in Part One had long roots in orthodox Victorian economics. We’ll start with how it hit a huge financial crisis in 1931. Then we’ll trace the fourteen-year struggle that followed, until a new consensus was secured in the wake of the Second World War.

In Part Two, we’ll explore how that post-war consensus began to break down in the industrial strife of the late 1960s—and how politicians repeatedly struggled to remake the old compromise with the unions, until Thatcherism overwhelmed them.

Then, in Part Three, we’ll follow what has happened since the consensus established by Margaret Thatcher was riddled with fissures by the 2008 Crash. This, of course, is still unfolding, so our story here is more provisional. And each of these three periods is very different. But within each of them, I think a process is discernible. Stripped down to essentials, it

might run something like this:

There is a political consensus, based on a taboo: some nightmarish thing that must not be allowed to happen. Perhaps it is happening in another country, or has happened in our own past. The taboo enables the development of what you might call a ‘concentration of power’, a group whose interests it protects. The death of consensus begins when a crisis strikes, and the existing solutions no longer seem to work. At this point, the existing system can only be kept going with a blatant assertion of dominance by those holding that concentrated power, forcing people to choose whether they still support it.

Those for whom the crisis is a worse nightmare try to fight the concentration of power, but it’s a hopeless struggle. While the old nightmare prevails, it blocks politicians from trying anything radically new.

Opposition to the concentration of power eventually puts the taboo under intolerable pressure, but even then it proves impossible to dislodge, precisely because it is secured in place by fear. This impasse plunges politics into flux and crisis, as the realisation that the old ways no longer work edges closer to the heart of power, yet every alternative still seems unthinkable. Every road leads to a nightmare.

Amid all this, leaders struggle to reinvent the consensus model—their only safe option. But this cannot last. More and more people decide that one of those alternatives might actually be worse than the existing taboo, the old nightmare still governing the limits of politics. Finally, through a new crisis, or a shift in public mood, the breakpoint comes. With the old taboo no longer protecting it, the old concentration of power is exposed to a much more effective challenge. Leaders still hemmed in by the old fears start to look weak and out of time, next to the once marginal figures who step forward to fight them, break the taboo, and take power.

The incoming leaders have a new story to tell about what has gone so terribly wrong, and about the weakness—and treachery—of the old leaders. This marks a sharp break with the past. The way through to a new democratic consensus at last becomes clear: it comes once enough people accept the newly dominant nightmare, the new ‘thing to which we must never go back’. 

Of course, it doesn’t happen exactly this way. There is no precise template, and none of this is to suggest that history is somehow circular. These steps have not necessarily happened in exactly this order. Sometimes they have happened more than once. One major difference is that in 1931–45, the breakpoint was caused by an external threat (Nazi attack, and war), whereas in 1968–85, it sprang from internal conflict (between government and trade unions). It is hardly surprising, however, that societies move through periods of relative consensus and relative crisis, rather as economies move through phases of growth and recession. Nor is it so strange that this process, as it has played out across Britain’s first century of mass democracy, does show some consistent patterns, which may help us understand our current predicaments. To trace how all this played out in messy reality, let’s try looking at British democracy from a fresh angle. We will track a series of people who played a major role as leading politicians in the 1970s: Labour’s Harold Wilson, Barbara Castle and Michael Foot, and Conservatives Quintin Hogg (Lord Hailsham), Keith Joseph and Edward Heath. But we will meet them first as youngsters in the 1930s, as they participated in that process of consensus change; at first from the margins, and then more decisively. We will see how they were shaped by the process too—particularly through their relationship with the nightmare of mass unemployment. So, as we follow the story of consensus from 1931 to 1945, we will trace a series of remarkable connections, from the teenage Harold Wilson’s reverence for the Labour defector Philip Snowden, to the far-left political debuts of the twenty-something Barbara Castle and Michael Foot, at the side of the upper-class firebrand Sir Stafford Cripps. We will move from the student Keith Joseph’s encounter with Yorkshire miners to the young Edward Heath and Quintin Hogg fighting over appeasement. Only then will we jump forwards to the 1960s and 1970s, to trace how memories of the unemployment nightmare of the 1930s shaped these individuals’ actions in the governments they ran. We’ll follow the increasingly desperate attempts by Wilson, Castle, Foot and even Heath to reinvent and rescue the old consensus, and Keith Joseph’s effort to replace it. Finally, we will jump again, to the period from the 2008 Crash, via the travails of the Big Society, Red Tories and Blue Labour, through the Brexit wars, to Covid and ‘levelling up’. And as we do so, we’ll trace what the 1930s and the 1970s can tell us about today’s struggles and nightmares—about our own experience of the death of consensus, and what might be coming next.

Blood and Iron – the rise and fall of the German empire from 1871-1918 Katja Hoyer (2021) An important analysis from this Anglo-German historian

And more books for your study

 George Scialabba is one of America’s greatest writers – despite being a retired building manager at Harvard University. Two of his most recent books were picked up on the internet by yours truly and can be found here -

• The Sealed Envelope – toward an intelligent utopia George Scialabba (2026) His thoughts on such writers as John Gray, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Barbara Ehrenreich, William Bucley and Jonathan Haidt

• Only a Voice - essays George Scialabba (2023) The contents sheet read thus - 

Introduction: What Are Intellectuals Good For?

PART I. THE PROBLEM WITH PROGRESS

1 Progress and Prejudice

2 The Workingman’s Friend: Adam Smith

3 Are We All Liberals Now? Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine

4 Shipwrecked: D. H. Lawrence

5 The Radicalism of Tradition: T. S. Eliot

6 Agonizing: Isaiah Berlin

7 Still Enlightening after All These Years: Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin

8 A Whole World of Heroes: Christopher Lasch

9 The Wages of Original Sin: Philip Rieff

10 Against Everything: Ivan Illich

11 Back to the Land? Wendell Berry

12 Preserving the Self: Matthew Crawford

13 Last Men and Women

PART II. THE LEFT

14 South of Eden: Leonardo Sciascia

15 A Critical Life: Irving Howe

16 The Common Fate: Victor Serge

17 A Conservative-Liberal Socialist: Leszek Kołakowski

18 Yes to Sex: Ellen Willis

19 How (and How Not) to Change the World

PART III. THE ROLE OF THE CRITIC

20 The Promise of an American Life: Randolph Bourne

21 An Exemplary Amateur: Dwight Macdonald

22 The Liberal Intelligence: Lionel Trilling

23 Just a Journalist: Edmund Wilson

24 An Enemy of the State: I. F. Stone

25 People Who Influence Influential People Are the Most Influential

People in the World: New Republic

26 Living by Ideas: Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball

27 Fearless: Pier Paolo Pasolini

28 The Price of Selfhood: Vivian Gornick

Shared Prosperity for a Fractured World – a new economics for the middle
 class, the global poor and our climate Dani Rodrik (2025)

We want to live in societies that are free, a world without poverty, and a climate that is hospitable. We want, in brief, democracy, prosperity, and sustainability. How can we achieve all three, in a global economy that has become more conflictual, is rapidly moving away from its previously established norms and arrangements, and faces a fragile geopolitical context marked by US-China rivalry?

How can we render them compatible, when so many policy currents are at cross-purposes, moving us away from the other goals even when they appear to advance one of them? These are the questions that lie at the heart of this book.

Poverty – by America Matthew Desmond (2023)

Why is there so much poverty in America? I wrote this book because I needed an answer to that question. For most of my adult life, I have researched and reported on poverty. I have lived in very poor neighborhoods, spent time with people living in poverty around the country, pored over statistical studies and government reports, listened to and learned from community organizers and union reps, drafted public policy, read up on the history of the welfare state and city planning and American racism, and taught courses on inequality at two universities. But even after all that, I still felt that I lacked a fundamental theory of the problem, a clear and convincing case as to why there is so much hardship in this land of abundance.

Putting Civil Society in its Place Bob Jessop (2022) Jessop is not the easiest of reads and this is his latest

A Scotsman Abroad  Ronald Mackay (2016) 
A fascinating account of a philolog’s stay in Romania in the late 1960s
Non-Violence – a history beyond the myth Domenico Losurdo (2015) 

Introduction: From the Broken Promises of Perpetual Peace to Non-Violence.

1 Christian Abolitionism and Pacifism in the United States 7

2 From Pacifist Abolitionism to Gandhi and Tolstoy 21

3 Gandhi and the Socialist Movement: Violence as Discrimination? 47

4 The Anti-Colonialist Movement, Lenin’s Party, and Gandhi’s Party 77

5 Non-Violence in the Face of Fascism and the Second World War 93

6 Martin Luther King as the “Black Gandhi” and Afro-American Radicalism 111

7 Gandhi’s Global Reputation and the Construction of the Non-Violent Pantheon 147

8 From Gandhi to the Dalai Lama? 159

9 “Non-Violence,” “Color Revolutions,” and the Great Game 191

10 A Realistic Non-Violence in a World Prey to Nuclear Catastrophe 205

Contention and Democracy in Europe 1650-2000 Charles Tilly (2004)

Censorship in Romania Lidia Vianu (1998) 
Lidia Vianu is a University Professor here in Bucharest who has established a 
strong reputation as a translator of English and sponsor of many publications 
of which this is one. It deals with a range of writers who suffered from censorship 
during the communist regime – such as Nina Cassian, Mircea Dinescu, Ana 
Blandiana and Marin Sorescu.