Heinrich Geiselberger (ed.) - The Great Regression

Table of Contents

Copyright page

First published in German as Die groe Regression. Eine internationale Debatte ber die geistige Situation der Zeit Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, 2017

Preface Heinrich Geiselberger, 2017, Ch.1 Arjun Appadurai, 2017, Ch.2 Zygmunt Bauman, 2017, Ch.3 Donatella della Porta, 2017, Ch.4 Nancy Fraser, 2017, Ch.5 Eva Illouz, 2017, Ch.6 Ivan Krastev, 2017, Ch.7 Bruno Latour, 2017, Ch.8 Paul Mason, 2017, Ch.9 Pankaj Mishra, 2017, Ch.10 Robert Misik, 2017, Ch.11 Oliver Nachtwey, 2017, Ch.12 Csar Rendueles, 2017, Ch.13 Wolfgang Streeck, 2017, Ch.14 David Van Reybrouck, 2017, Ch.15 Slavoj iek, 2017

English translations of the Preface and Chapters 7, 10, 11, 12, 13 Polity Press, 2017

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2235-4

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Contributors

Arjun Appadurai , born 1949 in Mumbai, is Goddard Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University and Visiting Professor at the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt University, Berlin (2016/17).

Zygmunt Bauman , born 1925 in Posen, died 2017 in Leeds, taught latterly at the University of Leeds. He received many accolades for his work, including the Theodor W. Adorno Award (1998) and the Prince of Asturias Award (2013).

Donatella della Porta , born 1956 in Catania, is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Centre of Social Movement Studies at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence.

Nancy Fraser , born 1947 in Baltimore, is Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science and Professor of Philosophy at the New School in New York.

Heinrich Geiselberger , born 1977 in Waiblingen, has been an editor at Suhrkamp Verlag since 2006.

Eva Illouz , born 1961 in Fs, is Professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the EHESS in Paris. She writes regularly for the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz .

Ivan Krastev , born 1965 in Lukovit, is Chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and Permanent Fellow at the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna. Since 2015, he has been a regular contributor to the New York Times International Edition .

Bruno Latour , born 1947 in Beaune, is Professor at Sciences Po Paris and at the Centre de sociologie des organisations. He has received multiple awards, including the 2013 Holberg Prize.

Paul Mason , born 1960 in Leigh, is an English author and award-winning television journalist. He worked for many years for the BBC and Channel 4 News and now writes regularly for the Guardian .

Pankaj Mishra , born 1969 in Jhansi, is an Indian essayist, literary critic and author. Amongst other publications, he writes for the New York Times , the New York Review of Books and the Guardian . In 2014 he received the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding.

Robert Misik , born 1966 in Vienna, is a journalist and political writer. He writes for the daily newspaper die tageszeitung as well as the magazines Falter and Profil and manages the video blog FS Misik on the website of the daily newspaper Der Standard . In 2009 he received the Austrian State Prize for Cultural Communication.

Oliver Nachtwey , born 1975 in Unna, is a sociologist at the Technische Universitt Darmstadt whose research focuses on labour, inequality, protest and democracy. He writes regularly for daily and weekly newspapers and web portals.

Csar Rendueles , born 1975 in Girona, teaches sociology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

Wolfgang Streeck , born 1946 in Lengerich, is a sociologist. From 1995 to 2014 he was Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. His research centres on comparative political economy and theories of institutional change. He is a regular contributor to the New Left Review .

David Van Reybrouck , born 1971 in Bruges, is a writer, dramatist, journalist, archaeologist and historian. In 2011 he founded G1000, an initiative that campaigns for democratic innovations in Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain. His book Congo: The Epic History of a People received several awards, including the ECI Literature Prize, the NDR Kultur Non-fiction Prize and the Prix Mdicis essai (all 2012). His articles appear in newspapers internationally, such as Le Monde , La Repubblica and De Standaard .

Slavoj iek , born 1949 in Ljubljana, teaches at the European Graduate School, Birkbeck, University of London, and at the Institute for Sociology at the University of Ljubljana.

Preface

Heinrich Geiselberger

When a world order breaks down,

that is when people begin to think about it.

Ulrich Beck 2011

The idea for this book arose in late autumn 2015, after a series of terrorist attacks had shaken Paris and as the debate in Germany about the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees became increasingly fraught. The reaction to these events in politics, the media and general discourse gave the impression that the world was suddenly falling below the standards it had fought hard to achieve and had thought of as secure.

Directly associated with terrorism and migration is the fact that all around the globe the number of territories in which a state as such no longer exists is growing. Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, the three countries from which most people seeking asylum in Germany came in 2016, ranked near the top of the Fragile State Index compiled by the NGO Fund for Peace in the same year. In the Age of Austerity, it is evidently no longer possible to offer citizens much in their roles as workers, fellow sovereign citizens, school children or users of public infrastructure. In consequence, the political emphasis has shifted to the dimension of nationality, the promise of safety, and the restoration of the glory of a bygone age.

The list of the symptoms of decline could be extended almost indefinitely. We could highlight the yearning for an anarchic, unilateral de-globalization or the emergence of the Identitarian movement, as for example in France, Italy and Austria; or the growing xenophobia and Islamophobia, the wave of so-called hate crimes, and of course the rise of authoritarian demagogues such as Rodrigo Duterte, Recep Tayyip Erdoan or Narendra Modi.

By the late autumn of 2015 all this was accompanied by an increased hysteria and a coarsening of public discourse, together with a certain herd mentality on the part of the established media. Evidently, people could no longer talk about flight and migration without invoking the semantic fields of natural catastrophes and epidemics. Instead of issuing calls for calm and pragmatism or contextualizing events historically and thus helping to see them in perspective, the risks of terrorism and immigration in Germany were turned into the greatest challenge not just since Reunification but even since the Second World War. At demonstrations as well as on the internet, terms such as lying press, dictatorship of the chancellor and traitors to the people ( Volksverrter ) instead of representatives of the people ( Volksvertreter ) became common currency.