Thread by @BarnabyRaine

My PhD supervisor @adam_tooze belongs among varied intellectuals (Therborn, David Scott, Chakrabarty, Hall etc) seeking social theory after the collapse of dialectical History. I've long thought this is underplayed in his books, which are presented as narrative histories... /1

When I first read the 'Crashed' manuscript, for example, I said "I don't get what relationship you're tracing between economy and politics." Once he explained the Latourian logic, the refusal of those two conceptual bundles, the book made sense to me; but it didn't before.

I wanted him to publish a reply to Perry Anderson, because I was struck that PA took the lack of a Marxist account of totality as evidence of a (politically motivated, anti-radical) refusal of any such account, which seemed to eclipse the interesting possibility:

that in a world no longer structured by (mediations of) a fundamental class antagonism with immanent emancipatory content, we have to go back to the drawing board - philosophically *and* politically - to account for our present, and the proper response to it.

Narrative history and Latour meet here. Both refuse any given theory of structure, against whose backdrop agents can then be read. I think Marxism could still be helpful in understanding the appeal of that choice:

The crisis of a Marxist theory of social structure followed the disassembly of the emancipatory coalition of the defeated 1960s-70s world revolution. When the standpoint collapsed, so did the theory, which fits with Lukacs or Gramsci (minus their optimistic teleology).

Like the four figures I mentioned above, Tooze was recruited to the revolutionary left when young and then attracted to a 1980s revisionism (Eurocommunism in his case) that claimed to speak to Brecht's 'bad new things' not the good old ones.

These accounts - I find Scott's the richest - usually suppose that something was always missed by neat dialectical History (not least its usual Eurocentrism) but also that neoliberalism marks a rupture more fundamental than a 'forward march' halted, with its agents enduring.

Clearly, these claims are contestable. But Anderson's difficulty is that he too has long suggested such an intellectual crisis for Marxism, from his famous 1976/83 book duo to his sensitive 90s essay on Fukuyama and then NLR relaunch essay in 2000.

I think the hard question (my PhD question!) is whether some concept of freedom beyond relations of subordination can survive the end of History, the disassembly of freedom's assumed subjects. Tooze doesn't ask that, but answering it will require a rethought social theory.

At stake here is both the scale of the historical rupture - what endures? - and its character: what is possible in new times? I think we require first the open investigation ('without guarantees') of processes of subject formation, the ground of political struggle and norms.

If this all feels like the 90s replayed, my hope is that now we are trying to tell new stories (hence Tooze's triadic Foucault/Latour/Keynes amalgam) not just bemoan the death of old ones. Still, this brilliant Marc Kaplan film captures it all, I think: