[Commlist] new book: The Great Recoil: Politics After Populism and Pandemic

New book

*The Great Recoil: Politics After Populism and Pandemic*

In these times of health emergency, economic collapse, populist anger 
and ecological threat, societies are forced to turn inward in search of 
protection. Neoliberalism, the ideology that presided over decades of 
market globalisation, is on trial, while state intervention is making a 
spectacular comeback amid lockdowns, mass vaccination programmes, 
deficit spending and climate planning. This is the Great Recoil, the era 
when the neo-statist endopolitics of national sovereignty, economic 
protection and democratic control overrides the neoliberal exopolitics 
of free markets, labour flexibility and business opportunity.

Looking back to the role of the state in Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, 
Hegel, Gramsci and Polanyi, and exploring the discourses, electoral 
programs and class blocs of the nationalist right and socialist left, 
Paolo Gerbaudo fleshes out the contours of the different statisms and 
populisms that inform contemporary politics. The central issue in 
dispute is what mission the post-pandemic state should pursue: whether 
it should protect native workers from immigration and the rich against 
redistributive demands, as proposed by the right’s authoritarian 
protectionism; or reassert social security and popular sovereignty 
against the rapacity of financial and tech elites, as advocated by the 
left’s social protectivism. Only by addressing the widespread sense of 
exposure and vulnerability may socialists turn the present phase of 
involution into an opportunity for social transformation.**
*
*


    To order The Great Recoil:


    https://www.versobooks.com/books/3774-the-great-recoil



    Reviews

“With remarkable intellectual reach, Paolo Gerbaudo draws on centuries 
of political thought to analyse and tackle big questions arising from 
society’s ‘recoil’ from the failed project that was/is neoliberal 
globalisation. This is a vital and timely text for a fuller 
understanding of how the left should react to the pandemic in order to 
‘build back better.’”

– Ann Pettifor, author of The Case for The Green New Deal

“A fascinating journey from neoliberal hegemony, through anti-globalist 
populist backlash, to the neo-statism of the pandemic world; it is a 
critical text for progressives seeking to orient themselves in a world 
marked by both dirigisme and cultural reaction. Gerbaudo rightly argues 
that a left populism in the post-pandemic world must centre on the 
deepening of political and economic democracy in order to combat a 
right-wing politics of domination and control.”

– Grace Blakeley, author of Stolen

“In this intriguing book that weaves together the ideas of authors such 
as Hegel and Polanyi, Paolo Gerbaudo follows the swinging pendulum of 
global capitalism moving from its expansive form to the inwardness of 
statism. The global crisis of 2008 and the pandemic have ushered in a 
great recoil in which Western capitalism looks like a giant pulled down 
by its own strength, and the return of the interventionist state is 
viewed as a possible solution to its ills.”

– Nadia Urbinati, author of Me, the People

“Counter-movements against neoliberal globalisation have been gathering 
momentum for a number of years, but are now reaching a critical mass. 
The Great Recoil provides a definitive account of how the nation state 
has been revived and transformed, bringing much-needed clarity and 
critique to the vast political questions of our present moment.”

– William Davies author of This is Not Normal

“What will replace neo-liberalism? Will it be a new big state capitalism 
overseen by a populist political right? In this timely and important 
book, Paolo Gerbaudo shows how the left can contest the meaning of 
sovereignty, protection, and control, and put forward its own 
progressive populism founded on economic and social inclusion, 
environmental sustainability, and radical republican politics.”

– Stuart White, Jesus College, Oxford


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