Adam Tooze

Adam Tooze’s books include Crashed, about the financial crisis. Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy will be reviewed in a future issue of the LRB.

After the Wars: Schäuble’s Realm

Adam Tooze, 19 November 2015

Wolfgang Schäuble​ can’t have expected an easy ride when he moved from Germany’s Interior Ministry to its Finance Ministry on 28 October 2009. Angela Merkel’s new coalition with the Free Democratic Party (FDP), the free market Liberals, was committed to reducing the government deficit. That summer the preceding Grand Coalition – the name for a coalition...

A General Logic of Crisis

Adam Tooze, 5 January 2017

The publication of How Will Capitalism End? comes when Wolfgang Streeck has positioned himself as the leading intellectual proponent in Germany of a Gaullist vision of Europe from the left. Now that his cards are fully on the table it is a good moment to try to answer the question: how did Streeck turn critical theory into a vehicle for the assertion of the primacy of the nation?

Letter
Adam Tooze writes: Wolfgang Streeck accuses me of blowing up his ‘innocent analytical distinction between “the people of the state" and “the people of the market" into an essentialist, racist, implicitly anti-Semitic conceptualisation of politics and political economy’. This reading is more revealing of Streeck’s insecurities than it is of anything I wrote. But the ‘innocent analytical...

Tempestuous Seasons: Keynes in China

Adam Tooze, 13 September 2018

If, faced with fundamental environmental challenges, Keynesianism is reaching its ultimate limit, will it end with a whimper or a bang? Beijing faces the classical Keynesian dilemmas raised to a new level of extremity. Xi’s ‘Chinese dream’ is the most spectacular Keynesian promise ever made. The underlying fear of domestic unrest is palpable, the scale of repression is astonishing, but so is the gamble on growth.

Two years into the Trump presidency, it is a gross exaggeration to talk of an end to the American world order. The two pillars of its global power – military and financial – are still firmly in place. What has ended is any claim on the part of American democracy to provide a political model. This is certainly a historic break. Trump closes the chapter begun by Woodrow Wilson in the First World War, with his claim that American democracy articulated the deepest feelings of liberal humanity. A hundred years later, Trump has for ever personified the sleaziness, cynicism and sheer stupidity that dominates much of American political life. What we are facing is a radical disjunction between the continuity of basic structures of power and their political legitimation.

As the Lock Rattles

John Lanchester, 16 December 2021

Much of the poorer part of the world is still susceptible to the disease, and as long as it is, many more people will die, and the risk of new and more dangerous variants will remain. In May 2020, the...

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Bait and Switch: The Global Financial Crisis

Simon Wren-Lewis, 25 October 2018

In​ 2007, Alan Greenspan, the former chair of the Federal Reserve, was asked by a Swiss newspaper which presidential candidate he was supporting. He said it didn’t matter: ‘We are...

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A Bit of Chaos: The Great War and After

Margaret MacMillan, 5 February 2015

A common​ and still widely accepted story of the origin of the Second World War is that it was the direct result of what happened in 1919 at the end of the Great War. The French were...

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Richard Evans’s history of the Third Reich – it will be completed by a third volume covering the war – is an invaluable work of synthesis. The mass of specialist studies we now...

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