Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy

by Adam Tooze

A critical history of modern power must find a way into the thickets of analysis, information, and knowledge produced day by day from inside the apparatus as its protagonists struggle to cope with the radical outcomes that their systems are producing.

The frontier of this technical knowledge is not just dauntingly complex and opaque but constantly evolving. To keep up with it, we have to run to stand still. Like it or not, we are in medias res.

The Green New Deal was brilliantly on point, but it imagined climate as the most urgent threat of the Anthropocene. It too was overrun by the pandemic. Such revisions do not imply a lack of intellectual or political principle. They are simply the openness commensurate with the times we live in.

This book like the others is cast as “grand narrative.” I hope thereby to do justice to the momentousness and complexity of the shocks and transformations we are living through and to the importance of the stakes involved. For all that, each historical picture, each arrangement of the pieces, is provisional, heuristic, experimental. If we are not beyond the end of history, that is what writing history involves. Not definitive pronouncement, but writing to be overwritten.

I graduated from college in 1989. You could feel the Iron Curtain shaking. It was the summer of Fukuyama and of Tiananmen.

I stumbled on the analysis of the “six effects” by one of Xi Jinping’s closest advisors. This book begins by referencing Chen Yixin’s pronouncements not simply for the sake of their inherent interest, but to make a larger point. The fact that Chen’s map of convergent crises was so apt, that it was more illuminating than the EU’s talk of polycrisis or America’s solipsistic preoccupation with its national narrative, should give us pause. The intellectuals of the Chinese regime are loyal to their party’s political project. They are at work on their own version of history. In that history, whether we like it or not, we are all enrolled. And in that respect too, as the Covid crisis brought home, we are just at the beginning.

If our first reaction to 2020 was disbelief, our watchword in facing the future should be: “We ain’t seen nothing yet.”