A Defence of Politics against Crises

Abstract

This chapter defends politics against crises. It argues that the crisis of politics (the erosion of public support for politics and politicians) reflects the politics of crisis (the use of crisis-inflation strategies in order to scare the public into behaving in a specific way). It suggests that we have lost our capacity to discriminate between social pathology or breakdown, on the one side, and social normality and social order on the other. The chapter focuses on four main themes: the notion of liquidity; the changing nature of risk; climate change and the ‘authoritarian alternative’; and the theme of collective confidence. These issues conspire to produce a form of ‘disaster capitalism’ in which threats, disasters, catastrophes, and crises are at one and the same time everywhere and nowhere.