We're ‘bowling alone’ politically when we should be rallying for change

“The rumour was going around that politics was dead”, the French novelist Annie Ernaux wrote in The Years about how many people experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall.

- Kenan Malik

“The advent of a ‘new world order’ was declared. The end of history was nigh, democracy would cover the earth. Never had we believed with such conviction that the world was headed in anew direction”

A“collective autobiography”, as novelist Edmund White described it, The Years tells the story of the second half of the 20th century simultaneously through the eyes of an individual and of the world. The strangeness of Ernaux’s melding of historical fact and autofiction beautifully captures the strangeness particularly of the 1990s, and of the hopes that the “death of politics” might bring with it a new era of democracy and prosperity.

Thirty years on, the age of “post-politics” has given way to an age of popular cynicism about politicians and of politicians’ cynicism about democracy, an age in which politics seems omnipresent, permeating every aspect of our lives from work to sex, and yet in which real social change appears difficult to achieve. An age of “extreme politicisation without political consequences”, as the political philosopher Anton Jager puts it in his forthcoming book Hyperpolitics.