Sublime

With The Great Transformation, published in 1944, the Hungarian-born historian and economist Karl Polanyi offers one of the best accounts of that techno-economic transition[58]. Although it’s not autobiographical, the book is deeply rooted in Polanyi’s life. Like many who grew up in Budapest and Vienna before the Great War, he witnessed first-hand

In the twentieth century, the masses revolted against exploitation and sought to translate their vital role in the economy into political power. Now the masses fear irrelevance, and they are frantic to use their remaining political power before it is too late.

The historian Niall Ferguson has shown the importance of networks to key historical events like the American Revolution, the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution.

At the same time, certain conceptions of the past become dominant or hegemonic among different temporalities, such as the linear conception of time and history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed, our very notion of history as an irreversible movement is inseparably tied to the conception of time as a linear succession of some bounded

Through all of human history from its earliest beginnings until now, there have been only three basic stages of economic life: (1) hunting-and-gathering societies; (2) agricultural societies; and (3) industrial societies. Now, looming over the horizon, is something entirely new, the fourth stage of social organization: information societies.

The liberal story was the story of ordinary people. How can it remain relevant to a world of cyborgs and networked algorithms?

the Marxist spectacles are no longer on the left-wing nose. Why they were removed, and by whom, it is hard to say. But for whatever cause, left-wing politics has discarded the revolutionary paradigm advanced by the New Left, in favour of bureaucratic routines and the institutionalization of the welfare culture.