Books

A sweeping cultural diagnosis of the late twentieth century and its discontents. Elsom argues that Western societies have progressively lost the ability to locate meaning outside the economic, technological and managerial systems, they have created to organize themselves. Art, politics, religion, and community have all been reshaped in the image of modernity, at the cost of the very human experiences they were meant to serve. Sharp, wide-ranging, and deeply informed by six decades of cultural observation.

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State of Paralysis is the study of the forces that prevents Western democratic institutions from responding effectively to the challenges they face be it from the structural inertia of parliamentary systems or the cultural inability to imagine genuine alternatives. Drawing on a lifetime’s engagement with British and European politics, John dentifies the habits of mind and institutional arrangements that produce paralysis in the face of crisis, and asks what it would take to break them.

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From the Athenian agora to the algorithmic present, democracy has never been what its defenders claimed or its critics feared. It has always been a sliding scale tilting toward the autocratic in times of fear, toward the participatory in times of confidence, and perpetually in danger of mistaking its own rhetoric for reality. In twelve chapters presented in the Sliding Scales, Elsom traces the key moments in that history, with particular attention to the British experience and the global pressures now testing democratic institutions everywhere.

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