Nervous States
Democracy and the Decline of Reason
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- £7.49
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- £7.49
Publisher Description
“Wide-ranging yet brilliantly astute. . . . Davies is a wild and surprising thinker who also happens to be an elegant writer.” — Jennifer Szalai, New York Times
Hailed as a “masterpiece” (Mark Green, New York Times Book Review), Nervous States offers an astute diagnosis for why our politics has become so fractious and warlike. In this bold and far- reaching book, political economist William Davies argues that our increasing reliance on feeling over fact has transformed democracies. The spread of media technology and the intrusion of mass shootings and terrorist attacks into everyday life has reduced a world of logic and fact into one driven by fear and anxiety. As emotions supplant facts in our politics, we lose the basis for consensus among people who otherwise have little in common. Nervous States “sits at the intersection of ongoing debates about post-truth, the assault on reason, the privileging of personal feelings and the rise of populism” (Financial Times) and provides an essential guide to the turbulent times in which we now live.
“An insightful and well- written book that explores the deep roots of the current crisis of expertise.” — Yuval Noah Harari, New York Times best-selling author of Sapiens
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The failures of scientific rationalism have produced a surge of emotional, anti-intellectual, nationalist, and populist ideologies, according to this wide-ranging, sometimes tenuously argued treatise. Davies, a University of London political economist, goes back to 17th-century philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Ren Descartes to trace the rise of a Western epistemology of governance that champions scientific expertise and objective evidence as a basis for forming political consensus. That rational, deliberative model falters, he contends, under the pressures of modern war (which feeds on nationalist passions and fast, decisive action despite imperfect knowledge) and free-market doctrines that celebrate bold entrepreneurs who eschew expertise in favor of gut-instinct risk-taking. Worse, he argues, persistent economic inequality and rationalist policies' lack of emotional appeal have made voters distrustful of technocratic elites and their statistics, and hungry for emotional engagement with demagogues like Donald Trump. He concludes that advocates of peace will have to work with, rather than try to eradicate, the feelings that are an inevitable part of politics. Intricately but not tightly argued, Davies's book shoehorns everything from the opioid epidemic to transhumanism into his analysis, which will appeal most to those concerned about technology, put off by claims of objectivity, and interested in insights about the role of emotion in politics.
