The crisis whisperer: how Adam Tooze makes sense of our bewildering age | Economics | The Guardian
The long read: Whether it’s the financial crash, the climate emergency or the breakdown of the international order, historian Adam Tooze has become the go-to guide to the radical new world we’ve entered
By the end of the essay, however, that latter judgment has expanded well beyond the content of Tooze’s books into a sneering indictment of his whole public existence. The breadth of interests, audiences and sympathies that for so many of Tooze’s admirers mark his signal virtue stood for Anderson as proof of his political unreliability. “Tooze spreads himself widely, and his accents and formulations vary from place to place,” Anderson wrote. “That’s often the price of a growing reputation [and] shouldn’t be taken too seriously. To criticisms of inconsistency, he can in any case reply quite reasonably that nothing he has written falls outside the parameters of a basic commitment to liberalism as it has developed in the west from the time of Wilson and Lloyd George to that of Geithner and Macron.” (In the context of the New Left Review, these points of comparison could hardly be more damning.)
Tooze says he decided to stay in the US in large part because his daughter lives here. He was confirmed in that decision, however, by news that three of his former colleagues at Yale, Timothy Snyder, Marci Shore and Jason Stanley, were moving to Canada. “Their decision just radically clarified it for me. Because it’s absolutely the wrong decision in every respect: it’s wrong politically, it’s wrong ethically
