A dazzlingly original analysis of how emotions shape the times we are living in by one of Britain’s most exciting thinkers
‘A masterpiece’ New York Times
‘Insightful and well-written’ Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens
How have feelings come to shape the world around us?
[An] interdisciplinary masterpiece.If you read one book about contemporary politics this year, make it this one. William Davies is as acute and accurate on the shifts we are enduring as on the deep roots behind contemporary thinking (or not thinking, I should add).
The roots of our current anxieties are traced in [
Nervous States,] an absorbing book
fizzing with ideas… Davies is a wonderfully alert and nimble guide and his absorbing and edgy book will help us feel our way to a better future. Wide-ranging yet brilliantly astute… Davies is a wild and surprising thinker who also happens to be an elegant writer — a wonderful and eminently readable combination. Nervous States covers 400 years of intellectual history, technological innovation and economic development, seamlessly weaving in such disparate intellects as Carl von Clausewitz, Friedrich von Hayek and Hannah Arendt.
We should all read William Davies’s Nervous States, a concise, penetrating exploration of the role played by negative emotions in our recent politics and cultureWilliam Davies teaches political economy and sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. His work explores the history of ideas, especially the history of economics, and how this helps us understand the present. He is the author of
The Happiness Industry and
The Limits of Neoliberalism,
and regularly writes for the
Guardian and
London Review of Books.