We meet after an absence of a few weeks and resume our primary task of remembering. Our conversation wanders between the seafaring prospect of eating soggy muesli aboard a storm tossed sailing ship to the more refined cosmopolitan pleasures of enjoying poached eggs on a bed of spinach with a hollandaise sauce on dry land, the white plate laid on a linen cloth at the cafe table of a Renaissance city. Why dont you stay longer? I ask provocatively along with other questions.
!938 and 1978? Pre-war and Post-war? Situation normal and social conflict, and I disagree, hardly a "barely suspecting world", there are always plenty of arguing voices ready to howl out for War, ready for a fight. We remember the Winter of Discontent (1978/79).
Then the breakdown of the (so called) post-war consensus which followed shortly after 1978 apparantly solved the contradiction betwen the thrust of the capital markets for ever more profits and the 'welfare state' demands of the social democrat tradition. A strange and unbelievable kind of social peace broke out, a certain "solidarity" built around the removal of inflation from the system, home ownership (the right to buy), and easy personal (plastic card) credit. Even the other argument between Reformers and Revolutionaries appeared to solve too when the Berlin Wall came down ten years later. Wealth all round (that was the myth on offer of course) for the thirty years to 2008, in other words, situation abnormal.
Situation abnormal!
The latest copy of the New Left Review offers a transcript of Wolfgang Streek's paper given as the Max Weber Lecture at the European University Institute, Florence in 2011. Under the title "Markets versus Voters?" we are given a review of the history of 19th and 20th century deep suspicions and open conflicts between capitalism and democracy grounded in the fear of the possibility the rule of the poor over the rich. We then look at the strange social peace of the 1978-2008, before looking at the current crisis since then. Crisis. Situation normal. Above all challenging the fond idea of a post-war or any other consensus, the situation normal is a "series of complex contests" and ongoing entrenched social conflict. In a word, crisis, not consensus is the norm of situation normal.
One wonders what other interesting programmmes the European University Institute offers in that fair city of Florence. A course on 20th Century World Literature perhaps? Why indeed dont you stay longer?