Adam Tooze Archives - Public Seminar

Politics

Switzerland, January 22

After the thugs

January 22, 2026 • by Adam Tooze

Walking past the pavilion proclaiming “Freedom 250.” The blank metal of the decaled window frames, evokes nothing of the sort. Faded wraps in red, white, and blue remind one of a gambling parlor in some bedraggled third-tier pedestrian mall. Or of the sort of images that enthusiastic men glue to cars and motorbikes. Strip ...

Economy

Trump vs. the Fed

Or how history is forcing the question of a democratic politics of central banking

August 27, 2025 • by Adam Tooze

Donald Trump’s move to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook “for cause,” escalates his long-running battle with America’s central bank. The news has triggered outrage. In the pages of the FT, David Wessel, director of the Hutchins Center for Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution, warned: “President Trump seems determined to ...

History

Curzio Malaparte’s War

The notorious war correspondent wanted to show us a civil war between different modes of industrialized modernity

January 30, 2025 • by Adam Tooze

Two of the most shocking books about World War II were written by the Italian fascist litterateur and dandy Curzio Malaparte. His “novels” Kaputt and The Skin have been canonized through incorporation into the wonderful series of New York Review Classics. They are hailed by luminaries like Milan Kundera, Gary ...

Economy

Columbia University’s “Crisis”

A political economy sketch map

May 3, 2024 • by Adam Tooze

Questions of political economy are at the heart of the Columbia University protests....

Activism

A Response to “Principles of Solidarity. A Statement”

Human dignity for all

November 22, 2023 • by Public Seminar

Solidarity means that the principle of human dignity must apply to all people. This requires us to recognize and address the suffering of all those affected by an armed conflict....

Democracy

Donald Trump: Democracy’s Mirror image?

Modern liberal democracies can always cancel themselves

September 15, 2020 • by Philip Manow

______ In a modern representative democracy, power alternates via elections. Or, as one minimalist definition puts it: ‘democracy is simply a system in which incumbents lose elections and leave when they lose’.[1] But since they only leave after the event, democracy on this account of it can only ever prove itself ex-post. ...