Introduction: Back to the 30s?
The 1930s are a major preoccupation of contemporary public culture—a crucial reference point for popular observers and academic researchers alike—as they attempt to make sense of current events by drawing parallels in economics and in politics; between th
- PDF / 639,972 Bytes
- 34 Pages / 419.528 x 595.276 pts Page_size
- 11 Downloads / 197 Views
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Back to the 30s? Jeremy Rayner, Susan Falls, George Souvlis, and Taylor C. Nelms
The 1930s are a major preoccupation of contemporary public culture. To be sure, the decade never really went away: Economic catastrophe, fascism, genocide, antisemitism, racism and xenophobia, rampant militarism, deep social and economic divisions—these all haunt our collective memory as preeminent examples of the worst that capitalism and the modern state have to offer, regularly invoked in ways both serious (e.g., Agamben 1998) and trivial (e.g., Godwin 1994).1 But at the end of 1 Godwin is best known for the facetious “law” he formulated in 1991, usually stated along the lines of the following: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”
J. Rayner (B) Centro de Economía Pública y Sectores Estratégicos, Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales, Quito, Ecuador S. Falls Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, Georgia G. Souvlis Department of History and Archaeology, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, Greece T. C. Nelms Filene Research Institute, Madison, WI, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J. Rayner et al. (eds.), Back to the ‘30s?, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41586-0_1
1
2
J. RAYNER ET AL.
the twenty-first-century’s second decade, comparisons to the 1930s have become more frequent and more urgent, raised by apparent similarities between the Great Depression and the Great Recession, historical fascism and today’s right-wing “populism” (Fig. 1.1). While few would deny that there are lessons to be learned from the study of the past, there is also concern that a culture of comparison might reductively misread or even sensationalize the present. Controversies about whether or not it is appropriate to refer to certain politicians as “fascists,” or to contemporary right-wing movements as “Nazis,” or to the spectacle of engineered human suffering on the US southern border as “concentration camps” (rather than “migrant detention centers”), indicate some of the rhetorical and ethical stakes involved. Often, debate over the appropriateness of the comparison seems to displace suffering and fear in the present. But some of our most fundamental concepts—of change, progress, agency, economy, democracy—do seem to be in play. It is worth recalling that at the beginning of the twenty-first century, received opinion held that the future belonged to liberal democracy and that monetary policy had forever tamed the business cycle—both variants of a linear, progressive telling of history that has arguably been the predominant temporal consciousness of capitalist modernity. Against this, the suggestion that the past has in some sense returned (or that we have returned to the past) is inherently unsettling—yet possibly also galvanizing, as Walter Benjamin (1968, 253–264) claimed, writing at the brink of death at the end of the cataclysmic 1930s. A sudden curve in what seemed a straight road brings
Data Loading...
