{"id":756,"date":"2026-07-23T14:54:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-23T14:54:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2026\/07\/23\/meet-the-man-whose-groundbreaking-book-is-being-devoured-by-the-left-politics-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2026-07-23T14:54:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-23T14:54:09","slug":"meet-the-man-whose-groundbreaking-book-is-being-devoured-by-the-left-politics-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2026\/07\/23\/meet-the-man-whose-groundbreaking-book-is-being-devoured-by-the-left-politics-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet the man whose groundbreaking book is being devoured by the left | Politics | The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

The years 1914 to 1989 mark the age of mass politics, when politicisation was high and institutionalisation was also high \u2013 so people engaged with politics electorally and on the streets. They were joiners \u2013 of political parties, unions, congregations, working men\u2019s clubs, reading groups; they participated in multiple interlacing institutions. Not by coincidence, this was also a time when political struggle resulted in concrete gains.<\/p>\n

Then, 1989 to the financial crash in 2008 (the years often called the \u201clong 90s\u201d) was the age of post-politics, when institutionalisation was low (we emphatically did not join clubs then, we went to clubs), and politicisation was through the floor. It was a time when technocrats took care of business while everyone else went to a rave, and we said history was over.<\/p>\n

From the crash through to about 2020 (sometimes earlier, this boundary is the most fluid) was the age of anti-politics \u2013 a resurgent Tea Party in the US, Beppe Grillo and anti-establishment protests in Italy, the Arab spring, the Occupy movement. Politicisation in this period came back with a vengeance, and even while institutionalisation hasn\u2019t recovered, these movements still have institutional ambitions. Protest movements in Spain and Greece bore political parties, Podemos and Syriza; protest candidates in the US, France and the UK, had their eyes on retaking traditional parties from which the revolutionary intent had long been stripped away.
\nHyperpolitics is what came next: intense politicisation, with neither institutional roots nor ambitions. \u201cOn the surface,\u201d J\u00e4ger writes, \u201cthe Black Lives Matter protests would seem to have little in common with the mob that stormed the Capitol in January 2021. Morally, they are worlds apart \u2026 Organisationally, however, these movements exhibit a striking set of similarities: fleeting in duration, they maintain no membership rolls and struggle to impose any real discipline on their adherents.\u201d As a consequence, everything explodes and nothing changes; movements surge suddenly forward and yet no territory is taken. He quotes political theorist Paolo Gerbaudo\u2019s evocative phrase \u201cbodies without organs\u201d. Modern political movements, he writes, are \u201cconcentrated and muscular, yet without an internal metabolism\u201d.
\n\u2014 Read on www.theguardian.com\/politics\/2026\/jul\/23\/anton-jager-groundbreaking-book-being-devoured-by-left<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The years 1914 to 1989 mark the age of mass politics, when politicisation was high and institutionalisation was also high \u2013 so people engaged with politics electorally and on the streets. They were joiners \u2013 of political parties, unions, congregations, working men\u2019s clubs, reading groups; they participated in multiple interlacing institutions. Not by coincidence, this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[171,38],"class_list":["post-756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-hyperpolitics","tag-society"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=756"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}