Morbid Symptoms

In 1930, Antonio Gramsci observed from his prison cell in Fascist Italy, 'The Old is dying and the New cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear'. Donald Sassoon recalls Gramsci's famous saying to frame a blistering account of the political distempers of our own times. Mixing blunt expose and classical references, he argues that as the sustained capitalist expansion of the post-war years recedes from view, we live poised uncertainly between eras, and at the greatest risk of a rapid regression. The resurgence of xenophobia and collapse of mainstream parties; the blunderings of the American superpower and demise of the European dream; the degeneration of public life and vainglories of a 'global Britain' - there are, Sassoon observes, 'morbid symptoms galore'.