This book was written in the late spring and summer of 2020 and revised in the winter and spring of 2021 when the COVID-19 pandemic had not only fundamentally changed personal lives, creating the time and space for reflection that enabled the book to be written, but also disturbed the course of nations, societies, economies and cultures, and additionally had shaped in ways still unknowable the future trajectories of higher education systems and institutions.

It is a habit of historians to write of ‘long’ or ‘short’ centuries not aligned with the counting of the years. For many the 20th century was a ‘short century’, beginning in 1914 with the outbreak of the First World War and ending in 1989 with the Fall of Communism (in Europe, at any rate, reflecting a still powerful Eurocentric view of the world; a vigorous variant of communism is still dominant in China, the world's most populous country). For some, on the shorter-cycle pattern of France's post-war trentes années glorieuses, the years since 1990 can be framed as a short post-Cold War period, beginning in Western triumph (the conceit of ‘the end of history’) and degenerating through 9/11, the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, the banking crisis and economic recession, the abortive Arab Spring and the civil war in Syria and the intractable ‘war of terror’ and culminating with the election of Donald Trump as US president and the self-harm of Brexit. Looking back from the troubled summer of 2020 it feels like another historical punctuation point, the humbling of the ‘anthropocene’ age so soon after it was announced, with global pandemic and global warming. History, still imperfectly tamed by human agency, is far from over.

In the tighter focus of political economy, shorter ‘periods’ are identified. Of particular relevance to this book are, first, the age of the welfare state between 1945 and its fatal erosion during the troubled 1970s, and of political consensus and the dominance of broadly progressive ideas during the same years; and, next, the age of … the market, the individual, neoliberalism (here there is a wide choice of labels) … which became established in the course of the 1980s, survived the 2008 banking crisis and subsequent economic recession only to confront new and tougher challenges in the next decade including so-called populism, increasing political (and ideological) polarisation that has strained the conventions of democratic life, and finally pandemic.