There is a great deal of horror around at the moment as I write. Overwhelmed critical care departments in hospitals, quiet funerals with no relatives allowed to attend, migrant workers tramping home and the refugee and homeless dead buried in unmarked graves. This is a book prompted by an urgent optimism, but I must begin with acknowledging the desperation, tears and hurt wrought by COVID-19. With tired eyes looking over face masks, and families crying for their dead.

Every generation appears to think that they are balanced on the hinge of history, between a broken past and the possibility of a better future. This global crisis intensifies that sense that we are living through a moment that is pregnant with dread, and consequently also of possibility. Crisis, after all, comes from the Greek root krinein, to separate, decide or judge, and in turn probably from the proto Indo-European root krei, to sieve, and therefore to discriminate between what we want to keep and what we want to throw away.

The struggle for the future is what propels this book, trying to make a particular intervention into current thought and action. There are a lot of academics in these pages, but it is not meant to be an ‘academic’ book. It's a series of provocations, short on sustained argument and references, but gesturing towards the idea that rebuilding after this crisis must involve challenging pretty much everything that we know and do.

Bouncing back

One of the common metaphors used by politicians and policy makers has been the idea that ‘the economy’ – and we come back to that later – must rebound after all this is over. We have seen graphs and bar charts of decline, and then the uptick in ‘growth’ that will follow. It will be tough, we are told, but we can get our jobs back, buy a new car, have that foreign holiday. There is a longing in this, a nostalgia for what we knew and were familiar with. For some well-heeled inhabitants of the global north, boomers with pensions, the past few decades haven't been too bad really, so why wouldn't we want that back?