How the impeccably credentialed, improbably charming economic historian adam_tooze supplanted the dirtbag left. mollyhfischer reports
Photo: Brian Finke Henry Williams was 7 in 2008, and what he remembers about 2008 is that his dad lost his job. Henry’s suburban childhood was comfortable, but even so, it was shadowed by an awareness of precarity. For a time when Henry was growing up, an aunt in her 20s lived with his family while she was between jobs. The aunt had gotten an M.F.A. in film. In the years to come, an M.F.A. in film would seem like a bad plan to Henry.
On the Cover — ➼ Adam Tooze. The chart above Tooze is adapted from a recent edition of his newsletter. Photo: Brian Finke for New York Magazine In seminar rooms and on Twitter, Tooze has won a following: They are primarily young men, known sometimes as “Tooze Bros” or “Tooze Boys,” if boys can encompass a male population in its early 20s to late 30s. Like Williams, these fans tend toward the left and have occupations that enable them to spend hours on Twitter forming opinions.
Tooze’s ongoing study of past global disasters has arrived at a present rife with global disasters to explain. The events of spring 2020 vaulted him to prominence: As much of the world shut down, his schedule filled. On one occasion, when booked back-to-back, he left a Zoom panel with Emmanuel Macron while the French president was mid-sentence — just closed the window on Macron. In an email, Tooze recalled, “I was kinda in shock for days afterward ;).
Tooze’s parents had met at Cambridge, where his father was a scholarship student and his mother, he says, a child of the “Brahmanical upper-middle class.” Tooze, upon applying, was torn between studying economics and history. Because British undergraduate education involves a single focus, this choice appeared absolute. In economics, Tooze was by his own account “kind of on fire” — he’d been permitted as a teenager to teach a class on Keynesian models at his secondary school.
Yale was also where Tooze began offering a graduate course on the philosophy of history. Fertik remembered Tooze’s role in the class as a “convener” more than an instructor: someone who was “surely in the top half of the group in terms of the depth of his existing knowledge of the texts,” but who acknowledged that some of the students had expertise surpassing his own. He came to the material with a sense of discovery. In 2011, when Fertik took the class, it unfolded alongside Occupy.
Within the academy, Tooze embodied a certain graduate student’s fantasy: a scholar defying recent trends toward social and domestic history, focusing instead on the elites who dominated economic and political battlefields. When Yakov Feygin, now an economic-policy researcher at the Berggruen Institute, was getting his history Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, “I would joke that I want to be Adam Tooze when I grow up,” he told me.
In January, he devoted an installment of Chartbook to mapping “the polycrisis we are in.” This polycrisis encompassed Omicron, U.S. inflation, European inflation, the need for net-zero climate policy, and the potential for war with Russia in Ukraine. “It comes from all sides and it just doesn’t stop,” Tooze wrote. “In German there is a compound noun: Krisenbilder — Crisis Pictures. I am going to draw some Krisenbilder.
“Every dude on here’s dream blunt rotation is Mike Davis, Adam Tooze, and Fidel Castro,” tweeted journalist Aaron Freedman recently. “And there’s nothin wrong with that.” Tooze joined Twitter in 2015, at the suggestion of his teenage daughter , and took to the medium energetically. “Every day, I can see him basically live-tweet-reading the Financial Times,” Pareene said of Tooze — partly under his inspiration, Pareene recently subscribed. The Tooze Bros look upon his productivity in wonderment. “It is mind-boggling. Beyond mind-boggling. I mean, I’ll see him tweeting at 4 a.m. sometimes,” Williams said. “I do that sometimes, but that’s really a mistake.
The texts arrived in a flurry when, in February, Elon Musk tweeted about Tooze. The Tesla co-founder had jumped into an exchange about the Canadian truck blockade to recommend The Wages of Destruction. “Well thank you @elonmusk much appreciated!” Tooze responded. Musk had cited the book in the course of comparing Justin Trudeau to Adolf Hitler. This came to Tooze’s attention only later.
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