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Hyperpolitics:Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences
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POLITICS AFTER THE END OF THE END OF HISTORY
What happens when politics is everywhere, yet nothing seems to change? From the abandoned dance floors of Thatcher’s London to the mass mobilizations of Black Lives Matter, Anton Jäger traces how public life has become infused with protest, spectacle, and moral urgency — while the old infrastructure of parties, unions, and civic solidarity has been hollowed out.
Hyperpolitics revisits the illusions of the “end of history” and dissects the strange energies that replaced them: viral outrage, endless culture wars, and the digital rush of causes that flare and vanish overnight. Jäger shows how the promises of post–Cold War liberalism gave way to a restless, unsteady public sphere where private passions overflow into politics but rarely build enduring power.
Ranging from Guy Debord and Wolfgang Tillmans to Houellebecq’s disenchanted fictions, Hyperpolitics makes sense of a world in which collective action remains fragmented and the social fabric thinner than ever. For anyone trying to grasp why our age feels so charged yet so inconsequential, this book offers a vital map through the new contradictions of our hyperpolitical moment.
Reviews
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The potential energy of organized gangs of wine moms is implicit in the new book “Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences,” in which Anton Jäger, a political historian at Oxford, draws a familiar but potent picture of an atomized, reactive, and screen-tethered culture, one lacking the sticky ongoing connections that were facilitated by the union meetings and shop floors and rec halls of yore.
The New Yorker -
Hyperpolitics is among the best and most dazzling efforts to model the political present in all its maddening strangeness.
, The New York Times -
What Jäger seeks to understand in Hyperpolitics is the way politics appears to have returned with a vengeance, yet at the same time turned on itself as a form of anti-political rage and hopelessness.
, London Review of Books
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Jäger shows that our increasingly saturated discourse prevents radical alternatives from taking shape, leaving us trapped in a hyperpolitical limbo: an eternal present characterized by 'extreme politicization without political consequences.'
, Jacobin -
At a time when the various enthusiasms of the 2010s seem faraway indeed, no matter how low Trump’s approval ratings sink, and when Democrats’ sheer desire to win seems to blot out any questions of long-term reorientation of state and society, Jäger stands out for the sweep and force of his analysis.
, The New Republic -
Jäger offers an incisive analysis of the contemporary political moment. It’s an urgent and clarifying call to log off and show up.
Publishers Weekly -
A text to return to again and again. Hyperpolitics is wide-ranging but never stretched, always plausible. Jäger is a rare meeting of an exciting thinker and a graceful writer
, Guardian -
Never have we been aware of so much—corrosive politics, daily catastrophes, celebrity banalities—and known so little. This dizzying and ubiquitous unreality, suggests Anton Jäger, is the era of hyperpolitics.
, Lit Hub -
Striking expressions... make this book a compelling read. It challenges readers to engage seriously with a new phenomenon
, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung -
A sharp and insightful analysis of contemporary political culture
, NZZ am Sonntag -
Everything strains to be political, yet all activism fizzles out. This book explains why.
, Welt am Sonntag -
Hyperpolitics is a very good book... It's very good because you don't need to have joined a party one wild night in 2016 to know that it's true. It's enough to live in the present.
, Süddeutsche Zeitung -
Both revelatory and invigorating. Anton Jäger’s nimble and careful reconstruction of the recent past helps us to answer two very pressing questions: What happened to our politics, and what happened to our minds?