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“At the expense of anything?” rejoined Lady Carbury with energy. “One cannot measure such men by the ordinary rule.”
—Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now (1875)
Facile criticisms of Adam Tooze's new book, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy, present themselves at once. It suffers by comparison to Tooze's masterpiece, The Wages of Destruction (2006)—easily one of the best historical works of the last two decades, a huge and original take on the economy of Nazi Germany, its geopolitics and political economy alike forged in reaction to the example of Fordist America, its war aims destined to fail because of an increasing deficit in the “balance of resources” vis-à-vis the Allies.
It suffers even by comparison to Tooze's Crashed (2018), to which Shutdown seems a sequel or, perhaps, a younger and scrappier brother. Crashed, which masterfully laid bare the systemic fragility in the day-to-day funding of global banks, is at once richer in conception, wider in scope, longer in development and more mature, and also seemingly closer to the nerve center of elite decision making—a place of money and power where temperament and personality seem to trump all but the deepest strata of ideology—than is Shutdown.
The new book's apparatus (fewer than forty pages of microscopically printed notes), overwhelmingly made up of born-online news stories and opinion pieces from 2020, suggests the work of a financial journalist—albeit an especially sophisticated one with voracious reading habits—more than of an economic historian. Tooze did his earliest historical research in the archives of the recently deceased German Democratic Republic, he tells us in the book's provocative coda, and did the present research on his laptop under lockdown in Manhattan. Some of Shutdown, like chapter 2 (titled “Wuhan, Not Chernobyl”), even seems framed against (and thus around) what have come to be called “hot takes,” provocative yet hastily formed opinions of the sort that make their way like a virus around Twitter and global editorial pages.
Instead of beginning in medias res, Shutdown ends in medias res—necessarily so, or, as Tooze writes, “like it or not” (p. 304); the manuscript was submitted in the midst of an evolving crisis, as he readily admits and even embraces, with the ramifications of the...