A nice profile about the Tooze phenomenon.
About Marx him and me both:
He told me that he is not a Marxist in part because he thinks treating a body of theory produced in the middle of the 19th century as “the be-all and end-all” – a stable point from which one might stand outside history and discern its hidden forces and patterns – is “a lazy way of dealing with reality”. To accept the radicalism of the present, he says, means acknowledging that you can’t understand history before it happens: “If you’re in the middle of shit, you don’t actually know what the shit is that you’re in the middle of.”
