Summer of Our Discontent

Summer of Our Discontent is the story of the dramatic and not inevitable turn in consciousness, encapsulated in the generation-defining twin calamities of the death of George Floyd and Covid-19. These events reshaped not just American life, but also the networked, Internet-driven monoculture that huge swaths of the planet increasingly cohabit. Any attempt to make sense of the recent past is not without risk. The aim here is not so much a definitive account of an era more or less beginning in the second Obama administration and concluding in the fall of 2023, after Hamas's attack on Israel, but a broader analysis of the evolving manners, mores, taboos and consequences of the recent American social justice orthodoxy-"antiracism, or "wokeness" more broadly-that came in from the discursive margins and went global.

This book is ultimately an argument for why we must resist the mutually assured destruction of identitarianism-even when it comes dressed up in the seductive guise of 'antiracism'-and really believe in the process of liberalism again, if we are ever to make our multiethnic societies hospitable to ourselves and to the future generations we hope will surpass us. We must, in a sense, reopen-or finally open-the liberal mind, which has been pressed perilously close by furious, radical, and sophistic forces on both sides of the political and cultural spectrum.

Even when I disagree, I admire those 'Hard-Headed Negroes,' like Thomas Chatterton Williams, who have the mettle and tenacity to challenge orthodoxy, often risking censure by their contemporaries for daring to speak their minds. Thomas Chatterton Williams has taken his place among these brilliant dissenters -- Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Distinguished Professor, Harvard University
Mass insanity broke out among America's elites in the summer of 2020, with devastating consequences for America's knowledge-creating institutions. Thomas Chatterton Williams is one of the few intellectuals who stood firm and made the case with great courage for liberal values and the free exchange of ideas. In Summer of our Discontent, he returns with a gift: a way of understanding what happened to us that preserves the humanity of all parties and points the way forward toward renewal -- Jonathan Haidt, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Anxious Generation
Thomas Chatterton Williams uses a fiercely probing intelligence, instinctively dissatisfied with absolutist explanations, to explore without ideological blindfolds what happened in one momentous summer. Camus would have liked this book -- Adam Gopnik, bestselling author of The Real Work
Thomas Chatterton Williams manages to make moral and cultural sense of a profoundly perplexing time. By seeing clearly, reflecting honestly, writing with real power and style, and beginning from the premise that no faction is entirely right or entirely wrong, he offers genuine illumination. This is an essential book -- Yuval Levin, author of American Covenant

Thomas Chatterton Williams is a staff writer at the Atlantic, a visiting professor of humanities at Bard College, and a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the bestselling author of Self-Portrait in Black and White and Losing My Cool. Williams is a visiting professor of the humanities and a senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, a 2022 Guggenheim fellow, and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Le Monde, and many other places, and has been collected in The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing. He has received support from New America, Yaddo, MacDowell, and The American Academy in Berlin, where he is a member of the Board of Trustees.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.