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Old Ideas That Explain the Present Better Than New Ones
Girard, Arendt, Ellul, Ibn Khaldun and Tocqueville keep appearing inside ‘unprecedented’ crises.
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Ellul’s technique
Ellul’s technique describes institutions reorganizing themselves around the most efficient available method until human purposes become secondary. AI adoption often follows exactly that pressure.
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Ibn Khaldun’s asabiyyah
Ibn Khaldun’s asabiyyah explains political rise and decline through group solidarity that strengthens outsiders and weakens comfortable ruling elites. The cycle still illuminates parties, states and movements.
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Du Bois’s double consciousness
Du Bois’s double consciousness describes seeing oneself through both personal experience and a society’s devaluing gaze. The concept remains essential to identity formed under unequal recognition.
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Weber’s iron cage
Weber’s iron cage describes rational administration becoming an impersonal system that limits freedom while increasing control and predictability. Modern metrics and platforms make the cage more granular.
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Girard’s mimetic desire
Girard’s mimetic desire explains how people copy one another’s wants and then become rivals over the same objects. Social platforms make the imitation measurable and extremely fast.
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Tocqueville’s soft despotism
Tocqueville’s soft despotism imagined citizens managed by a gentle administrative power that relieves them of responsibility without overt terror. Personalized digital systems give the warning a modern form.
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Polanyi’s double movement
Polanyi’s double movement predicts political resistance when markets disembed labor, land and money from social protection. Backlash against globalization and austerity fits the pattern better than sudden irrationality.
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Gramsci’s hegemony
Gramsci’s hegemony explains how power persists through common sense, institutions and cultural consent rather than force alone. It clarifies why political struggle occurs through language and education.
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Fanon’s colonial psychology
Fanon analyzed how colonial power enters language, desire, identity and the body, not only laws or borders. His psychology remains visible long after formal empire ends.
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10.
Arendt on totalitarianism
Arendt showed how isolation, propaganda and collapsed distinctions between fact and fiction can support totalitarian politics. Her account is more precise than calling every disliked leader authoritarian.
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