Sphinx

Obviously one always hopes one’s work will be read by people working on relevant topics in other disciplines – not just because of wanting to have as big an audience as possible, but with a quiet sense that perhaps extra-disciplinary readings will be somehow purer and more objective, rather than conditioned by prior knowledge and expectations. (And, for some of us, a vaguely optimistic “a prophet is not without honour…” hope that surely sooner or later someone will get what we’re trying to do). It’s fair to say, I think, that we do anticipate particular secondary audiences, and so there is always the possibility of being taken completely by surprise that someone else has actually come across our work, and apparently liked it.

I’ve recently been working on a piece on the politics of decadence. In my fairly long list of “it seemed a good idea at the time” things, this is undoubtedly a career highlight. My sole qualification for the task is an article I published in 2004 on ‘decadence as a theory of history’ – and to be honest I can’t recall why it occurred to anyone to ask me to give the conference paper on which that one was based, although it did tie into things I’d been doing with historical metanarratives. As I started to research this new piece, it did become clear that this was perhaps as much of a qualification as anyone could claim, simply because this isn’t a topic with much of an existing bibliography.

Or, from another perspective, a terrifyingly vast bibliography that no one has yet helpfully rendered down or organised. The thing with ‘decadence’ is that it has not been elaborated as a concept by anybody – it’s deployed as an allegedly objective description of reality, or thrown in as a rhetorical gesture – and so, with the exception of a brief survey of what the Decadents themselves had to say about politics (vague, incoherent…) this would be a very short chapter. The idea itself is decadent – as indeed I argued in that 2004 piece, historians are generally happy to use the equally metaphorical ‘decline’, but ‘decadence’ is too much, even when their actual analysis constantly teeters on the edge of it.

But if you think of ‘decadence’ not as a term or concept but as a complex of ideas about historical change, then it pops up all over the place, in many different contexts, through two and a half thousand years of political thought. You could almost claim that it is a constant background presence – why worry about trying to develop a stable constitutional structure, or fret about the state of civic virtue or the dangers of unbridled passions, or concern yourself with the impact of luxury on population and national virility, if not for the looming threat of decay? – in which case, trying to summarise it all in 8,000 words is basically mad. So, that’s what I’ve been doing for the last couple of weeks.

This has put me in the position of reading a lot of 17th- and 18th-century intellectual history, as that’s a period I’m relatively unfamiliar with (and heartfelt thanks to everyone who responded to my desperate pleas for bibliographic recommendations), but also deep immersion into the study of 20th- and 21st-century fascist and far-right thought, because the idea that society is sick and in desperate need of violent restoration is absolutely central to that agenda – including the whole Drain The Swamp Make American Great Again Thing, as well as Generation Identity, Golden Dawn, the Front National and their favourite philosophers…

And there it was, in an extremely clear and insightful article on the decadence rhetoric of the Front National: my 2004 piece, cited as the basic framework for thinking about the contrast between corrupt present and virtuous imaginary past. Wow. Once I’d got over the shock, I feel more or less equally flattered, reassured and terrified. (1) Someone in a completely different discipline has found my work interesting and useful! (2) Clearly this is an area where further research really is needed, and my ideas may make a useful contribution. (3) Ohdeargods this is actually serious stuff, not just me playing around with abstract ideas, and I need to get this right…