Review: Hyperpolitics. Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences, by Anton Jäger

Today, politics is ubiquitous. Anton Jäger, a historian of the political, sensed this in the early 2020s. His friends echoed his sentiment, sharing that people they knew from their past as apolitical were now ‘hyperpolitical’. Others outside Jäger's circle sensed this too. As Jäger cites in Hyperpolitics, in 2020 an American journalist remarked: ‘The people who once shared cat videos on the internet now share stridently political memes, and third-tier staffers have become celebrities.’ Then, as Jäger explained in a 2023 interview to the American magazine The Point, he posted a Tweet noting a ‘real nostalgia for post-politics’ and expressing, ‘everything feels so hyperpolitical’. Jäger's Tweet resonated, garnering the attention of a Tribune editor, who then commissioned Jäger to write an article on his impression, published in 2022. Subsequently, The Point invited Jäger to further refine his analysis of the hyperpolitical moment, which they published in 2023. This same year, a German edition of Jäger's analysis was published. Now, Verso has a newly revised, English-language version of Jäger's social history of the present moment, and his findings are cogent.

In Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences, Anton Jäger conceptualises the present political moment as one of intense politicisation coupled with historically low levels of institutionalisation—conditions that have led to the ‘tendency’ of what he calls ‘hyperpolitics’. Jäger states that hyperpolitics ‘confronts us with a new mode of interaction between public and private. It is dynamic, intense, and polarizing, yet also ideologically diffuse, visibly modelled on the fluidity of the online world’. Through a method akin to what Max Weber described as that of an ‘interpretative specialist’, marked by a ‘genuine artistry’ that produces new knowledge through the reinterpretation of known facts, Jäger traces the evolution of Western political culture over the last century, ultimately to diagnose the contemporary political moment as one defined by hyperpolitics. As he explains, hyperpolitics ‘is meant to make sense of what comes after the mass politics of the short twentieth century (1914–1989), the postpolitics of the “very long” 1990s (1989–2008), and the antipolitics of the 2010s’.

Reviewing each political form in turn shows what has been lost in today's hyperpolitical era. Mass politics ‘belongs to a world in which society is … populated by movements with clearly identifiable social bases and ideologies’. Jäger poses this era as being the political culture of the West in the years 1914–89. He conveys mass politics’ ‘immersive character of political belonging, including the passions it once aroused’ through rich empirical sources. The acclaimed historian Eric Hobsbawm, in his memoir entitled Interesting Times, recalls his experience of a German Communist Party demonstration in 1933. Citing the memoir, Jäger writes:

Through this excerpt, Jäger shows how during the era of mass politics, organisations like the Communist Party of Germany allowed its members to assemble their political sentiments through collective actions like the march, resulting in an ‘immersive character of political belonging’. His analysis further demonstrates how such institutions of civil society offered its members a coherent ‘worldview’. High membership participation in formal associations like political parties, unions and religious organisations during the era of mass politics meant ‘political engagement … was markedly more patient and sustained than that which prevails in the twenty-first century’, and ‘politicians would bide their time over decades’.

Postpolitics emerged from the West's mass politics at the end of the twentieth century. Jäger suggests that the high institutionalisation and high politicisation of that era (the era of mass politics) ‘died a gradual death during the inflation-ridden 1970s, succeeded by the privatised postpolitics of the long 1990s’. Occurring between 1989 and 2008, postpolitics was an era where ‘people retreat[-ed] from collective life into the private sphere’. Jäger draws on Robert Putman's study in Bowling Alone to trace postpolitics’ roots:

Putnam surveyed a variety of causes for this grand désengagement … In the United States, middle-class families’ flight to the suburbs, beginning in the 1960s, left many in neighborhoods exclusively designed for motorists, without footpaths. Consumption was democratized in the postwar boom. People spent more time in their cars, a mobile privatization of public space. Corner stores were bulldozed to make way for shopping malls, and commuter rail infrastructure lost out to highways. The steady entry of women into the labor market deprived voluntary associations of a central base of support. Employees began working longer hours than their parents had and found little time for volunteering. Television locked citizens at home in the evening—the tombstone of postwar loneliness.

According to Jäger, this withdrawal from civil society was exacerbated by the neoliberal policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s, further compromising working-class collective power through ‘politically orchestrated crackdowns’. As Jäger writes:

In the post-political age, ‘[p]olicy became the purview of the unelected actors—central banks and bodies such as the European Commission’ and ‘[p]olitics was relegated to the media sphere’. Then, ‘the progressive-neoliberal consensus of the long 1990s released its hegemonic grip … and the left- and right-wing movements destabilized the established party systems, a process that eventually culminated in the populist victories of 2016 and beyond’.

Antipolitics follows the post-political era. Jäger graphs ‘strikes, demonstrations, and armed conflicts’ between 1995 and 2015 to demonstrate that the antipolitical era emerged in the mid-2010s and was characterised by political activity ‘against the status quo, against elites, against the establishment’. By profiling the party politics of antipolitical movements in Europe, and the Tea Party and Occupy movements in the USA, Jäger analyses the antipolitical zeal that swept the West during this era. He theorises that antipolitics ‘signifies repoliticization under conditions of diminishing social capital and the continuing decline of unions and traditional parties’. Through his analysis, Jäger finds that the fervent antipolitical sentiment of this era failed to progress into sustained, institutionalised power until the mid-2010s. Then, in 2015, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn entered onto the national stage, giving ‘way to a period of semi-institutionalization’ of antipolitical fervour. Reflecting on Sanders’ loss to Trump in 2016, and Corbyn's resignation in 2019, Jäger notes that the right's antipolitical energies evolved into longer-lasting staying power. He goes further by analysing the American Tea Party movement, ultimately showing how ‘the right was here better positioned than the left, both on the ground and among elite actors’.

Hyperpolitics arises from the antipolitical era. Emerging in the mid-2010s, Jäger conceptualises it as a ‘product of a hard but hollow environment, an attempt to break the iron grip of neoliberalism without the requisite tools to do so’. According to his analysis, waning membership of unions, associations, churches and clubs coupled with the ‘hollowing out’ of political parties left the working class with no means to organise their collective will. As Jäger writes:

In his final chapter, called ‘Escape routes’, Jäger considers the USA's Black Lives Matter movement as a hyperpolitical case in point. His analysis shows how, despite the historic turnout in support of the movement, lasting change in line with the movement's demands failed. Beyond this, Jäger poses that the movement's own calls to defund the police appear ‘painfully limited’ in the face of what he cites as the more complex issue of ‘a close connection between the underdevelopment of the American welfare state and the overdevelopment of its carceral counterpart’. That is, Jäger's final case study pinpoints the neoliberal state as a main driver for the disaffected public in our hyperpolitical era.

The strength of Hyperpolitics is twofold. First, Jäger's analytical method is stunning. He characterises his method as ‘distantiation’, akin to a researcher estranging themselves from an object of study so they can consider it critically. However, this characterisation undersells his achievement. Instead, and following Herbert Spencer's conceptualisation of ‘societies as living organisms’ in his essays, Jäger's analytical method is closer to that of a psychoanalyst studying the organism constituting the West's last century. That is, more than analysing objects or ideas, Jäger analyses what Wilhelm Dilthey, the German historian and philosopher, terms Erlebnis or ‘lived experience’ to come to the Weberian term of Verstehen or ‘understanding’ through which ‘life comes to know itself’.

Drawing on the concept of Erlebnis, Jäger analyses the expressions of political life through literature, photographs, memoirs, movements and online media to reconstruct the shifting forms of Western political culture and diagnose the present as ‘hyperpolitical’: a condition of intense mobilisation without durable organisation. By contrasting the dense institutional belonging of twentieth-century mass politics with today's atomised yet highly stimulated public, he offers conceptual clarity about the mismatch between participation and power and suggests that meaningful change requires re-institutionalised forms of collective engagement. His analysis shows that belonging, and the power to organise collective will, has been lost in the hyperpolitical era, clarifying the starting place we can act from. He ends his analysis on the sobering note that ‘still, the journey will have to begin somewhere’.

Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences, by Anton Jäger. Verso. 128 pp. £11.99