In a still more profound way than we may think, we are in a period of crisis. Every aspect of the human condition and the social institutions we have made together are today in doubt. In the popular imagination, a crisis is a marker of something vexing that is to be overcome. It enjoys a temporal dimension, seeming to diagnose a present problem at the same time as it already imagines a future moment when the crisis will cease to be, when things will ‘return to normal’. Writing this book together during the the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020, that desire for a return to normal life is especially acute, currently providing the basis for a new and common hope all around the world.

And yet, the extent to which we should want to ‘return’ to what we previously understood as ‘normal’ is immediately problematic. The 21st century has already seen an unprecedented cadence of social, environmental, political and economic emergencies that have called into question the belief systems that have hitherto underpinned that normality. These emergencies have resulted in a steady decline in our trust in the value of our democratic political systems, which is seldom attributed to a globalized financial system that is too often responsible for driving these outcomes. The COVID-19 pandemic is providing humanity with an opportunity for a ‘great reset’ with the chance to ‘build back better’, but some are asking if we really want a swift return to the way things were. Instead, should we be choosing something better, a new way of organizing social life such that we can respond to the challenges of today and tomorrow, not yesterday? After all, we learn from Janet Roitman that if everything is in ‘crisis’ then perhaps nothing is. Is our state of perpetual crisis itself just the ‘new normal’? Suddenly emptied of its popular meaning then, how can we be in a period of crisis?

Reflecting on the events of 2008, when the world was first hit by those shockwaves of the global crash that still reverberate today, Sylvia Walby argues that ‘[f] inance caused the crisis.