Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse - Hardcover

Chatterton Williams, Thomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593534409 ISBN 13: 9780593534403

Publisher: Knopf, 2025

Synopsis

An incisive, culturally observant analysis of the evolving mores, manners and taboos of social justice (“anti-racist”) orthodoxy, which has profoundly influenced how we think about diversity and freedom of expression, often with complex or paradoxical consequences.

"Summer of our Discontent [is] 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

In this provocative book, Thomas Chatterton Williams, one of the most revered and reviled social commentators of our time, paints a clear and detailed picture of the ideas and events that have paved the way for the dramatic paradigm shift in social justice that has taken place over the past few years. Taking aim at the ideology of critical race theory, the rise of an oppressive social media, the fall from Obama to Trump, and the twinned crises of COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd, Williams documents the extent to which this transition has altered media, artistic creativity, education, employment, policing, and, most profoundly, the ambient language and culture we use to make sense of our lives.

Williams also decries how liberalism—the very foundation of an open and vibrant society—is in existential crisis, under assault from both the right and the left, especially in our predominantly networked, Internet-driven monoculture.

Sure to be highly controversial, Summer of Our Discontent is a compelling look at our place in a radically changing world.

About this title

About the Author

THOMAS CHATTERTON WILLIAMS is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a visiting professor of humanities and senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, a 2022 Guggenheim fellow, and a non-resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Previously a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a columnist at Harper’s, he has written for The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and Le Monde, among other publications. He lives in Paris and New York.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593534409
• ISBN 13: 9780593534403
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272