Reading Varoufakis: Frustrated Strategist of Greek Financial Deterrence

Adam Tooze in his own website:

Adults in the Room is a book that anyone interested in modern European politics should read. To say it is the best memoir of the Eurozone crisis is an understatement. It is a devastating indictment of current state of Europe and a fascinating inside account of the logic of reformist politics and its limits and why it keeps going anyway.

It’s a truly complex document for a variety of reasons:

It’s a highly personal even confessional memoir of recent history.

Varoufakis is an intensely self-conscious historical subject.

He has a pronounced aesthetic and writerly self-consciousness. One may argue as to taste.

He has an outsized ego and this was seized on by the world’s media, who made his persona into the target for vast amounts of public comment and criticism. He has reason to feel victimized.

He is also an academic and an intellectual with wide-ranging interests: political theory, social theory and economics.

And he is a political activist with a cause, DiEM25, to promote.

All of these interests and concerns inflect the text. All of them would be worth expanding on at some length. But I’ll focus on three of the more “substantive” aspects of his memoir.

More here.