Hobson is therefore at least as relevant for what he had to say about Britain, the leading imperial power of the day, where he posited a theory of under-consumption, in which the maldistribution of wealth at home, seeking outlets for investment abroad, undermined democracy and turned finance into the ‘governor of the imperial engine’. Luce accumulates ample evidence of such tendencies in his own weary titan—the baleful grip of Wall Street on Washington, the overreach of American empire—but declines to follow Hobson in drawing systemic conclusions from their coincidence. The crisis of the ‘middle class’ and ‘our democracies’ is one of economic growth, pur et dur, as if its social distribution were immutable, or without consequence for the rate of growth itself. The effect is to take both the mode and relations of production off the table: here everyone is middle class, even as more and more Americans see themselves as lower or working class; capitalism as such never appears once in the book. In contrast to Hobson, who saw socialism as one way to cut off fuel to the imperial engine and create a workers democracy, Luce disdains the political forces that have made rising inequality their battle cry. Corbyn is dismissed as ‘standing as much for unblinking nostalgia as Trump’, and his supporters are ‘as historically illiterate’ as ‘Trump’s army of “deplorables”’, if ‘less racist’. Luce is scandalized by Corbyn’s call to renationalize the railways, with overwhelming popular support—a measure ‘no sane cost-benefit analysis of Britain’s fiscal outlook’ would recommend. For Luce, the best result in 2017 was Emmanuel Macron’s ‘thumping victory’, a quinquennat that kicked off by slashing taxes on capital gains, cutting student benefits, reducing retirees’ pensions, and attacking railway unions.

In the twentieth century, the most influential narrative of decline belonged to Oswald Spengler, whose title Luce and Emmott reference, while moving in the opposite direction from it. Spengler, of course, scorned liberal intellectuals, advising young Germans ‘to turn from poetry to technology, from painting to the merchant marine, from epistemology to politics’. But in 1918 Spengler was at least clear on what he meant by the downfall of the occident, which is in part why Adorno called his reactionary critique of liberalism ‘superior in many respects to the progressive one’, since it saw in liberal ideals not a false promise, but a fraud. Luce never returns to the Berlin Wall to ask if it was ‘democracy’ that triumphed the day he scrambled atop it. In our age of decline, alas, even the books on decline are in decline.