Economic Horror

Viviane Forrester is a novelist and journalist, and the author of many books including La Violence du calme and a biography of Van Gogh. She is also a literary critic for Le Monde.

"People have found many scapegoats to explain the rise of unemployment and the inability to combat it - globalization, multinationals, neo-liberalism, even the end of history. Viviane Forrester goes beyond these concepts. Her book sets the terms of a real debate at last. Others will say whether her analyses are relevant, her concepts sound and her facts accurate - in short, whether she is right or wrong. But the reader of Economic Horror will undoubtedly be persuaded of one thing: what she says is just." Le Monde "Economic Horror also comes to us as a European publishing sensation ... she does have a vision of contemporary capitalism which focuses almost exclusively on its destructive, disorientating side. And which does so in a passionate, pulsing style, clearly attuned to the everyday fears of its predominantly middle-class readership, but not asking them to think too theoretically about the sources of their angst ... Powerful stuff" Sunday Herald (Glasgow) "Amid so many contemporary arguments about "Third Ways" and the inevitability...of capitalism, it is refreshing to read such an impassioned account of its essential malignance. Some may feel that the case is overstated by the lack of qualification of claims about globalisation and the lack of differentiation between nations, classes, ethnicities, genders. But this is partly deliberate, in order to present starkly that which is usually masked in qualification, to hold onto the wider picture, to refuse to set different sections of the population against each other."Ruth Levitas, Work, Employment and Society. 'Viviane Forrester's The Economic Horror, a bestseller in her native France, is full of passion for the destructive nature of employment. While governments advocate the "sanctity" of work, the unemployed are made to feel excluded, worthless, detached from the mainstream of society. With the razzmatazz of new Labour's New Deal fast fading, Forrester's arguments have a knowing persistence that upsets the conventional wisdoms of even the most modernised politics.' Mark Perriman, New Statesman