State of confusion

With Time of Discomfort, Ad Verbrugge broke through to a large audience. Nine years later, his long-awaited new book, State of Confusion, appears, in which Verbrugge rethinks the problems of Western modernity on the basis of recent events, other thinkers and personal experiences, and in a more far-reaching manner.

We live in a state of confusion. Verbrugge understands this 'state' in both the institutional and personal sense of the word and speaks of both degenerated economy and alienated physicality. In conversation with a selection of thinkers - from Aristotle, Hegel, Spengler and Marx to Hayek, Keynes, Zizek and Sloterdijk - Verbrugge analyses our time with its problems and trends: the financial-economic crisis, Europe and the euro, the globalisation and virtualisation of human life, the state of our education, the demand for religion, the problem of professional honour. In his analyses, Verbrugge encounters an intriguing paradox: in the (post-)modern dynamics of degeneracy, the element earth forces itself upon us again. It is in this state of confusion that the birth of something new is announced that requires a different way of thinking.