Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer what they Must? Book review.

Yanis Varoufakis at DiEM Session One, Volksbuhne. Arno-image. All rights reserved. I would like to start this review by looking at Varoufakis’ writing style: his style is interesting. The circumstances of Varoufakis’ life during the writing of this text were anything but conducive to the reflective processes that aid good writing. But, unlike many a scholar siloed within academic arcana, the stylistic treadmarks of 2015 are only noticeable in this book because Varoufakis writes so well.

Like all great story tellers, Varoufakis’ literary flare is not just a function of stylistic prowess. He gets right inside the fears, desires and external constraints of the key players in the complex history of the Eurozone so that we come to understand the human reasons why Europe now is where she is. This ‘getting inside’ is a function of a sharp analytical mind combined with a clear eyed commitment to the moral principles undergirding liberal democratic politics and humane economic science. It is his combination of high humanist values with carefully calibrated practical rationality that guides his story telling and makes his style so clear and powerful. This is on fine display in the hardest part of any book to write, its opening.

The preface is a pearl: a vivid account of childhood in Greece under the fascist turmoil of the late 1960s. It is polished, penetrating and powerful writing which moves the moral consciousness of the reader. We see that his concerns arise from tragic contact with the deep things of human experience that are universal and should be our concerns too. There is an urgency underpinning this text requiring that the story he tells must be told now. Three features give the book its solidity and importance: historical breadth and clarity, analytical incisiveness, and – to borrow a phrase from Ghandi – the moral power of its reasoning.