... wide-ranging yet brilliantly astute ... Davies is a wild and surprising thinker who also happens to be an elegant writer — a wonderful and eminently readable combination. Nervous States covers 400 years of intellectual history, technological innovation and economic development, seamlessly weaving in such disparate intellects as Carl von Clausewitz, Friedrich von Hayek and Hannah Arendt. The unexpected affinities proposed in this book bring to mind the roving approach of Marshall McLuhan or Bruno Latour.

The book sits at the intersection of ongoing debates about post-truth, the assault on reason, the privileging of personal feelings and the rise of populism. Nervous States stands out for its sincere attempt not simply to lament these trends but to understand them ... When it comes to pointing a way out of our current predicament, however, Davies has little concrete to offer ... makes a compelling case for paying more attention to the role of feelings, alongside that of reason, in modern life.

The book’s concise thesis notwithstanding, it’s unclear what Mr. Davies means to argue. Nervous State is written in the omniscient style of so many 'sweeping' treatments these days, ranging haphazardly over four centuries of European history in the manner of Jürgen Habermas. The author jumps from one abstruse analysis to another, each chapter ending like a piece of atonal music, with no resolution or sense of closure ... Where Mr. Davies gives us a coherent argument, it’s often maddeningly tendentious.

At times, Davies’s weaving together of so many ideas feels overwhelming in an Adam Curtissy way, and it is hard to know where this will lead us. He has nothing to say on gender, which is interesting. But perhaps that’s another book. What he is certainly doing is pointing towards the need to reset traditional political analysis, which doesn’t take contradictory feelings into account ... Davies is a wonderfully alert and nimble guide and his absorbing and edgy book will help us feel our way to a better future ... Davies is doing some of the heavy lifting and probing for us.

This book does a good job of showing that the two-way contest between experts and the people is really a three-way relationship: both are fighting to claim the authority of the state ... These are sparkling insights, but Nervous States can’t decide whether we are living in unprecedented times or not. As a publishing strategy, it makes sense to talk up the novelty of the current moment, but the argument frequently cuts against that. Just as the idea of post-truth starts to lose its edge when we try to find an age of truth to contrast it with (there aren’t any), so the notion of a world struggling to cope with feeling sounds more like a part of the modern human condition than a distinctively 21st-century phenomenon ... For an account that is rightly sceptical of many inflated claims to expertise, Davies’s argument is often based on versions of the same ... Where it is useful to his account, he uses factual evidence to bolster his case, yet he often undercuts it at the same time ... This is an ambitious book with plenty to commend it...It represents an attempt to join up the myriad dots of our anxieties, but I could not see a way through its maze of facts and feelings, authorities and counter-authorities.

Davies’s account is full of acute observations, but there are several points at which the tools of Marxist analysis might have helped him out. One of the major themes of the book is the idea that the ‘weaponisation of everyday things’ has undermined any meaningful distinction between war and peace. When weaponised, an otherwise peaceful tool is seen ‘not in terms of its intended functions, but in terms of its full range of possible impacts’. Set up a social media account to share a few of your trivial thoughts with the world and you don’t expect to find yourself trolled towards suicide, but that can happen ... Davies suggests that we should ‘accept that we are all in a situation of quasi-war,’ but doesn’t make clear who he thinks is fighting whom.

Tracing the history of ideas beginning in the Enlightenment, the author transcends the familiar dichotomy of educated/uneducated, urban/rural, cosmopolitan/tribal that has come to explain combative political debate and elections that resulted in Brexit and Donald Trump’s presidency ... A fresh, astute examination of current events and urgent challenges.

Wide-ranging, sometimes tenuously argued ... Intricately but not tightly argued, Davies’s book shoehorns everything from the opioid epidemic to transhumanism into his analysis, which will appeal most to those concerned about technology, put off by claims of objectivity, and interested in insights about the role of emotion in politics.