“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change,” says Tancredi in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo. The novel, and the eponymous realist film set in the Italian Risorgimento of the mid-nineteenth century, show the aristocratic order of old Europe crumbling under the blows of liberal insurgency — but also how the hoped-for new order benefited only a few. Arguably, the transformation unfolding today is no less sweeping. It seems the time of historical change has been compressed — but its direction remains unclear.

We do know something about the epochal transformations catalyzed by the epidemic — they include financial destabilization, the rapid spreading of poverty, the resurgence of ecological issues, and the stifling of so-called globalization. But this also means both the welcome and the inevitable derailing of a productive model built around extractivism and consumerism, megafactories and agrobusiness, mass transport, urban sprawl, and debt. Today, air-conditioned skyscrapers look like symbols of hubris and improvidence rather than power.

The pandemic and quarantines tarnished the soothing idea of progress itself, on which both liberals and the Left had built powerful imaginaries. Five hundred years of capitalism and two centuries of industrialization proved insufficient prophylactic against lethal viruses that were supposed to have been banished. State and economic actors that legitimate themselves through hygienist practices and discourses were surprised by a foe deemed vanquished, and they panicked.