Summer of Our Discontent

The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse

By: Thomas Chatterton Williams

An incisive, culturally observant analysis of the evolving mores, manners and taboos of social justice (“anti-racist”) orthodoxy, which has profoundly influenced how we think about diversity and freedom of expression, often with complex or paradoxical consequences.

In this provocative book, Thomas Chatterton Williams, one of the most revered and reviled social commentators of our time, paints a clear and detailed picture of the ideas and events that have paved the way for the dramatic paradigm shift in social justice that has taken place over the past few years. Taking aim at the ideology of critical race theory, the rise of an oppressive social media, the fall from Obama to Trump, and the twinned crises of COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd, Williams documents the extent to which this transition has altered media, artistic creativity, education, employment, policing, and, most profoundly, the ambient language and culture we use to make sense of our lives.

Williams also decries how liberalism—the very foundation of an open and vibrant society—is in existential crisis, under assault from both the right and the left, especially in our predominantly networked, Internet-driven monoculture.

Sure to be highly controversial, Summer of Our Discontent is a compelling look at our place in a radically changing world.

©2025 Thomas Chatterton Williams (P)2025 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Even when I disagree, I admire those ‘Hard-Headed Negroes,’ like Thomas Chatterton Williams, who have the mettle and tenacity to challenge orthodoxy, often risking censure by their contemporaries for daring to speak their minds. Thomas Chatterton Williams has taken his place among these brilliant dissenters.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Distinguished Professor, Harvard University

“Mass insanity broke out among America's elites in the summer of 2020, with devastating consequences for America's knowledge-creating institutions. Thomas Chatterton Williams is one of the few intellectuals who stood firm and made the case with great courage for liberal values and the free exchange of ideas. In Summer of our Discontent he returns with a gift: a way of understanding what happened to us that preserves the humanity of all parties and points the way forward toward renewal.”—Jonathan Haidt, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Anxious Generation

“Thomas Chatterton Williams uses a fiercely probing intelligence, instinctively dissatisfied with absolutist explanations, to explore without ideological blindfolds what happened in one momentous summer. Camus would have liked this book.”—Adam Gopnik, bestselling author of The Real Work