ABSTRACT
This chapter considers whether the financial crisis will speed a transition to what Thomas Kuhn would recognise as a new paradigm, something that happens when real-life experience and observations conflict with the predictions of the paradigm. Occupy is the cosy exciting manifestation of this fear, as is the impression of a huge number of people connected by social media, united in their concern for their own future and that of their children. The occupation will have to be of the intellectual high ground, collating and generating ideas that make sense to both politicians and citizens. The Occupy movement brought with it the same surge of identity and agency, magnified by social media, not just to old and young revolutionaries, but to middle-class matrons who brought food to the camps. Occupy was just another charge, without consequence to the overall battle, and over dispiritingly soon.
