What happened at Canterbury is now happening in universities around the Anglophone world. Even if most news coverage of higher education focuses on quarrels over curricula and freedom of speech, humanities departments have in fact experienced a far deeper realignment, one that is three decades in the making.

As the entire workplace of the university has become more contingent, the protections fought for over decades by both students and academics – protections from the government, the public, and indeed from each other – have evaporated almost by stealth.

Bolsonaro is advancing his political agenda not by dictating what may or may not be taught, but rather by bringing to bear on students and academics the discipline of a market he commands.

We are all, to a greater or lesser extent, in a romance with our own fantasies. For some time, though, politics on the left has refused to entertain the realm of feeling; instead it has become dominated by a technocratic and perfective strand of thinking. I am referring to the investment social democratic parties have made across the world in producing ever better technical fixes to the job of governing: If only we could crack the right set of incentives, or the right set of interventions, each of us will flourish, and our longings for a better life will be fulfilled.