Nemesis

Examining history through the lens of Bertrand de Jouvenel's high - low vs. middle mechanism, C.A. Bond lays bare the hyper-centralisation of power under liberalism and democracy. He reveals the poverty of liberal accounts of history as a bottom-up process of grassroots change, instead showing history to be driven by patronage and the selection effects of power. In this, we discover the unsettling fact that many ideas so fundamental to modernity - from the "individual" to political science to human rights and beyond - are not the product of reason or progress, but of the demands of structural conflict.