Carne Ross – författare

There are few books that attempt to interpret the world and how it is run.The Leaderless Revolution offers a refreshing and potent contrast to the Panglossian optimism of Tom Friedman's The World is Flatbut, like that book, it offers a way of understanding the world of the 21stcentury that is both clear and easily comprehensible. Carne Ross takes different angles on contemporary issues - economics, politics, the state of democracy, the environment and terrorism - wrapping them into a unified explanation of how money and power function to control the lives of the earth's inhabitants, such that they feel powerless to affect their collective future. It seems that mankind has settled upon liberal democracy as the ideal form of government. Its triumph with the collapse of communism signalled the end of ideological struggle and thus of history. The Leaderless Revolutionwill show however that even in democracies, many if not most of the population feel that they are excluded from any agency over the issues that most trouble them, while governments appear less and less able to influence the global problems that threaten our peace and comforts. Mining the rich but little-examined histories of both cosmopolitanism and anarchism, The Leaderless Revolutionshows how both ideas, in combination, are relevant and necessary for the problems of today. Not only an antidote to our global crises; Carne Ross offers, moreover, a route to fulfillment and self-realisation.

Part memoir, part political argument, There We Are Human Again declares that a much richer way of living is possible, and within our grasp today, together – to be truly human, at last.The world is sliding towards one kind of anarchy: incessant conflict, environmental collapse, and a disturbing sense of insoluble crisis and hopelessness. But there is another kind of “anarchy” entirely – not chaos, but organizing ourselves, cooperating without domination or coercion, and therefore living – and loving – together in peace.In this book, Carne Ross tells the story of how he went from negotiating conflict and terrorism for the British government and resigning in disgust over the Iraq war, to working with liberation and democracy movements around the world, and in the process discovering anarchism as an inspiring yet surprisingly plausible politics.His journey spans disillusionment, despair and psychological collapse, and finally the discovery of a new way of looking at life – and love – and with it a personal reconstruction and revival of hope.There We Are Human Again explains that we cannot be truly ourselves when controlled by the state, our lives dominated by the incessant demands of work and 'the boss'. We are told that the current 'system' is inevitable and indeed reflects the reality of human nature.  But this is not so. If we instead put the highest of human needs and desires - our relationships, love itself - at the centre, we discover an entirely different way of organising ourselves, our politics, our economics - in fact, of how to live. And only there can we find what it is to be truly human, at last.