Douglas Carswell – författare

Politics has never been more unpredictable. Radical populists and insurgents have turned politics-as-usual on its head. Rebel explores how we got here, where we are heading and what we can do about it. Douglas Carswell argues that these insurgencies are a reaction against the emergence of a political and economic oligarchy that has subverted our democracy and stifled our market system. ''Politics,'' he writes, ''is a cartel. Like the economy, it is rigged in the interests of a few.'' This leaves our liberal, democratic order – the mechanism that has allowed a historically unprecedented proportion of humanity to flourish – facing a twin assault: oligarchs on the one hand, radical populists on the other. Reassessing history and politics, Rebel puts forward a bold new thesis: we are not the first to face such a threat. Oligarchic cartels have clogged the arteries of nations and economies throughout history, triggering radical insurgencies in protest. But all too often the radicals have strengthened the hand of the oligarchs: the Roman, Venetian and Dutch republics all succumbed to cartels. ''Anti-oligarch radicals,'' the author notes, ''have often made the oligarchs seem the more attractive option.'' So, too, today, he suggests. In the face of these twin threats, Carswell mounts a robust defence of the liberal, democratic order. Drawing on his first-hand experience in taking on – and beating – the established political parties, he proposes a profound reform of politics and capitalism to free us from the cartels, listing the practical steps needed to make this revolutionary change happen.

The change in our ancestors' behaviour was barely perceptible at first. Only a few clues in the archaeological record – sea shells, ochre and stone tools exchanged over long distances – hint at what was to come. Today, a network of interdependence and trade spans the planet – lifting most of our species out of the grinding poverty of the past. But for much of history this engine of human progress stalled, with societies rigged in the interests of small parasitic elites. From the Greeks and Romans in antiquity, to China, India and Europe in the Middle Ages, the history of the world can be written as the constant struggle between the productive and the parasitic. Progress Vs Parasites charts this struggle. States rise and empires fall as the balance between the two shifts. It is the idea of freedom, Carswell argues, that ultimately allows the productive to escape the parasitic – and thus decides whether a society flourishes or flounders. A robust defence of classical liberalism, Progress Vs Parasites shows that the greatest threat to human progress today – as it has been in every age – is the idea that human affairs need to be ordered by top down design.