‘David Graeber has always been an inspiration to me. Reading him fills me with both hope and joy… The tools he has shared to help all of us deconstruct the current reality we inhabit are invaluable. The more people that we can reach the more chance of a reimagined world is possible’– Clive Lewis MP

‘The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently,’ wrote David Graeber. This new collection brings together the renowned anthropologist, author and activist’s most visionary essays, showing him imagining a new understanding of the past – and a future based on humans’ fundamental freedom.

Drawn from more than two decades of pathbreaking writing, and ranging across the biggest issues of our time – inequality, technology, the identity of ‘the West,’ democracy, art, power, anger, mutual aid and protest – Graeber’s essays challenge the old assumptions about political life. Despite converging political, economic, and ecological crises, our politics is still dominated by either ‘business as usual’ or nostalgia for a mythical past. Instead, Graeber shows himself to be a trenchant critic of the order of things, driven by a bold imagination and a passionate hope that our world can be different.

The incisive, entertaining and urgent essays collected in The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World make for essential reading. They are a profound reminder of Graeber’s enduring significance as an inspiring and necessary thinker.

‘David Graeber has always been an inspiration to me. Reading him fills me with both hope and joy… The tools he has shared to help all of us deconstruct the current reality we inhabit are invaluable. The more people that we can reach the more chance of a reimagined world is possible’– Clive Lewis MP

‘The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently,’ wrote David Graeber. This new collection brings together the renowned anthropologist, author and activist’s most visionary essays, showing him imagining a new understanding of the past – and a future based on humans’ fundamental freedom.

Drawn from more than two decades of pathbreaking writing, and ranging across the biggest issues of our time – inequality, technology, the identity of ‘the West,’ democracy, art, power, anger, mutual aid and protest – Graeber’s essays challenge the old assumptions about political life. Despite converging political, economic, and ecological crises, our politics is still dominated by either ‘business as usual’ or nostalgia for a mythical past. Instead, Graeber shows himself to be a trenchant critic of the order of things, driven by a bold imagination and a passionate hope that our world can be different.

The incisive, entertaining and urgent essays collected in The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World make for essential reading. They are a profound reminder of Graeber’s enduring significance as an inspiring and necessary thinker.

No-one deserves to be a millionaire. Not even you.

We all notice when the poor get poorer: when there are more rough sleepers and food bank queues start to grow. But if the rich become richer, there is nothing much to see in public and, for most of us, daily life doesn’t change. Or at least, not immediately.

In this astonishing, eye-opening intervention, world-leading philosopher and economist Ingrid Robeyns exposes the true extent of our wealth problem, which has spent the past fifty years silently spiralling out of control. In moral, political, economic, social, environmental and psychological terms, she shows, extreme wealth is not only unjustifiable but harmful to us all – the rich included.

In place of our current system, Robeyns offers a breathtakingly clear alternative: limitarianism. The answer to so many of the problems posed by neoliberal capitalism – and the opportunity for a vastly better world – lies in placing a hard limit on the wealth that any one person can accumulate. Because nobody deserves to be a millionaire. Not even you.

*Shortlisted for the Socrates Philosophy Prize*

Faith in technological fixes for our problems is waning. Automation, which promised relief from toil, has reactivated the long-standing fear of job redundancy. Information technology, meant to liberate us from traditional authority, is placing unprecedented powers of surveillance and control in the hands of a purely secular Big Brother. And for the first time, artificial intelligence threatens anthropogenic disaster – disaster caused by our own activities. Scientists join imaginative writers in warning us of the fate of Icarus, whose wings melted because he flew too close to the sun.

This book tells the story of our fractured relationship with machines from humanity’s first tools down to the present and into the future. It raises the crucial question of why some parts of the world developed a ‘machine civilisation’ and not others, and traces the interactions between capitalism and technology, and between science and religion, in the making of the modern world.

Taking in the peaks of philosophy and triumphs of science, the foundation of economics and speculations of fiction, Robert Skidelsky embarks on a bold intellectual journey through the evolution of our understanding of technology and what this means for our lives and politics. ‘Unless we understand technology as a system of ideas rather than as a necessity,’ he writes, ‘we will be powerless to choose which technology is best suited to our needs and purposes.’

The Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller.
Winner of the Orwell Prize.
Named the most ‘Rebellious Read of the 21st Century’ in a Scottish Book Trust poll.

Darren McGarvey has experienced poverty and its devastating effects first-hand. He knows why people from deprived communities all around Britain feel angry and unheard. And he wants to explain . . .

So he invites you to come on a safari of sorts. But not the kind where the wildlife is surveyed from a safe distance. This book takes you inside the experience of poverty to show how the pressures really feel and how hard their legacy is to overcome.

Arguing that both the political left and right misunderstand poverty as it is actually lived, McGarvey sets out what everybody – including himself – could do to change things.

‘Another cry of anger from a working class that feels the pain of a rotten, failing system. Its value lies in the strength it will add to the movement for change.’ – Ken Loach, director of Kes