With After Nations, Rana Dasgupta has given us the new political breviary of our century. It is the most incisive, urgent, and necessary reflection on political philosophy I have read in decades - the first in a very long time that does not leave me with a sense of despair, but instead fills me with profound hope. A new classic, the twenty-first century’s counterpart to Hobbes’s Leviathan. -- Emanuele Coccia, author of The Life of Plants and Philosophy of the Home

After Nations is an innovative and erudite historical reflection on our contemporary crisis. Dasgupta provides a riveting global account of how the nation-state, the principal form of organization in modern society, established itself by providing a new source of legitimacy, taming religion, promising freedom and equality, mastering nature, and mobilizing the economy and technology for prosperity. But, Dasgupta argues, this success of the nation-state was both contingent and fragile. It is increasingly 'not fit for purpose', undermined by the very forces it unleashed. His book boldly sketches out a vision for what might come After Nations. -- Pratap Bhanu Mehta, former Vice Chancellor of Ashoka University and President of the Centre for Policy Research

Simply astonishing –After Nations offers an original perspective on the recent history of world affairs, and in the process opens new vistas onto the future of global politics. Dasgupta is consistently insightful, thought-provoking, and on point. Above all, this book is a call to rediscover our species’ most basic and important form of freedom: to create new social worlds and alternative political realities. -- David Wengrow, co-author of?The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

Rana Dasgupta is the author of two novels and a non-fiction portrait of twenty-first century Delhi. Dasgupta was a visiting fellow in the humanities at Princeton University and has taught as a visiting lecturer at Brown University. His essays have been published in The Guardian, New Statesma