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. Ranging over such phenomena as Athenian democracy, radical Islam, Black Lives Matter, NGOs, the Enlightenment, the civil rights era, and feminism, Bond offers a secure theoretical basis for the illiberal revolt which has engulfed our world.

The initial publication of this work described it as “an event with which all historians and political observers will need to come to grips,” and the history of ideas since then have borne this out. Nemesis made an understated but important impact in a post-2020 world. This second edition makes this impact clear with a new introduction placing the book in the context of Bond’s intellectual trajectory leading to his second book Themis: A Science of Human Orders, which deepens and extends the foundational insights contained herein.

Nemesis remains an important contribution to political theory, and essential for understanding power dynamics, whether ancient or modern.