Something is profoundly wrong not only with how we live today, but with how we think about it too. In this exceptional short book, Tony Judt, one of the world's leading historians and public intellectuals, reveals how we have arrived at our present dangerously confused moment and masterfully crystallizes our great collective unease, showing how we might yet think ourselves out of them.

As the economic collapse of 2008 made clear, the social contract that defined postwar life in Europe and America - the guarantee of security, stability and fairness - is no longer assured; in fact, it's no longer part of collective conversation. Judt offers us a language to address our common needs, rejecting the nihilistic individualism of the far right and the debunked socialism of the past.

To find a way forward, Judt argues we must look to our recent past and once again value fairness over mere efficiency. Instead of placing blind faith in the marker - as we have for thirty years past, to our detriment - we must confront our societal ills and shoulder responsibility for the world we live in. Ill Fares the Land gives us the tools with which to imagine a new form of governance, a better way of life.

Passionate, wise, lucid and humane, and far-sighted into both the past and the present, this concentrated expression of a lifetime's concerns will take its palace, in achievement and in influence, with the truly great political writing of this or any age.