Recent decades have witnessed protests that are unlike many of the social movements of previous centuries. They are not led by any party, union or leader, but by ordinary people. Their deep roots are existential rather than material.

These protests are not driven by class consciousness or ideology but by the sense that people have been abandoned, stripped of their rights and shunted out to the peripheries of social and economic life. This is the movement of the dispossessed – of a mass of ordinary people who have gained a will of their own and are no longer content to comply with the directives of elites who want to tell them how to live and behave. The high-profile political events of recent years – Brexit, the election of Trump, the rise of right-wing parties – are merely surface tremors of a much deeper tectonic shift caused by the slow displacement of a forgotten continent.

In this book Christophe Guilluy uncovers this forgotten continent of the dispossessed and shows how ordinary people are rising up and responding to their programmed disappearance by forging an alternative to a doomed model.

Christophe Guilluy is a French geographer and the author of several books, including The Twilight of the Elites.