Clear Bright Future

It has quick wit, vivid prose and makes rapid and stimulating connections. Its subtitle sums up its strengths. Fundamentally, Mason believes in the power of agency - the ability to choose to act and shape your own future.—John McTernan, Financial TimesA very interesting book, wide-ranging, insightful and yet still optimistic…some of his glosses on the history of ideas, and their impact on our troubled present, are alone worth the price of the book: he explains, lucidly and persuasively, how the uncertainty principles of quantum mechanics - questionable in themselves - have bled, via post-modernist theory, into the climate of irrationalism and fatalism that fuels Brexit, Putin and Trump.—Ed O’Loughin, Irish TimesClear Bright Future’s account of our political predicament is thrilling.—Eliane Glaser, GuardianPaul Mason is doing something remarkable in this book, though it shouldn’t be remarkable: he’s focusing on the nature of being human, and how this is affected for better or worse by social, economic, and political forces that might seem overwhelming. It’s the best analysis of neo-liberalism that I’ve seen for a long time, and puts our lives in a richly described context. Best of all, it’s written with clarity and passion. I hope it’ll change many minds.—Philip PullmanAmid the ruins of many modern ideologies, Paul Mason’s consistently bracing book offers a guide to a sustainable future - one that we can still shape with a fresh transformational vision of what it means to be free human being. Everyone should read it.—Pankaj MishraAn unshakable humanist faith runs through this book… with his humane stress on the good life, Mason defies the caricature of the Corbyn left as reheated Soviet Communism. Corbynism is also routinely charged with wanting to “take us back to the 1970s.” But here its leading thinker engages with tomorrow’s economy with an urgency that’s not currently matched on the right.—Tom Clark, Prospect

Paul Mason is an award-winning writer, broadcaster, and film-maker. Previously economics editor of Channel 4 News, his books include PostCapitalism, Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere- the New Global Revolutions; Live Working Die Fighting; and Rare Earth- A Novel.