"Before the disastrous economic and political events of 2008–9, it was possible to blithely assume that we had left the brutal and unpredictable world of the 1930s behind us. However, just as the economic crisis of 1929–31 summoned up the demons described in this book, so our own time’s economic and social problems – excessive national and private debt, globalization leading to unemployment and low wages for the majority but high profits for the few, and uncontrolled mass movements of populations – have led to similarly destabilizing and demoralizing developments in Europe, America, and parts of Asia. At the same time, large-scale abuse of data, accompanied by manipulation of online information and social media, has placed persuasive power into the hands of twenty-first-century authoritarian disrupters to an extent that their predecessors in the 1930s could only have dreamt of."