Political theorist Brown’s argument for shaking up the traditional understanding of the relationship between politics and history in order to recreate a sense of political potential in the face of the left’s retreat from notions of progress in a world dominated by the concerns of capital and neoliberalism. Touching on the role of the public intellectual, general disillusionment with politics, and how the loss of the ‘compass points of modernity’ have shifted the very ground upon which the political can be activated, Brown’s book provides an important diagnosis of our so-called ‘post-political’ condition today.