The Leaderless Revolution explains why our government institutions are inadequate to the task of solving major problems and offers a set of steps we can take to create lasting and workable solutions ourselves. In taking these steps, we can not only reclaim the control we have lost, but also a sense of meaning and community so elusive in the current circumstance. In a day and age when things feel bleak and beyond our control, this powerful and personal book will revive one's sense of hope that a better, more just and equitable order lies within our reach-if only we are willing to grasp it.
The Leaderless Revolution
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Praise for THE LEADERLESS REVOLUTION by Carne Ross:
"An impassioned, idealistic critique of the state of global politics and the deepening rift between those with power and those without."
—The Guardian
—The Guardian
"So bold, so full of incontestable truths and overwhelming convictions, that it should be read by every diplomat, politician and thinking citizen with the courage to pick it up."
—John le Carré
—John le Carré
“It’s been a long time since I’ve read a more interesting, informing and inspiring book than ‘The Leaderless Revolution."
—Bill Moyers
—Bill Moyers
“Intriguing … the author provides many fascinating personal insights into the crises not only in Iraq, but also Afghanistan, Kosovo, Mauretania and Sudan.”
—Kirkus Reviews
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
49 of 52 people found the following review helpful
By Traveler
Format:Kindle Edition
The philosophy outlined here presaged the sudden appearance and force of the Occupy Wall St. movement. Written with courage and candor by a former instrument of a nation (British diplomat, envoy to the UN}, it's revealing that the author not only regrets his past involvement with falsely justified and failed policy, but that he has come to reject the very notion of nation states' ability to solve any serious problems at all. Mr. Ross adroitly weaves in a narrative of his personal experiences, describing his attempts to mediate crises in the Balkans and the Middle East; hamstrung, as he came to understand, by his immersion in a myopic culture of modern noblesse oblige. There's insights throughout and even a constructive reinterpretation of the "Golden Rule" to be considered. I recommend this to anyone who wants to learn more about why the multi-dimensional challenges we're facing aren't going to be addressed effectively by anyone in positions of power - now or evermore. Instead you'll learn how you might act yourself from your own convictions, and along with many others doing the same, effect the change we need.
40 of 46 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Does decentralized and globalized politics mean more power to the people?
April 7, 2012
Format:Hardcover
The thesis of this book is that the world has become so large, so unwieldy, that certain mass events can shift political power away from the traditional governments and into the hands of the people, or at least people who previously were a powerless minority in the scope of world politics.
That's a powerful statement and there seems to be a lot of merit in the idea. For example, let's take the rise of Iran, whose leaders have no real connection to the power base of the mid 20th century, or the Islamic "Spring" that spread across the Mideast in 2011. The author contends that these revolutions are essentially leaderless and spring from discontent in the masses.
The author covers many ideas about the mass action of large groups of people. One idea is that rather than use rational thought, people simply copy what others are doing, and that's probably very true as well, whether it's in buying power or political movements. However the author seems to minimize the rise of one creative, ruthless, focused, persuasive and charismatic person at a time of disorder (I'm thinking of Hitler or Stalin) and seems to want us to believe that all revolution is grass-roots based, when there is also a case for agitation done at levels that are beyond the scope of the evening news reports or general knowledge. Admittedly, that is the conspiracy theory problem which is no more believable than mass, unorganized uprising with no focus point of leadership.
The author quotes legal scholar Cass Sunstein, who makes an observation that the more dispossessed a group is from power, the more extreme their decisions become, and that when groups join in discussion, the end result is a greater polarization, not unity (which sounds a great deal like the quote from Noam Chomsky that the end result of all communication is misunderstanding.) And there is another telling datum; that when the decision has no real bearing on an outcome, the polarization is inevitable, in other words, there is no payoff for reaching an agreement.
However, the observation that a dispossessed group may be more liable to be extreme, is perhaps only superficial. The question is, who are the people meeting and agitating for change? It is dangerous to lump all people together in a collective because the overall group may be represented by a very small number of people with an agenda and an axe to grind--and perhaps a more extreme point of view than the overall viewpoint of their cohort. A good example of this is our very own American revolution. It was a relatively small number of people at first who felt that the British rule and taxation were repressive. The vast majority were happy to go along to get along. As the issue polarized, about 40 percent of colonists took up the side of independence and eventually the actual number of loyalists dropped to a minority, but at first, when there was discussion and meeting about the issues of taxation and a lack of representation in England, it was not an overwhelmingly large number of people.
However, I found one thing missing in the book, and that is the observation that in times of confusion and economic disarray, often a sort of warlord or gang of power arises, and this seems rather constant in history. Rather than "the people" achieving more liberty by shaking off traditional and established power centers, the end result is less liberty and more trauma. Since the turbulent actions of people who grab power in times of tumult really has shaped world history time and again, a discussion of this phenomenon would have been pertinent to the book, in my opinion. Mobs are influential in their way, but remember, a committee is a creature with no brain and all back legs, so a mob must be some kind of acephalic centipede.
The hopeful examples that Ross quotes in the book (the Porto Allegre Experiment and the Post-Katrina community rebuilding where more parties who were previously dispossessed were involved) ARE hopeful, but there was an underpinning of a rule of law (the ability for decisions to be implemented by a framework of law that would enforce or agree to the outcome) is not really discussed in proper detail. In other words, the will of the people has to have a component of law outside the mob that can support local governance. For example, the US Constitution leaves much power in the hands of the individual states, and has enumerated powers that limit its own power to compel the people directly. This seemed to me to be a necessary component in a transfer of power to more decentralized and local governments, and perhaps the outcome in other places where there is a breakdown of centralized rule and the establishment of local power is not consensus but a rise of local strong-arming. Just read your history.
That's a powerful statement and there seems to be a lot of merit in the idea. For example, let's take the rise of Iran, whose leaders have no real connection to the power base of the mid 20th century, or the Islamic "Spring" that spread across the Mideast in 2011. The author contends that these revolutions are essentially leaderless and spring from discontent in the masses.
The author covers many ideas about the mass action of large groups of people. One idea is that rather than use rational thought, people simply copy what others are doing, and that's probably very true as well, whether it's in buying power or political movements. However the author seems to minimize the rise of one creative, ruthless, focused, persuasive and charismatic person at a time of disorder (I'm thinking of Hitler or Stalin) and seems to want us to believe that all revolution is grass-roots based, when there is also a case for agitation done at levels that are beyond the scope of the evening news reports or general knowledge. Admittedly, that is the conspiracy theory problem which is no more believable than mass, unorganized uprising with no focus point of leadership.
The author quotes legal scholar Cass Sunstein, who makes an observation that the more dispossessed a group is from power, the more extreme their decisions become, and that when groups join in discussion, the end result is a greater polarization, not unity (which sounds a great deal like the quote from Noam Chomsky that the end result of all communication is misunderstanding.) And there is another telling datum; that when the decision has no real bearing on an outcome, the polarization is inevitable, in other words, there is no payoff for reaching an agreement.
However, the observation that a dispossessed group may be more liable to be extreme, is perhaps only superficial. The question is, who are the people meeting and agitating for change? It is dangerous to lump all people together in a collective because the overall group may be represented by a very small number of people with an agenda and an axe to grind--and perhaps a more extreme point of view than the overall viewpoint of their cohort. A good example of this is our very own American revolution. It was a relatively small number of people at first who felt that the British rule and taxation were repressive. The vast majority were happy to go along to get along. As the issue polarized, about 40 percent of colonists took up the side of independence and eventually the actual number of loyalists dropped to a minority, but at first, when there was discussion and meeting about the issues of taxation and a lack of representation in England, it was not an overwhelmingly large number of people.
However, I found one thing missing in the book, and that is the observation that in times of confusion and economic disarray, often a sort of warlord or gang of power arises, and this seems rather constant in history. Rather than "the people" achieving more liberty by shaking off traditional and established power centers, the end result is less liberty and more trauma. Since the turbulent actions of people who grab power in times of tumult really has shaped world history time and again, a discussion of this phenomenon would have been pertinent to the book, in my opinion. Mobs are influential in their way, but remember, a committee is a creature with no brain and all back legs, so a mob must be some kind of acephalic centipede.
The hopeful examples that Ross quotes in the book (the Porto Allegre Experiment and the Post-Katrina community rebuilding where more parties who were previously dispossessed were involved) ARE hopeful, but there was an underpinning of a rule of law (the ability for decisions to be implemented by a framework of law that would enforce or agree to the outcome) is not really discussed in proper detail. In other words, the will of the people has to have a component of law outside the mob that can support local governance. For example, the US Constitution leaves much power in the hands of the individual states, and has enumerated powers that limit its own power to compel the people directly. This seemed to me to be a necessary component in a transfer of power to more decentralized and local governments, and perhaps the outcome in other places where there is a breakdown of centralized rule and the establishment of local power is not consensus but a rise of local strong-arming. Just read your history.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
It is unfortunate that Amazon's superb "Look Inside the Book" has been limited by the publisher to only the introduction, as I would like the potential buyer to have a much greater feel for the book that the reviews or the few front pages can offer, before making a decision.
Here is the bottom line: nothing in this book is a new insight, and I am astonished by the claimed editorial reviews, as they seem oblivious of the decades of work by others in the areas of co-evolution, panarachy, collective intelligence, hybrid governance, open source everything, small is beautiful, human scale, Epoch B, resilience, intelligence at the edges of the network, etcetera. In other words, this book is more of a "quickie" book, not at all the "deeply researched" effort that is claimed, and it is at best a survey that barely scratches the surface of my two master lists, of lists of book reviews I have done here at Amazon, a means of reading all my reviews sorted into many categories (including the future of democracy, of capitalism, etcetera). The positive list is the one to focus on for everything that this author attempts to convey, and points to many of the sources that the book does not cite. Both lists were the foundation for my 2010 book listed below after my name. The negative list documents the obvious, but with a structure that has been lacking in critiques to date, most are incoherent for lack of an analytic model. To get to the link, just search for full name of the list as shown below.
Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Positive)
Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Negative)
Now within the ten link limit that Amazon has established,
The Tao of Democracy: Using co-intelligence to create a world that works for all
Empowering Public Wisdom: A Practical Vision of Citizen-Led Politics
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
Human Scale
All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (BK Currents (Hardcover))
Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems
Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World
Designing a World That Works for All: How the Youth of the World are Creating Real-World Solutions for the UN Millenium Development Goals and Beyond
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits, Revised and Updated 5th Anniversary Edition
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Now, being somewhat jaded on this particular book, but recognizing how limited time and money are for most people, I end by observing that this book can indeed serve as a primer for those who do not read broadly and do not have the time to read the wealth of information available on the Internet for free in terms of cost, but requiring time and insight to acquire. At Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog I have a Links page that can make this much easier, here I will just mention the Co-Intelligence Institute and Reality Sandwich.
Robert David STEELE Vivas
INTELLIGENCE FOR EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity & Sustainability
Here is the bottom line: nothing in this book is a new insight, and I am astonished by the claimed editorial reviews, as they seem oblivious of the decades of work by others in the areas of co-evolution, panarachy, collective intelligence, hybrid governance, open source everything, small is beautiful, human scale, Epoch B, resilience, intelligence at the edges of the network, etcetera. In other words, this book is more of a "quickie" book, not at all the "deeply researched" effort that is claimed, and it is at best a survey that barely scratches the surface of my two master lists, of lists of book reviews I have done here at Amazon, a means of reading all my reviews sorted into many categories (including the future of democracy, of capitalism, etcetera). The positive list is the one to focus on for everything that this author attempts to convey, and points to many of the sources that the book does not cite. Both lists were the foundation for my 2010 book listed below after my name. The negative list documents the obvious, but with a structure that has been lacking in critiques to date, most are incoherent for lack of an analytic model. To get to the link, just search for full name of the list as shown below.
Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Positive)
Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Negative)
Now within the ten link limit that Amazon has established,
The Tao of Democracy: Using co-intelligence to create a world that works for all
Empowering Public Wisdom: A Practical Vision of Citizen-Led Politics
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
Human Scale
All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (BK Currents (Hardcover))
Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems
Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World
Designing a World That Works for All: How the Youth of the World are Creating Real-World Solutions for the UN Millenium Development Goals and Beyond
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits, Revised and Updated 5th Anniversary Edition
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Now, being somewhat jaded on this particular book, but recognizing how limited time and money are for most people, I end by observing that this book can indeed serve as a primer for those who do not read broadly and do not have the time to read the wealth of information available on the Internet for free in terms of cost, but requiring time and insight to acquire. At Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog I have a Links page that can make this much easier, here I will just mention the Co-Intelligence Institute and Reality Sandwich.
Robert David STEELE Vivas
INTELLIGENCE FOR EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity & Sustainability
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Methods for revolution
An interesting read and hopefully, the people will rise up and fix the problems. We should not despair for our country as we always seem to rise to the necessary occasion.
Published 2 months ago by Janice M. Watson
4.0 out of 5 stars
I would recommend to a friend interested in direct action or the OWS...
Good book although a little idealistic. I used this for a book report for a college class. The teacher liked my work and I did make an A. Easy, quick read.
Published 4 months ago by Andrea
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Leaderless Revolution
Very interesting and hopeful, though perhaps too optimistic about the future of humanity. Recommended for anyone interested in leadership problems.
Published 7 months ago by Rosemary
5.0 out of 5 stars
"The Leaderless Revolution : ...21st Century" > Guide For Ordinary...
>>>..."The Leaderless Revolution : ...21st Century", Circa 2012, is a "Must-Read & Use", Call-To-Action, Bold Guide which argues that rather than rely on failing political &... Read more
Published 7 months ago by Michael Sykes
5.0 out of 5 stars
Leaderless revolution
The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People Will Take Power and Change Politics in the 21st Century by Carne Ross, [...] , Blue Rider Press, 2011, 244 pages. Read more
Published 11 months ago by F. Kline
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Leaderless revolution
This book, regardless of one's political position, is an exceptionally well written, in-depth look at our government, our economy and corporations. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Amanda
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great book!!!
This is a good book that's very informative and well written. I think that the insights offered are most interesting and holds on to your interest. Good book.
Published 12 months ago by Ronald l. Graham
3.0 out of 5 stars
Real insights, compellingly written - from a former British diplomat
A glaring and well documented diagnosis of the global paralysis/dysfunction of international diplomacy/relations, especially as related to global economic growth-at-all-costs,... Read more
Published 12 months ago by David L. Hicks
1.0 out of 5 stars
um, yeah
This is the email I sent to Carne Ross a few weeks ago. I think people should take a pass on this guy and find better thinkers and writers to follow. Read more
Published 12 months ago by Melissa Dennison
4.0 out of 5 stars
Getting there. . .
Ross has his sights set correctly on the inability of centralized authority to solve most of the global challenges confronting humankind. Read more
Published 13 months ago by Jerry A. Moles
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