The author offers a challenging and wide-ranging analysis of the crisis of contemporary politics showing that problems which were thought to be peculiar to the Left are now spreading to the whole political system.

In the last years of the twentieth century, many of our established political institutions seem to be in crisis. Parties are declining and falling apart. Governments appear unable to lead or to resolve outstanding problems. Radicals feel that old routes to change are blocked.

In this important new book, Geoffrey Mulgan offers a wide-ranging and powerful analysis of the crisis of contemporary politics. He shows that what was once thought to be a problem peculiar to the Left has now spread to affect the whole of the political system, calling into question the future role of parties, politicians and national governments.

Mulgan argues that an entire era of political institutions and ideologies - stretching back some two hundred years - is now coming to an end, bringing confusion and disorientation to traditional political movements and governments around the world. Politics has transcended its origins in national institutions and spread into new domains of social life, from the global arena to the bedroom. At the same time its central motivating power has waned with a return to ethical and personal sources of meaning. In place of the old politics based around states and markets, a new politics based around the quality and reciprocity of relationships is slowly emerging, bringing with it radically new definitions of the links between past and future, governors and governed, men and women.