The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

Product Information

First published in 1997, shortly before New Labour won the first of our three election victories, it is called The Sovereign Individual, and is subtitled Mastering the Transition to the Information Age.It is the product of very large brainpower, sweeps far and wide in historical research and current analysis, but its strength, especially reading it today, lies in the force of its predictions about the new millennium. Afflicted by oesophageal cancer, he became seriously ill just before Christmas of 2012, and died in London on 29 December at the age of 84. [38] Rees-Mogg's funeral was held at Westminster Cathedral on 9 January 2013, [39] with his body being buried in the graveyard of the Church of St James at Cameley in the county of Somerset. The Bolsheviks and Workers Control, 1917–1921: The State and Counter-revolution". Spunk Library . Retrieved 4 March 2013. I took another look at the book this week in an attempt to find a logic to the position to which Johnson’s government has led us. Set in the context of the Rees-Mogg Sr worldview, a desire for no deal is that logic. Had Johnson campaigned openly for it, he would never have won the referendum in the first place. It had to be the destination on a journey fuelled by “the will of the people,” and in which others – the EU, or “Remoaners” – could be blamed when the journey ended in a very different place to that which had been promised.

There you go. Quite a vision. It is about as free market a view of the world as you could imagine, fiercely anti politics, with democracy itself called into question. So why, you are wondering, have I subjected you to this profoundly right-wing, anti-state, anti-welfare, anti-rules worldview, most of which fills me with fear and loathing? And why was my man at Marylebone so keen that I read this co-authored tome? Not because of the identity of the first author, American James Dale Davidson. But because of the second, Lord William Rees-Mogg, father of Jacob. Though the authors (relatively) correctly predict the affordances of digital technology, they then recommend that people should try to hoard their wealth as Sovereign Individuals by placing it in tax havens and such. Ugh. This misses two huge points: Meta-note: I personally find these “violence-based” claims/lenses fascinating. Many of the books that think about “root-causes” (like money) deal with violence. e.g. In Debt, the author discusses violence as the base governing system for debt. (What do you do if someone doesn’t pay? If you can exert violence, then you can jail them.) Information/Myths Gabriel Gatehouse has something to confess. Throughout the making of the series he’s been developing his own conspiracy theory. It’s about a book, called The Sovereign Individual, written by two men who were also pushing stories about the Clintons in the 1990s. Rees-Mogg and Davidson's recall of "mathematical algorithms that have no physical existence" is similar to the functional mechanism of certain cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and other proof-of-work currencies.Rand, Ayn (1988). The Ayn Rand lexicon: objectivism from A to Z. p.204. ISBN 9780452010512. Citation: "the ruler of the individual — as a sovereign authority (with or without supernatural mandate), an authority logically antecedent to the citizen and to which he must submit. The Founding Fathers challenged this primordial notion. They started with the premise of the primacy and sovereignty of the individual." There is so much to digest in it that I intend to return to it next week, but for now I offer you a few highlights.

presumably in April 1949 to complete the nine terms of residence normally required for a BA, although his memoirs do not give the exact date Leapman, Michael (31 December 2012). "Lord Rees-Mogg: 'Times' editor who later brought high moral purpose to his public service". The Independent. Archived from the original on 18 August 2021 . Retrieved 18 August 2021. a b c Budden, Rob (29 December 2012). "Journalist Lord Rees-Mogg dies". Financial Times. London. Archived from the original on 2 February 2013 . Retrieved 17 April 2020. One important thing is that William Rees ‘sounds cuddly like a pussy cat’ Mogg was at Oxford University with Maggie Thatcher, in the conservative association, so his influence might be a little grander than we can imagine. Our wishes, people’s wishes, do have power. Sometimes it may take a certain amount of time for the results of that power to show themselves, but that doesn’t mean that the power is not there. William Rees-Mogg’s wishes are a case in point. One of the wishes that William Rees-Mogg seems to express in the ideal of the “Sovereign Individual” is the wish to have individual power without communal responsibility. This is “wishful thinking” at its most dangerous — because it “might just come true” (if only for a later generation and not William himself). Or rather, it already has.The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age (1997, with James Dale Davidson) ISBN 9780684832722 Rees-Mogg, William (21 December 1992). "Is this the end of life as I know it?". The Independent. London. Archived from the original on 16 April 2015 . Retrieved 1 January 2013. William Rees-Mogg was born in 1928 in Bristol, England. He was the son of Edmund Fletcher Rees-Mogg (1889–1962) of Cholwell House [1] in the parish of Cameley in Somerset, an Anglican, and his Irish American Catholic wife, Beatrice Warren, a daughter of Daniel Warren of New York. [2] [3] William Rees-Mogg was raised in the Roman Catholic faith. One big enabler of this worrying trend is the fact that many major western countries are not true democracies (eg UK, US) and so allow a minority to make huge changes for everyone.