Hardly a straight academic history, this is a powerful invective and personal homage to history’s great insurgents. Beginning with philosophers Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, and Solzhenitsyn, French philosopher Michel Onfray discourses on anarchists Stirner, Bakounine, Grave, and Proudhon, as well as authors Debray, Antelme, Levi and beyond. Fueled by rage at ongoing social injustice, Onfray draws up an infernal geography of poverty, Dante-esque circles of the damned, the reprobate, and the exploited. Staunchly critical of a liberal economy, and the cynicism it has spawned, he points to a systematic de-humanization of the individual in today’s corporate-driven world. Contrary to what many have come to believe, Onfray explains, past revolutions and countercultural movements have not failed to win us key personal freedoms, they have merely fallen short of our highest aspirations. Reminding us not to accept anything less, he goes on to formulate incentives for a new form of political insurgency in a fascinating new philosophy of “ethical hedonism” which readers will find at once illuminating and inspiring.