The Dispossessed

The Working Classes and Their Instinct For Survival

Christophe Guilluy, Andrew Brown

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English

Polity Press
03 October 2025

Politics & government

Recent decades have witnessed protests that are unlike many of the social movements of previous centuries. They are not led by any party, union or leader, but by ordinary people. Their deep roots are existential rather than material.

These protests are not driven by class consciousness or ideology but by the sense that people have been abandoned, stripped of their rights and shunted out to the peripheries of social and economic life. This is the movement of the dispossessed – of a mass of ordinary people who have gained a will of their own and are no longer content to comply with the directives of elites who want to tell them how to live and behave. The high-profile political events of recent years – Brexit, the election of Trump, the rise of right-wing parties – are merely surface tremors of a much deeper tectonic shift caused by the slow displacement of a forgotten continent.

In this book Christophe Guilluy uncovers this forgotten continent of the dispossessed and shows how ordinary people are rising up and responding to their programmed disappearance by forging an alternative to a doomed model.

By: Christophe Guilluy
Translated by: Andrew Brown
Imprint: Polity Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 137mm, Spine: 13mm
Weight: 204g
ISBN: 9781509568468
ISBN 10: 1509568468
Pages: 140
Publication Date: 03 October 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Christophe Guilluy is a French geographer and the author of several books, including The Twilight of the Elites.

Reviews for The Dispossessed: The Working Classes and Their Instinct For Survival

""The dissident geographer Christophe Guilluy was the very first writer to describe the front lines of the class war globalization unleashed. He did it before Trump, before Brexit, before any university intellectual even recognized there was a conflict - and his account remains the best. The Dispossessed is the story of a working class bamboozled out of the civilization it helped build."" Christopher Caldwell, author of The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties ""A bracing polemic about the gap between the political class narrative and the reality of ordinary lives. Christophe Guilluy is the scourge of progressive, metropolitan hypocrisy."" David Goodhart, author of The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics ""a persuasive analysis of what he believes has gone wrong in France and why"" Jason Cowley, The Sunday Times