Disorder

Hard Times in the 21st Century

Preview

Failed to add items

Sorry, we are unable to add the item because your shopping cart is already at capacity.

Add to basket failed.

Please try again later

Add to wishlist failed.

Please try again later

Remove from wishlist failed.

Please try again later

Adding to library failed

Please try again

Follow podcast failed

Unfollow podcast failed

£0.00 for first 30 days

LIMITED TIME OFFER

Get 3 months for £0.99/mo

Get this deal

Try Premium Plus free

Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.

Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.

1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.

Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.

Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.

Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.

Access exclusive sales and deals.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Disorder

By: Helen Thompson

Narrated by: Kitty Kelly

Get this deal

Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

Getting to grips with the overlapping geopolitical, economic, and political crises faced by Western democratic societies in the 2020s.

The twenty-first century has brought a powerful tide of geopolitical, economic, and democratic shocks. Their fallout has led central banks to create over $25 trillion of new money, brought about a new age of geopolitical competition, destabilized the Middle East, ruptured the European Union, and exposed old political fault lines in the United States.

Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century is a long history of this present political moment. It recounts three histories—one about geopolitics, one about the world economy, and one about western democracies—and explains how in the years of political disorder prior to the pandemic, the disruption in each became one big story. It shows how much of this turbulence originated in problems generated by fossil-fuel energies, and it explains why, as the green transition takes place, the longstanding predicaments energy invariably shapes will remain in place.

Helen ThompsonKitty KellyTantor Audio

Politics & Government

21st Century

Politics & Government 21st Century

Listeners also enjoyed...

Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? cover art

Most relevant

This is a fascinating historical perspective on the current global situation. It breaks down the geo-political world we are familiar with into threads and concepts many of which were new to me, but very useful in analysing where we are and how we got here. Much of the economic analysis is very technical and beyond my understanding, but I found it worth persevering with as the surrounding material is so illuminating. It’s a shame about the narrator who didn’t seem to understand what she was reading and so makes it harder to follow. She mispronounced several words all though the book (e.g. eschew pronounced estew!) but I still loved it and will re-read much of it after some more research. I would like to have heard her analysis of the Jeremy Corbyn phenomenon in the UK but this is sadly missing. Still, you can’t have everything and my thinking has been changed on several things after reading this book.