The riddle of the modern world. On liberty, wealth and equality

This book stands back from our preicament in order to discover soem of the pressures which have made the development of human civilizations in the past so slow and then what is radically altered almost every feature of human experience in the last 300 years. It does so through the study of four great thinkers who lived between 1689 and 1995: Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Tocqueville and Ernest Gellner.