Luca Ricolfi returns to the themes that have made his research unanimously appreciated, tracing the sociopolitical changes of the last forty years, from the origins of globalization to the crisis of the advanced economies, to arrive at a painful, compelling reflection: everywhere in the West, people seek protection from the consequences of the crisis and the fragilities of the global scenario, but the left inevitably commits its energies to downplaying the problems that voters perceive as major: unemployment, austerity policies, immigration, terrorism. If, therefore, on both sides of the Atlantic, citizens aggressively raise their heads against a left that is impotent when not outright blind to the rising wave of fear sweeping over them, it is not so strange that populism is put forward as an answer, however sketchy and inadequate, to the anxieties of the present.