The Sovereign Individual – Book Review

I’ve bookmarked this book for a while, yet recent geopolitical events in 2024-2025 drew me to read it. Unexpectedly, the book’s underlying ideology was easier to follow amid the tech AI boom.

Being 27 years old, book exposes numerous social political issues from politics that are still relevant today: income inequality, sovereign debt explosion, etc. It remarkably predicted major mega political trends, e.g. countries are converging on incomes yet groups within a country’s border are suffering higher inequality.

The book stresses on diminishing return of violence by nation states and the adversarial nature of taxing power and wealthy individuals.

I appreciate the book’s attempts to explain the history of collective power and demystify the nation building process. Historically Sovereignty has taken forms other than nation states and it’s a refreshing perspective to modern readers to think outside the box of “countries”.

The authors, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, argue that politics follows “megapolitics”: deep shifts in technology, economics, and the organization of violence. Feudalism, monarchies, and modern democracies, in their view, weren’t primarily born from ideas or ideals, but from changing conditions—how easy it was to collect taxes, move goods, or wage war.

Their claim is that we’re now moving from the industrial age to the information age, and that this shift will:

• Reduce the effectiveness of large-scale physical violence as a tool of control
• Empower highly mobile, digitally enabled individuals
• Undermine the ability of governments to tax and regulate those individuals
• Gradually weaken the nation-state as the central organizing unit of political life

Reading this today—when remote work, global capital flows, digital assets, and AI tools are normal—it feels less like theory and more like a rough sketch of the world we’re already entering.

The book explores the changing economics of violence and taxation. Historically, whoever could organize violence—armies, police, surveillance—could enforce taxes and rules. As more wealth becomes intangible and mobile, that equation shifts. Governments’ taxing power will be curtained as commerce shifts to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. The result is a more adversarial relationship between high-earning individuals and states.

What I found most valuable, though, is the way the book demystifies the nation-state. It reminds you that “countries” and “citizenship” are not eternal facts, but relatively recent arrangements in a much longer history of sovereignty. Before the modern state, power was organized through empires, city-states, feudal hierarchies, church authority, and corporate charters.

The authors invite you to consider that the nation-state may not be the final form of political organization. As more of life moves online, they suggest, new kinds of sovereignty could emerge—organized around networks, platforms, virtual jurisdictions, or small, competitive enclaves. In an era where AI, data, and compute are concentrated in a handful of powerful private actors, that question feels particularly relevant: who really governs, and how?

All that said, this is not a neutral book. It has a clear ideological tilt toward ableism, elitism, radical individualism and a deep skepticism of welfare states and mass democracy.

For me, The Sovereign Individual felt less like a piece of 90s futurism and more like a sharp, sometimes uncomfortable lens on the present. It doesn’t have all the answers, and its ideological edges deserve pushback, but it does a rare thing: it forces you to step outside the assumption that the world of nation-states, mass taxation, and traditional citizenship is permanent.

In a time when AI and digital networks are rapidly rewriting what individuals can do on their own, that’s a question worth sitting with—even if you ultimately reject the authors’ vision of where it leads.

This book review was drafted by hand and edited by OpenAI GPT 5.1.