Cynthia Fleury, is the disease most likely to endanger modern democracy. By presenting resentment as a key threat to modern democracy, Fleury re-focuses democratic theory on the task of searching for the tools that could enable us to stem its flow. Democracy is a way of sublimating violent instincts and collectively creating institutions and cultural resources that enable us to cope with conflict. As individuals and as societies, we are facing the same challenge: how to diagnose resentment and its dark forces, and how to resist the temptation to allow it to become the motor of our individual and collective histories. This bestselling and highly original account of the psychic forces shaping modern societies will be of great interest to anyone concerned about the crisis of democracy today and what we can do to address it.