The Sovereign Individual: How to survive and thrive during the collapse of the welfare state is a 1997 non-fiction book by William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson, later republished on 26 August 1999 by Touchstone with the new subtitle Mastering the Transition to the Information Age. It forecasts the development of the twenty-first century; focusing on the rise of the internet and cyberspace, digital currency and digital economy, self-ownership and decentralization from the State.
The Sovereign Individual has been recommended by members of the cryptocurrency community such as Naval Ravikant and Brian Armstrong. In 2020, the book was reprinted with a preface written by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.
The book contains eleven chapters and has 446 pages (400 pages of plain text, 46 pages of references, notes, and an appendix. The latest edition of the book with Thiel's foreword adds two more pages).
The chapters are:
Rees-Mogg and Davidson's main thesis centres around self-ownership and the individual's independence from the State, forecasting the end of the nations and nation-states. In a chapter titled Nationalism, Reaction, and the New Luddites, they criticize nationalism and appeal more to giving the individual control over his destiny rather than the collectiveness given by nationalism. Rees-Mogg and Davidson also refer to a transition to the year 2000, being a birth of a new stage of Western civilization in the coming of the new millennium.
With the rise of the information society, they argue, the individual would be freed from the oppression of government and the drags of prejudice:
Rees-Mogg and Davidson also suggested that digital currency/cybermoney would supersede fiat currency:
Rees-Mogg and Davidson's recall of "mathematical algorithms that have no physical existence" is similar to the functional mechanism of certain cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and other proof-of-work currencies.
Rees-Mogg and Davidson have also predicted that with the rise of this new cyberspace, and consequently cybermoney, it will become harder for a nation-state to collect taxes from its citizens. They compare the State to a farmer keeping cows in a field to be milked but that "soon, the cows will have wings". They predict that for the government to collect taxes from its citizens in this type of society, it would have to violate human rights, even traditionally civil countries would have to resort and "turn nasty":
Peter Thiel, who wrote the preface to the 2020 printing, wrote that, among the many things that Rees-Mogg and Davidson got wrong, the biggest part was "perhaps their misjudgment in the rise of China and the prosperity of Hong Kong as an ideal type of government [under colonial rule]".
In his 2018 book, The Bitcoin Standard, Saifedean Ammous mentions and calls The Sovereign Individuals prediction of digital currency "remarkable". Ammous also gives insight on The Sovereign Individual during the section titled Individual Sovereignty, while also commending Davidson and Rees-Mogg's prediction of a digital currency as "remarkable".
E. Glen Weyl and Jaron Lanier criticized in 2022 its predictions about Fujimori's self-coup, cocaine traffic in the United States, bankrupt Canada, right-wing coups, cryptocurrencies and income redistribution. They point the processes predicted by the book are not unavoidable and point to Thiel, Sebastian Kurz and Jacob Rees-Mogg helping accelerate the power of the state to provoke a reaction enabling its collapse.