The human resources professionals shall inherit the earth. That is the message of The HR (R)Evolution, a book-length human resources manifesto and one of the most truly mind-bending cultural documents of recent memory. Coauthored by Alan Watkins, a medical doctor turned TED-talking “human performance” shaman, and Nick Dalton, former executive vice president of HR at Unilever, The HR (R)Evolution defies easy categorization.

It is at once an operating manual for human resources managers, an intellectual history of HR, a philosophical treatise, and a literal work of science fiction that imagines a coming utopia of “collaborative capitalism” and bustling lunar bases. In 208 blistering pages, Watkins and Dalton describe HR professionals as humankind’s “Sherpas” to a glorious future of sustainable enterprise that will operate within “planetary limits,” the only alternative to which is the end of the world. We are counseled to embrace human resources or face human extinction.

As strange as this text may seem, it feels more like the culmination of a much longer revolution in capitalist ideology than any sudden shift. In their study The New Spirit of Capitalism, Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello turned to management texts from the 1960s and 1990s to better understand how the titular “spirit of capitalism” — defined as “the ideology that justifies engagement in capitalism” — changed during the second half of the twentieth century in order to weather new crises and criticisms.