Why?In an era of growing cultural pessimism, many thoughtful individuals believe that different civilisations – especially Islam and the West – cannot live together in peace. The ten countries of ASEAN provide a thriving counter-example of civilizational co-existence. Here 625m people live together in peace. This miracle was delivered by ASEAN.In an era of growing economic pessimism, where many young people believe that their lives will get worse in coming decades, Southeast Asia bubbles with optimism. In an era where many thinkers predict rising geopolitical competition and tension, ASEAN regularly brings together all the world’s great powers.Stories of peace are told less frequently than stories of conflict and war. ASEAN’s imperfections make better headlines than its achievements. But in the hands of thinker and writer Kishore Mahbubani, the good news story is also a provocation and a challenge to the rest of the world."This excellent book explains, in clear and simple terms, how and why ASEAN has become one of the most successful regional organizations in the world."George Yeo"A powerful and passionate account of how, against all odds, ASEAN transformed the region and why Asia and the world need it even more today."Amitav Acharya“Kishore and I have written that the world is coming together in a Fusion of Civilisations. This book documents beautifully how ASEAN has achieved this fusion. The ASEAN story is hugely instructive and this book tells it very well.”Larry SummersKishore Mahbubani is Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, and author of The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East. Jeffery Sng is a writer and former diplomat based in Bangkok, co-author of A History of the Thai-Chinese.

    One of the master historians of twentieth-century Europe, Walter Laqueur is renowned for his "gold standard" studies of fascism, terrorism, and anti-Semitism. Here he describes how unplanned immigration policies and indifference coinciding with internal political and social crises have led to a continent-wide identity crisis. "Self-ghettoization" by immigrant groups has caused serious social and political divisions and intense resentment and xenophobia among native Europeans. Worse, widespread educational failure resulting in massive youth unemployment and religious or ideological disdain for the host country have bred extremist violence, as seen in the London and Madrid bombings and the Paris riots. Laqueur urges European policy makers to maintain strict controls with regard to the abuse of democratic freedoms by preachers of hate and to promote education, productive work, and integration among the new immigrants. Written with deep concern and cool analysis by a European-born historian with a gift for explaining complex subjects, this lucid, unflinching analysis will be a must-read for anyone interested in international politics and the so-called clash of civilizations. "

    Thomas Aquinas’s views on government, law, war, property, and sexual ethics, but also provide the theological, epistemological, and psychological background for his political and ethical thought, including the Five Proofs on the existence of God and Aquinas’s theories of knowledge, the soul, the purpose of man, and the order of the universe. Throughout the book,footnotes explain technical terms and historical, biblical, and classical references."Backgrounds and Sources" follows the text, with selections from the writings of Aristotle, St. Augustine, and Dionysius the Areopagite."Interpretations" traces Aquinas’s influence on medieval thought, on Roman Catholicism during the Renaissance, on early modern political thought (Richard Hooker and Francisco Suarez), on nineteenth-and twentieth-century papal social thought, and on contemporary Christian Democratic political parties in Europe and Latin America.The volume concludes with "Contemporary Problems in Thomistic Ethics",which contains eight analyses of the influence of Aquinas's thought on modern debates on war, contraception, and abortion.A Selected Bibliography is included.

    Richard Carrier, world renowned philosopher and historian, explains the four reasons he does not accept the Christian religion, describing four facts of the world that, had they been different, he would believe. He is brief, clear, and down to earth, covering the whole topic in under ninety pages of easy-to-read explanation. Those four reasons are God's silence, God's inaction, the lack of evidence, and the way the universe looks exactly like a godless universe would, and not at all like a Christian universe would, even down to its very structure. Dr. Carrier addresses all the usual replies to these claims, in ways you might not have heard before, relying on his wide experience in debating and studying these issues all over the world for more than fifteen years. A perfect book to introduce yourself, or your friends, to why fewer educated people are embracing Christianity than ever before. Ideal for handing out to door-to-door missionaries.

    -Irving Kristol, The Public Interest

    What is your position on prostitution, pornography, gambling and other victimless crimes? This book will make readers consider their rights and the rights of others in a more humanistic and caring way. First serial to Playboy. (Prelude Press)

    Few, if any, have sought to explain the origin of all of these problems at once. In Catholic Republic, Timothy Gordon argues that America’s premature withering could have been avoided if only the founders had fully incorporated into the new republic the Catholic natural law. The anti-Catholic bias of 18th Century America kept our Protestant and Enlightenment forefathers from admitting their dependence upon the ideas of Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the early Jesuits. In Catholic Republic, Gordon unpacks our nation’s complicated history of repudiating, yet borrowing, the Catholic ideas about politics and nature, which turn out to be indispensable to our—and all—republics.Indeed, America still can be saved. It is not too late.

    Drawing on unprecedented access to Rand's private papers and the original, unedited versions of Rand's journals, Jennifer Burns offers a groundbreaking reassessment of this key cultural figure, examining her life, her ideas, and her impact on conservative political thought.Goddess of the Market follows Rand from her childhood in Russia through her meteoric rise from struggling Hollywood screenwriter to bestselling novelist, including the writing of her wildly successful The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Burns highlights the two facets of Rand's work that make her a perennial draw for those on the right: her promotion of capitalism, and her defense of limited government. Both sprang from her early, bitter experience of life under Communism, and became among the most deeply enduring of her messages, attracting a diverse audience of college students and intellectuals, business people and Republican Party activists, libertarians and conservatives. The book also traces the development of Rand's Objectivist philosophy and her relationship with Nathaniel Branden, her closest intellectual partner, with whom she had an explosive falling out in 1968.One of the Denver Post's Great Reads of 2009One of Bloomberg News's Top Nonfiction Books of 2009Excellent.--Time magazineA terrific book--a serious consideration of Rand's ideas, and her role in the conservative movement of the past three quarters of a century.--The American ThinkerA wonderful book: beautifully written, completely balanced, extensively researched. The match between author and subject is so perfect that one might believe that the author was chosen by the gods to write this book. She has sympathy and affection for her subject but treats her as a human being, with no attempt to cover up the foibles.--Mises Economics Blog

    Douglas Murray takes a fresh look at the movement that replaced Great-Society liberalism, helped Ronald Reagan bring down the Wall, and provided the intellectual rationale for the Bush administration's War on Terror. While others are blaming it for foreign policy failures and, more extremely, attacking it as a Jewish cabal, Murray argues that the West needs Neo-conservatism more than ever. In addition to explaining what Neo conservatism is and where it came from, he argues that this American-born response to the failed policies of the 1960s is the best approach to foreign affairs not only for the United States but also for Britain and the West as well.

    It presents the complexity and depth which underlies all of de Benoist's work and which is often neglected by those who seek to dismiss him by oversimplifying or distorting his arguments. De Benoist shows how democracy is, contrary to what some critics have claimed, something which has been a part of our civilisation from the beginning. The problem, he says, is not the notion of democracy in itself, but rather the current understanding of the term which, instead of empowering the individual, reduces him to little more than a cog in a machine over which he has no control, and in which the direction is set by politicians with little genuine accountability. De Benoist proposes that effective democracy would mean a return to an understanding of citizenship as being tied to one's belonging to a specific political community based on shared values and common historical ties, while doing away with the liberal notion of the delegation of sovereignty to elected representatives. The type of government which is called for is thus a return to the form of government widely understood in Antiquity, but which now seems to us to be a revolutionary notion. This is the first in a series of volumes by Alain de Benoist which will be translated and published by Arktos.

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    Banfield uses a study of the people of southern Italy to argue how self-interested families can lead to poverty.Analyzing families in southern Italy in 1955, Moral Basis of a Backward Society discusses how poverty is a result of the inability to trust or associate strongly outside of immediate family. Challenged and argued for years, Edward C. Banfield’s study has become accept by many people in the modern age.

    Self-serving monarchic social systems, which collectively reduced common people to servitude, were now attacked by Enlightenment philosophers, of whom Rouseau was a leading light.His masterpiece, The Social Contract, profoundly influenced the subsequent development of society and remains provocative in a modern age of continuing widespread vested interest. This is the most comprehensive paperback edition available, with introduction, notes, index and chronology of Rousseau's life and times.

    This revised and enlarged edition of the leading anthology provides the essential writings of Marx and Engels--those works necessary for an introduction to Marxist thought and ideology.

    His skill as a reviewer is particularly notable: never content merely to assess the ideas of a writer and the theses of a book, Eagleton, in his inimitable and often wickedly funny style, always paints a vivid theoretical and political fresco as the background to his engagement with the texts.In this collection of more than a decade of such bracing criticism, Eagleton comes face to face with Stanley Fish, Gayatri Spivak, Slavoj Žižek, Edward Said, and even David Beckham. All are subjected to his pugnacious wit, scathing critical pen, and brilliant literary investigations.