Liberalism: A Counter-History


Domenico Losurdo - 2005
    Among the dominant strains of liberalism, he discerns the counter-currents of more radical positions, lost in the constitution of the modern world order.

The ASEAN Miracle: A Catalyst for Peace


Kishore Mahbubani - 2017
    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.

The New Science of Politics: An Introduction


Eric Voegelin - 1952
    Compressed within the Draconian economy of the six Walgreen lectures is a complete theory of man, society, and history, presented at the most profound and intellectual level. . . . Voegelin's [work] stands out in bold relief from much of what has passed under the name of political science in recent decades. . . . The New Science is aptly titled, for Voegelin makes clear at the outset that a 'return to the specific content' of premodern political theory is out of the question. . . . The subtitle of the book, An Introduction, clearly indicates that The New Science of Politics is an invitation to join the search for the recovery of our full humanity."—From the new Foreword by Dante Germino "This book must be considered one of the most enlightening essays on the character of European politics that has appeared in half a century. . . . This is a book powerful and vivid enough to make agreement or disagreement with even its main thesis relatively unimportant."—Times Literary Supplement "Voegelin . . . is one of the most distinguished interpreters to Americans of the non-liberal streams of European thought. . . . He brings a remarkable breadth of knowledge, and a historical imagination that ranges frequently into brilliant insights and generalizations."—Francis G. Wilson, American Political Science Review "This book is beautifully constructed . . . his erudition constantly brings a startling illumination."—Martin Wright, International Affairs "A ledestar to thinking men who seek a restoration of political science on the classic and Christian basis . . . a significant accomplishment in the retheorization of our age."—Anthony Harrigan, Christian Century

Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War


Jean Bricmont - 2006
    The criteria for such intervention have become more arbitrary and self-serving, and their form more destructive, from Yugoslavia to Afghanistan to Iraq. Until the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the large parts of the left was often complicit in this ideology of intervention--discovering new "Hitlers" as the need arose, and denouncing antiwar arguments as appeasement on the model of Munich in 1938.Jean Bricmont's Humanitarian Imperialism is both a historical account of this development and a powerful political and moral critique. It seeks to restore the critique of imperialism to its rightful place in the defense of human rights. It describes the leading role of the United States in initiating military and other interventions, but also on the obvious support given to it by European powers and NATO. It outlines an alternative approach to the question of human rights, based on the genuine recognition of the equal rights of people in poor and wealthy countries.Timely, topical, and rigorously argued, Jean Bricmont's book establishes a firm basis for resistance to global war with no end in sight.

The World According to Xi: Everything You Need to Know About the New China


Kerry Brown - 2018
    Its manufacturing underpins the world's economy; its military is growing at the fastest rate of any nation and its leader - Xi Jinping - is to set the pace and tone of world affairs for decades.In 2017 Xi Jinping became part of the constitution - an honour not seen since Chairman Mao. Here, China expert Kerry Brown guides us through the world according to Xi: his plans to make China the most powerful country on earth and to eradicate poverty for its citizens. In this captivating book we discover Xi's beliefs, how he thinks about communism, and how far he is willing to go to defend it.

Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race


Patrick Wolfe - 2015
    Bringing a historical perspective to bear on the regimes of race that colonizers have sought to impose on Aboriginal people in Australia, on Blacks and Native Americans in the United States, on Ashkenazi Jews in Western Europe, on Arab Jews in Israel/Palestine, and on people of African descent in Brazil, this book shows how race marks and reproduces the different relationships of inequality into which Europeans have coopted subaltern populations: territorial dispossession, enslavement, confinement, assimilation, and removal. Charting the different modes of domination that engender specific regimes of race and the strategies of anti-colonial resistance they entail, the book powerfully argues for cross-racial solidarities that respect these historical differences.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Paved with Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America


Jared Taylor - 1992
    The most important book on the subject of race for many years.--National Review.

Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order


Noam Chomsky - 1998
    By examining the contradictions between the democratic and market principles proclaimed by those in power and those actually practiced, Chomsky critiques the tyranny of the few that restricts the public arena and enacts policies that vastly increase private wealth, often with complete disregard for social and ecological consequences. Combining detailed historical examples and uncompromising criticism, Chomsky offers a profound sense of hope that social activism can reclaim people's rights as citizens rather than as consumers, redefining democracy as a global movement, not a global market.

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority


Martin Gurri - 2014
    In the words of economist and scholar Arnold Kling, Martin Gurri saw it coming.Technology has categorically reversed the information balance of power between the public and the elites who manage the great hierarchical institutions of the industrial age government, political parties, the media.The Revolt of the Public tells the story of how insurgencies, enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere, have mobilized millions of ordinary people around the world.Originally published in 2014, this updated edition of The Revolt of the Public includes an extensive analysis of Donald Trump's improbable rise to the presidency and the electoral triumphs of Brexit and concludes with a speculative look forward, pondering whether the current elite class can bring about a reformation of the democratic process and whether new organizing principles, adapted to a digital world, can arise out of the present political turbulence.

Nationalism


Ernest Gellner - 1997
    It has underpinned the emergence of many states, and the conflict it has often generated has caused enormous suffering, both directly and indirectly. Nationalism remains a powerful influence today; in the former Yugoslavia and the successor states of the Soviet Union it has instigated great violence and attrocity.In this incisive and provocative book, completed just before his death, Ernest Gellner - described as "one of the last of the great central European polymath intellectuals" by the Financial Times - explores the phenomenon of nationalism, tracing its emergence and roots in the modern industrialized nation state, its links with romanticism and its creation of national myhs. He investigates its various manifestations and reveals how in long established states such as France, it has been relatively benign, while in Eastern Europe in particular - where nationalist feeling preceded the emergence of modern states - its influence has been far more problematic, and at times disastrous. Finally, the book explores the prospects of minimizing the influence of nationalist feeling and cautiously anticipates the possibility of its decline in this decade of continuing atrocities and "ethnic cleansing."Lucid and direct, Gellner's work combines politics, history, philosophy, and anthropolgy with the multidisciplinary flair for which he was renowned. As nationalism continues to inform contemporary politics, often with vicious and tragic results, Gellner's last words on the subject are essential reading.

The Anatomy of Power


John Kenneth Galbraith - 1983
    

The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives


Sasha Abramsky - 2013
    It is made up of both the long-term chronically poor and new working poor—the tens of millions of victims of a broken economy and an ever more dysfunctional political system. In many ways, for the majority of Americans, financial insecurity has become the new norm.The American Way of Poverty shines a light on this travesty. Sasha Abramsky brings the effects of economic inequality out of the shadows and, ultimately, suggests ways for moving toward a fairer and more equitable social contract. Exploring everything from housing policy to wage protections and affordable higher education, Abramsky lays out a panoramic blueprint for a reinvigorated political process that, in turn, will pave the way for a renewed War on Poverty.It is, Harrington believed, a moral outrage that in a country as wealthy as America, so many people could be so poor. Written in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, in an era of grotesque economic extremes, The American Way of Poverty brings that same powerful indignation to the topic.

Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams


David Graeber - 2001
    David Graeber reexamines a century of anthropological thought about value and exchange, in large measure to find a way out of quandaries in current social theory, which have become critical at the present moment of ideological collapse in the face of Neoliberalism. Rooted in an engaged, dynamic realism, Graeber argues that projects of cultural comparison are in a sense necessarily revolutionary projects: He attempts to synthesize the best insights of Karl Marx and Marcel Mauss, arguing that these figures represent two extreme, but ultimately complementary, possibilities in the shape such a project might take. Graeber breathes new life into the classic anthropological texts on exchange, value, and economy. He rethinks the cases of Iroquois wampum, Pacific kula exchanges, and the Kwakiutl potlatch within the flow of world historical processes, and recasts value as a model of human meaning-making, which far exceeds rationalist/reductive economist paradigms.

Man vs. the Welfare State


Henry Hazlitt - 1969
    

Catholic Republic: Why America Will Perish Without Rome


Timothy J. Gordon - 2018
    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.