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The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason and the Laws of Nature
Timothy Ferris · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorNexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
Yuval Noah Harari · 544 pages
From the author of Sapiens comes the groundbreaking story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world. For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions, and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing head
Age of Anger: A History of the Present
Pankaj Mishra · 416 pages
From Goodreads (edited by me though): **One of our most important public intellectuals reveals the hidden history of our current global crisis** Modernity, secularism, development, and progress have long been viewed by the powerful few as benign ideals for the many. Today, however, botched experiments in nation-building, democracy, industrialization, and urbanization visibly scar much of the wo
The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left
Yuval Levin · 289 pages
"In The Great Debate Yuval Levin explores the origins of the familiar left/right divide in American politics by examining the views of the men who best represent each side of that debate: Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. In a groundbreaking exploration of the origins of our political order, Levin shows that our political divide did not originate (as many historians argue) in the French Revolution, b
Thinking the Twentieth Century
Tony Judt · 432 pages
Thinking the Twentieth Century maps the issues and concerns of a turbulent age onto a life of intellectual conflict and engagement. Tony Judt presents the triumphs and the failures of prominent intellectuals, adeptly explaining both their ideas and the risks of their political commitments.--[book jacket]
Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies
Ian Buruma, Avishai Margalit · 192 pages
Twenty-five years ago, Edward Said's Orientalism spawned a generation of scholarship on the denigrating and dangerous mirage of "the East" in the Western colonial mind. But "the West" is the more dangerous mirage of our own time, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit argue, and the idea of "the West" in the minds of its self-proclaimed enemies remains largely unexamined and woefully misunderstood. Occid
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
Timothy Snyder · 128 pages
In previous books, Holocaust historian Timothy Snyder dissected the events and values that enabled the rise of Hitler and Stalin and the execution of their catastrophic policies. With Twenty Lessons, Snyder draws from the darkest hours of the twentieth century to provide hope for the twenty-first. As he writes, "Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism a
Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography
Christopher Hitchens · 158 pages
Thomas Paine was one of the greatest advocates of freedom in history, and his Declaration of the Rights of Man, first published in 1791, is the key to his reputation. Inspired by his outrage at Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution, Paine's text is a passionate defense of man's inalienable rights. Since its publication, Rights of Man has been celebrated, criticized, maligned, suppressed,
How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011
Eric Hobsbawm · 470 pages
"The ideas of capitalism's most vigorous and eloquent enemy have been enlightening in every era, the author contends, and our current historical situation of free-market extremes suggests that reading Marx may be more important now than ever. Hobsbawm begins with a consideration of how we should think about Marxism in the post-communist era, observing that the features we most associate with Sovi
A Human Being Died That Night: A South African Woman Confronts the Legacy of Apartheid
Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela · 200 pages
"Eugene de Kock, the commanding officer of state-sanctioned apartheid death squads, is currently serving a 212-year sentence for crimes against humanity. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, who grew up in a black township in South Africa served as a psychologist on that country's great national experiment in healing, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. As this book opens, in an act of inescapable, mult
Socialism: A Very Short Introduction
Michael Newman · 144 pages
Offering a practical and historical perspective on socialism this work explains the evolution of socialist ideas from the French Revolution, and examines why past attempts to implement socialism might have failed.
Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology
Howard Zinn · 341 pages
Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
Jonah Goldberg · 491 pages
A startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. Replacing myths with research, journalist Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left. The Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term "National socialism"). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public educati
Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship Of Reason in the West
John Ralston Saul · 640 pages
Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West is a sweeping and provocative exploration of nothing less than the political, economic, social, and cultural origins of Western society. With great daring and originality, John Ralston Saul dissects the contradictions, delusions, and illusions that have brought the world to the brink of confusion and crisis, and shatters the myths surroun
The End of History and the Last Man
Francis Fukuyama · 418 pages
Observing totalitarian and authoritarian governments falling around the world, Fukuyama develops an hypothesis that the end state of all this change will be liberal democracy everywhere (The End of History), and considers how people will react (The Last Man).
Fascism: A Very Short Introduction
Kevin Passmore · 169 pages
Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976
Michel Foucault · 310 pages
The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America
Leonard Peikoff · 352 pages
Ayn Rand chose Leonard Peikoff to be her successor as the spokesman for Objectivism. And in this brilliantly reasoned, thought-provoking work we learn why, as he demonstrates how far America has been detoured from its original path and led down the same road that Germany followed to Nazism. Self-sacrifice, Oriental mysticism, racial ?truth,? the public good, doing one?s duty--these are among the s
Democracy in America Volume 2
Alexis de Tocqueville · 428 pages
Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea
Mark Kurlansky · 213 pages
In this timely, highly original, and controversial narrative, New York Times bestselling author Mark Kurlansky discusses nonviolence as a distinct entity, a course of action, rather than a mere state of mind. Nonviolence can and should be a technique for overcoming social injustice and ending wars, he asserts, which is why it is the preferred method of those who speak truth to power. Nonviolence i
Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism
Peter Marshall · 778 pages
Navigating the broad "river of anarchy," from Taoism to Situationism, from Ranters to Punk rockers, from individualists to communists, from anarcho-syndicalists to anarcha-feminists, Demanding the Impossible is an authoritative and lively study of a widely misunderstood subject. It explores the key anarchist concepts of society and the state, freedom and equality, authority and power, and investig