Political Philosophy

It is an axiom of American life that advantage should be earned through ability and effort. Even as the country divides itself at every turn, the meritocratic ideal - that social and economic rewards should follow achievement rather than breeding - reigns supreme. Both Democrats and Republicans insistently repeat meritocratic notions. Meritocracy cuts to the heart of who we are. It sustains the American dream.

In 2004, the journalist Bill Bishop, armed with original and startling demographic data, made national news in a series of articles showing how Americans have been sorting themselves over the past three decades into alarmingly homogeneous communities—not by region or by red state or blue state, but by city and even neighborhood. In The Big Sort, Bishop deepens his analysis in a brilliantly reported book that makes its case from the ground up, starting with stories about how we live today.

For those with eyes to see, it is painfully apparent. Society everywhere teeters over an abyss, on the edge of the most explosive revolutionary and apocalyptic upheaval. We experience the upheaval everyday, in our minds, as we experience our subjection to ever more audacious forms of menticide - the full-spectrum, systematic campaign that seeks to undermine and destroy our individual and collective values and beliefs. The twenty-first century war over our minds has been waged through the use of prolonged methods of techno-interrogation and torture, through an endless array of drugs, ...

First published as articles in El Sol in 1929, the essays in The Revolt of the Masses serve as a prescient analysis of a 20th-century creature - the "mass man" - and the mass society that he makes up. With strains of Jamesian pragmatism and the sociology of Gustave Le Bon, Ortega shows how technological and political changes reduced Western civilization to the lowest common denominator and made it susceptible to the pressures of statism.

En Un pequeño empujón, considerado ya un clásico y uno de los mejores libros sobre economía y política de las últimas décadas, Cass R. Sunstein y Richard H. Thaler, premio Nobel de Economía, observan cómo nuestras percepciones y decisiones dependen del modo en que se organizan ante nosotros las diferentes opciones. Gobiernos y empresas, pero también padres, profesores y médicos, se convierten así en una especie de «arquitectos de la elección».

If you follow the headlines, the world in the 21st century appears to be sinking into chaos, hatred and irrationality. Yet, as Steven Pinker shows, if you follow the trendlines, you discover that our lives have become longer, healthier, safer and more prosperous - not just in the West but worldwide. Such progress is no accident: it's the gift of a coherent value system that many of us embrace without even realising it. These are the values of the Enlightenment: of reason, science, humanism and progress.

Publié en 1848, Le manifeste du Parti communiste est antérieur à toutes les obédiences auxquelles on l'associe machinalement. Marx suit les principes du mouvement dialectique hégélien et l'applique à la politique. On retrouve ici le renversement célèbre du maître et de l'esclave, où c'est finalement le "prolétaire" qui par sa force de production est en position dominante dans la société. Mais cette domination naturelle lui est refusée, il faut donc qu'il la revendique à travers une révolution.

This audiobook argues for a society organized by voluntary cooperation under institutions of private property and exchange with little, ultimately no, government. It describes how the most fundamental functions of government might be replaced by private institutions, with services such as protecting individual rights and settling disputes provided by private firms in a competitive market.

The founder of the international Transition Towns movement asks why true creative, positive thinking is in decline, asserts that it's more important now than ever, and suggests ways our communities can revive and reclaim it.

With its message of working-class empowerment and call for unity, The Communist Manifesto endures as one of history’s most influential, visionary, and controversial documents. Intending to rouse listeners from their indifference, authors Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels demanded the end of proletariat exploitation and called for the overthrow of the oppressive bourgeois ruling class. It was a blueprint for an uncompromising new direction that would serve as the spark for the socialist uprising in the late 1800s.

Some books emerge from a lifetime of hard-won knowledge. Robert D. Kaplan has learned, from a career spent reporting on wars, revolutions, and international politics in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia, that the essence of geopolitics is tragedy. In The Tragic Mind, he employs the works of ancient Greek dramatists, Shakespeare, German philosophers, and the modern classics to explore the central subjects of international politics: order, disorder, rebellion, ambition, loyalty to family and state, violence, and the mistakes of power.

Urban violence is one of the most divisive and allegedly intractable issues of our time. But as Harvard scholar Thomas Abt shows in Bleeding Out, we actually possess all the tools necessary to stem violence in our cities. Coupling the latest social science with firsthand experience as a crime-fighter, Abt proposes a relentless focus on violence itself.

Democracy, free thought and expression, religious tolerance, individual liberty, political self-determination of peoples, sexual and racial equality - these values have firmly entered the mainstream in the decades since they were enshrined in the 1948 U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. But if these ideals no longer seem radical today, their origin was very radical indeed - far more so than most historians have been willing to recognize.

In Decades of Decadence, Marco Rubio exposes the elites’ attacks on the four key elements of American strength: good local jobs, stable families, geographical communities, and a sovereign nation that serves as a beacon of freedom and prosperity. These have been eroded not only by globalization, but by the lies we tell ourselves, including, “Anyone who loves each other is a family,” “Real community can be found on the internet,” and “We’re all citizens of the world.”

What, exactly, is post-truth? Is it wishful thinking, political spin, mass delusion, bold-faced lying? McIntyre analyzes recent examples - claims about inauguration crowd size, crime statistics, and the popular vote - and finds that post-truth is an assertion of ideological supremacy by which its practitioners try to compel someone to believe something regardless of the evidence. Yet post-truth didn't begin with the 2016 election; the denial of scientific facts about smoking, evolution, vaccines, and climate change offers a road map for more widespread fact denial.

Robert Rubin, former secretary of the Treasury and co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, shares thoughts on decision-making developed over more than six decades in markets, business, government, and politics, and offers listeners an astute and original guide for navigating uncertain times.

Following a remarkable epoch of greater dispersion of wealth and opportunity, we are inexorably returning towards a more feudal era marked by greater concentration of wealth and property, reduced upward mobility, demographic stagnation, and increased dogmatism. If the last 70 years saw a massive expansion of the middle class, not only in America but in much of the developed world, today that class is declining and a new, more hierarchical society is emerging. The new class structure resembles that of Medieval times.

The Parkland school shooting was the most avoidable mass murder in American history. And the policies that made it inevitable have spread to your school....

Thomas Hobbes lived through the Thirty Years War and Britain's civil wars, and the trauma of these events led to his great masterpiece of political thought. How could humankind rescue itself from life in the natural state, which was 'poor, nasty, brutish and short'? Vilified and scorned from the moment it was published, Leviathan was publicly burnt for sedition, but ever since it has exercised a unique fascination upon its readers, both for its ideas and its remarkable prose. Its concepts helped to drag Europe into a new world - one in which we still live today.

Breakthroughs in genetics present us with a promise and a predicament. The promise is that we will soon be able to treat and prevent a host of debilitating diseases. The predicament is that our newfound genetic knowledge may enable us to manipulate our nature - to enhance our genetic traits and those of our children. Although most people find at least some forms of genetic engineering disquieting, it is not easy to articulate why.