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Why Liberalism Failed
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Coddling of the America Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, read by Jonathan Haidt. What doesn't kill you makes you weaker. Always trust your feelings. Life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being as well as ancient wisdom from many cultures. And yet they have become increasingly woven into education, culminating in a stifling culture of 'safetyism' that began on American college campuses.
-
-
Utterly brilliant!
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Two Harvard professors explain the dangerous world we face today. Democracies can die with a coup d'état - or they can die slowly. This happens most deceptively when in piecemeal fashion, with the election of an authoritarian leader, the abuse of governmental power and the complete repression of opposition. All three steps are being taken around the world - not least with the election of Donald Trump - and we must all understand how we can stop them.
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Is so bad that it does not allow the content work
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In this major statement, the renowned international-relations scholar John Mearsheimer argues that liberal hegemony, the foreign policy pursued by the United States since the Cold War ended, is doomed to fail. It makes far more sense, he maintains, for Washington to adopt a more restrained foreign policy based on a sound understanding of how nationalism and realism constrain great powers abroad.
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A great expose of the liberal delusion
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Dominion
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Performance
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Christianity is the most enduring and influential legacy of the ancient world, and its emergence the single most transformative development in Western history. Even the increasing number in the West today who have abandoned the faith of their forebears, and dismiss all religion as pointless superstition, remain recognisably its heirs. Seen close up, the division between a sceptic and a believer may seem unbridgeable. Widen the focus, though, and Christianity's enduring impact upon the West can be seen in the emergence of much that has traditionally been cast as its nemesis.
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In The Retreat of Western Liberalism, Luce makes a larger statement about the weakening of western hegemony and the crisis of democratic liberalism - of which Donald Trump and his European counterparts are not the cause, but a symptom. Luce argues that we are on a menacing trajectory brought about by ignorance of what it took to build the West, arrogance towards society's losers, and complacency about our system's durability - attitudes that have been emerging since the fall of the Berlin Wall, treated by the West as an absolute triumph over the East.
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Essential Reading For Understanding The Current State Of The West
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One of the few times I wish there was a sixth star
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This book is a jewel
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Prominent English social critic Peter Hitchens writes of the period between the death of Winston Churchill and the funeral of Princess Diana, a time he believes has seen disastrous changes in English life. The Abolition of Britain is bitingly witty and fiercely argued, yet also filled with somber appreciation for what the idea of England has always meant to the West and to the world.
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Though much is taken, much abides;
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The Road to Somewhere
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Many Remainers reported waking up the day after the Brexit vote feeling as if they were living in a foreign country. In fact, they were merely experiencing the same feeling that many British people have felt every day for years. Goodhart shows us how people have come to be divided into two camps: the 'Anywheres', who have 'achieved' identities, derived from their careers and education, and the 'Somewheres', who get their identity from a sense of place and from the people around them, and who feel a sense of loss due to mass immigration and rapid social change.
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Fantastic and insightful book
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The Future of Capitalism
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Deep new rifts are tearing apart the fabric of Britain and other Western societies: thriving cities versus the provinces, the highly skilled elite versus the less educated, wealthy versus developing countries. As these divides deepen, we have lost the sense of ethical obligation to others that was crucial to the rise of post-war social democracy. So far these rifts have been answered only by the revivalist ideologies of populism and socialism, leading to the seismic upheavals of Trump, Brexit and the return of the far right in Germany. We have heard many critiques of capitalism but no one has laid out a realistic way to fix it, until now.
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Insightful
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How Democracy Ends
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Democracy has died hundreds of times, all over the world. We think we know what that looks like: chaos descends and the military arrives to restore order, until the people can be trusted to look after their own affairs again. However, there is a danger that this picture is out of date. Until very recently, most citizens of Western democracies would have imagined that the end was a long way off, and very few would have thought it might be happening before their eyes as Trump, Brexit and paranoid populism have become a reality.
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Thoughtful and interesting
- By Mr. M. J. Dodd on 29-08-19
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The New Right
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- Length: 9 hrs
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From the heterodox right wing of the 1940s to the Buchanan/Rothbard alliance of 1992 and all the way through to what he witnessed personally in Charlottesville, The New Right is a thorough firsthand accounting of the concepts, characters and chronology of this widely misunderstood sociopolitical phenomenon. Today’s fringe is tomorrow’s orthodoxy. As entertaining as it is informative, The New Right is required listening for every American across the spectrum who would like to learn more about the past, present and future of our divided political culture.
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Hugely interesting book
- By Mash Jamtoes on 13-06-19
Summary
Has liberalism failed because it has succeeded?
Of the three dominant ideologies of the 20th century - fascism, communism, and liberalism - only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism's proponents tend to forget that it is an ideology and not the natural end-state of human political evolution. As Patrick Deneen argues in this provocative book, liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: It trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history.
Here, Deneen offers an astringent warning that the centripetal forces now at work on our political culture are not superficial flaws but inherent features of a system whose success is generating its own failure.
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Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Hedgehog
- Sydney, Australia
- 05-05-19
What happens if history did not end?
A culture war. Or perhaps a cultural v acultural war. Good contribution to the debate.
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- David
- 26-09-18
a fine idea stuffed in a dead horse and beat
self satisfied and needlessly verbose, the entire premise, while interesting, could be boiled easily down to a couple hundred words. the lack of useful or even insightful conclusions, though one is nominally attempted, is additionally disappointing.
a worthy idea as food for thought, but a waste of words in this format, and hard to listen to due to the overwrought academic prose
9 of 10 people found this review helpful
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- Darren P. Auger
- 12-05-19
Robot narrator
Good material in the book, but the narration is unlistenable. Sounds like a dull robot
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
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- Leonardo P.
- 27-03-19
The by product of successful liberalism
Part of Obama's summer reading list, I would highlight a few key paraphrases.
"The near unanimity of political views represented on college campuses is echoed by the omnipresent belief that an education must be economically practical, culminating in a high-paying job in a city populated by like-minded college graduates who will continue to reinforce their keen outrage over inequality while enjoying its bounteous fruits."
"liberalism has drawn down on a preliberal inheritance and resources that at once sustained liberalism but which it cannot replenish. The loosening of social bonds in nearly every aspect of life - familial, neighbourly, communal, religious, even national - reflects the advancing logic of liberalism and is the source of its deepest instability"
Think of it as a call of action and for us to understand how far we have come and where to go from here.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 13-08-18
Smart man w/ a grim view, but insufficient support
The author has an interesting and surprising claim, and withsome merit. I gained many new interesting insights and appreciate the book for that. However Deneen lumps classic liberalism together with modern progressive liberalism and declares them both failures. He also lumps conservatism and libertarianism in with classic liberalism. He gives some examples for progressive liberalism but really only one for classic liberalism in which he declares free market ideas to be a failure. He specifically points to the 2008 mortgage crisis and financial meltdown as a market failure, but many economists think that was substantially due to government meddling (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). The narration was also flat, almost monotone. I hung onto the book for most of the chapters, hoping Deneen would support his case with facts and examples. His ideas are intriguing and flow against most modern streams of thought. But I gave up on the audible book just short of his conclusion. It was too much work to listen for too little gain. Still. I'm glad I encountered Mr. Deneen. But I wouldn't recommend the book to a friend.
9 of 13 people found this review helpful
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- Gabriel Noah Brahm
- 03-06-18
Liberty After Liberalism
This book asks the big questions and gets to some plausible answers by the end, too. If you want to know what it means to be free today, give it a listen.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful
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- M. E. Donnelly
- 19-06-18
Plausible connection between the two liberalism's
Well reasoned. Reading a little too textbookish. I still listened all the way through, as the content was worth considering. This book may not be well received by rugged individualists. Certainly not by anyone who has bought into the all powerful central state. Deneen, I think, sought to detail the roots and evaluate the fruits of liberalism, and, finally, to start the conversation about how to practically move into a post-liberal world.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful
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- Ronnie
- 10-08-19
Is this an AI performance?
Deneen is a professor. I’m sure a very engaging lecturer. Pity it is not him delivering the content.
The material is excellent. I shall order this in print.
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- Muyambi
- 16-06-19
highly recommended
incredible. worth a second read and sharing with everyone put there. not to mention the writing is good too
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- M. Woollard
- 04-04-19
Fantastic, insightful, disturbing, and hopeful
A fascinating look at the ills plaguing modern liberal society. The author cuts to the core of the ideas animating liberalism, and shows how they lead to the problems much modern political discourse aims at solving. This book has very much changed my way of thinking about politics, political philosophy, and political responsibility.
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- Julian Peacock
- 03-03-19
thought provoking.
this book drew from a surprising number of sources to challenge preconceived notions about liberalism