Political Thought

Thinking about politics has tended to be historical in nature because of the comparisons and contrasts that can be drawn between past and present. Different periods in politics have used the past differently. At times, political thought can be said to have been drawn directly from the study of history; at others, perhaps including our own time, the relationship is more indirect.

Over the course of the last half dozen years, China's supreme leader Xi Jinping has made extraordinary changes which have profound implications not only for the Chinese people but nations throughout the world. Given how swiftly and fundamentally China's relations with the rest of the world are changing under Xi's rule, it is imperative that we know what Xi Jinping Thought is, how it evolved, and why it is so important.

This audiobook challenges the fatalism surrounding the housing crisis and lays out a bold, humane alternative: a world where home is treated not as a privilege, but as a universal right. Drawing from lived experience, economic analysis, and urban design, it dismantles the myths of deservingness, productivity, and property, exposing how systems preserve exclusion by intent.

In The Ideas That Rule Us, political theory researcher, author, and entrepreneur Nathan J. Murphy takes an eye-opening, multi-disciplinary deep dive into how others' ideologies, perceived societal norms, and pop culture influences shape our lives, through our decision-making, political affiliations, and consumer spending. Murphy deftly weaves over 4 years of political, cognitive, and sociological research into a very relatable and practical discussion about the fascinating origins of the many influential ideas and ideologies that rule our lives.

From the fall of Constantinople in 1453 until the 18th century, many Western European writers viewed the Ottoman Empire with almost obsessive interest. In this path-breaking audiobook, Noel Malcolm ranges through these vital centuries of East-West interaction, studying all the ways in which thinkers in the West interpreted the Ottoman Empire as a political phenomenon - and Islam as a political religion. 

What if everything we thought we knew about conflict and cooperation was backwards? For centuries, philosophers, economists, and scientists have asked: why do humans cooperate? The question assumes that conflict is natural and cooperation is the puzzle requiring explanation. This groundbreaking book inverts that assumption entirely. Drawing on evolutionary game theory, Nobel Prize-winning research on commons governance, and evidence from biology to artificial intelligence, A Unified Theory of Self-Organizing Systems presents a radical reframing.

In Oceania, the Party seeks to eliminate independent thought. Every citizen is monitored by telescreens, and the Thought Police scrutinize every word. In this suffocating world of perpetual war and state-sponsored hatred, Winston Smith dares to dream of a life where truth is objective and the past is stable.

We often strive to reinvent ourselves, our organizations, or our societies—believing that a fresh start is possible if only we try hard enough. Yet experience repeatedly shows that we rarely begin from nothing. Constraints—some visible, many hidden—shape every new beginning.

The world has witnessed almost everything: cannibalism born of famine, slavery normalized by law, genocide industrialized and justified, the Holocaust carried out in the name of order and purity. We comforted ourselves with the belief that these horrors belonged to the past, that humanity had learned its final lessons. Yet there was one thing history had not fully rehearsed: the systematic persecution of migrants as a global norm. This book argues that we are now living through precisely that moment.

Political history often appears to be driven by ideology, strategy, or the cold arithmetic of power. Yet behind the speeches, alliances, and threats stand people whose inner world was formed long before they entered public office. This audiobook reveals the hidden psychological engines of geopolitics: childhood wounds disguised as doctrines, unacknowledged fears enlarged into national myths, infantile rivalries inflated into global crises.

In 31 Days, Barry Werth takes readers inside the White House during the tumultuous days following Nixon’s resignation and the swearing-in of America’s “accidental president,” Gerald Ford. The congressional hearings, Nixon’s increasing paranoia, and, finally, the devastating revelations...

This exhilarating collection of essays, interviews, and correspondence—spanning the years 1988 through 2018, and reaching back a decade more—is about the simple concept that ideas matter. They mutate, inform, create fuel for thought, and inspire actions. As Kelman says, the State relies on our suffocation, that we cannot hope to learn the truth. But whether we can or not is beside the point. We must grasp the nettle, we assume control and go forward.

Wielding his widely recognized powers of explanation, Paul Krugman lays bare the hidden facts behind the $2 trillion tax cut. With huge budget surpluses just ahead, the question of whether to cut taxes has shifted to when? and by how much? With Fuzzy Math, Paul Krugman dissects the Bush tax...

Nobel prize-winner F. A. Hayek is one of the great thinkers of the 20th century, but up to now there has been no book for the non-specialist that describes his ideas and explains their significance. Eamonn Butler's clear, systematic, perceptive study fills this gap. Starting with a short survey of Hayek's life, Dr. Butler goes on to analyze all the main elements in his thought under six basic headings: Understanding How Society Works; The Market Process; Hayek's Critique of Socialism; Criticism of Social Justice; The Institutions of a Liberal Order; and The Constitution of a Liberal State.

A much-needed defense of liberalism—what it is, why it is under threat, and why we need it more than ever—from one of our most important political thinkers today. More than at any time since World War II, liberalism is under pressure, even siege. On the right, some have given up on...

Modern conservatism was born in the crisis of the French Revolution that sought to overturn Christianity, monarchy, tradition, and a trust in experience rather than reason. In the name of reason and progress, the French Revolution led to the guillotine, the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte, and a decade of continental war. Today Western Civilization is again in crisis, with an ever-widening progressive campaign against religion, tradition, and ordered liberty.

Why do the most successful companies so often become the most spectacular failures? Why did Kodak, which invented digital photography, go bankrupt? Why did Nokia, which dominated mobile phones, become irrelevant? Why did Blockbuster, which could have bought Netflix, collapse instead? The answer lies in a paradox at the heart of organizational life: what builds systems up also locks them in. The rules that ensure quality become barriers to innovation. The processes that guarantee efficiency become obstacles to flexibility. Success plants the seeds of failure.

Must the sins of America's past poison its hope for the future? Lately the American Left, withdrawing into the ivied halls of academe to rue the nation's shame, has answered "yes" in both word and deed. In Achieving Our Country, one of America's foremost philosophers challenges this lost generation of the Left to understand the role it might play in the great tradition of democratic intellectual labor that started with writers like Walt Whitman and John Dewey.

The American Political Tradition is one of the most influential and widely read historical volumes of our time. First published in 1948, its elegance, passion, and iconoclastic erudition laid the groundwork for a totally new understanding of the American past. By writing a "kind of intellectual...

This essay explores the political theory of Ayn Rand, a topic that catapulted to the national stage during the last presidential election following the nomination of Rep. Paul Ryan (a self-described enthusiast of Rand's ideas and novels) to the Romney ticket. Ayn Rand's ideas continue to generate public debate in political and cultural circles, but those ideas are frequently misunderstood and misrepresented.