Government Philosophy

When Joe Biden assumed the United States presidency, he brought with him a team of all-star talent, perhaps the most experienced ensemble of policy experts in modern U.S. history. Their mission: repair America’s damaged reputation abroad and decide the course of its global future. The challenges and risks could not have been greater. Acclaimed national security reporter Alexander Ward takes us behind the scenes to reveal the struggle to enact a coherent and effective set of policies in a time of global crisis.

The New Atlantis (1627) is a utopian novel by Sir Francis Bacon in which he describes a vision of the future of human discovery, expressing his aspirations and ideals for humanity. The novel portrays a utopian world where "generosity and enlightenment, dignity and splendour, piety and public spirit" are the dominant qualities of the inhabitants.

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.

This highly understandable audiobook offers a contemporary interpretation of the political thought of Edmund Burke, drawing on his experiences to illuminate and address fundamental questions of politics and society that are of particular interest today. In Edmund Burke for Our Time, Byrne asserts that Burke's politics is reflective of unique and sophisticated ideas about how people think and learn, and about determinants of political behavior.

Pour apprendre la stratégie, qu'elle soit militaire, sociale ou quotidienne, ce sont les enseignements des plus grands qui mettent sur la voie de façon efficace. Le général, stratège et philosophe Sun Tzu a inspiré les plus grandes figures militaires et politiques, en passant par l'entreprenariat ; "l'Art de la guerre" est fait de maximes qui peuvent s'appliquer tant au champ de bataille qu'au quotidien.

Author Monica Sharma describes how we can source our inner capacities and wisdom to manifest change that embodies universal values such as dignity, compassion, fairness, and courage. Drawing on more than 20 years of work for the United Nations and elsewhere, she presents a radical new approach to transformational leadership, one that creates systems of change where everyone can engage - not just analysts and policy-makers.

A Thousand Small Sanities is a manifesto rooted in the lives of people who invented and extended the liberal tradition. Taking us from Montaigne to Mill, and from Middlemarch to the civil rights movement, Adam Gopnik argues that liberalism is not a form of centrism, nor simply another word for free markets, nor merely a term denoting a set of rights. It is something far more ambitious: the search for radical change by humane measures. Gopnik shows us why liberalism is one of the great moral adventures in human history.

Discovering that reason is the defining feature of our species, we named ourselves the “rational animal”. But is this flattering story itself rational? In this sweeping account of irrationality from antiquity to today - from the fifth-century BC murder of Hippasus for revealing the existence of irrational numbers to the rise of Twitter mobs and the election of Donald Trump - Justin Smith says the evidence suggests the opposite.

We in the West appear to be at a year zero, with the seeming end of the relative peace and prosperity we took for granted. The pandemic, Putin's invasion of Ukraine, growing tension with China, a rolling back of globalisation, Brexit, the return of inflation and painful interest rates - all these have shattered the illusions of the world as we knew it. For years our politicians have said they were going for growth and would ensure that those with least would benefit disproportionately from the proceeds of that growth. They've failed.

In this tour de force essay, Hans-Hermann Hoppe turns the standard account of historical governmental progress on its head. While the state is an evil in all its forms, monarchy is, in many ways, far less pernicious than democracy. Hoppe shows the evolution of government away from aristocracy, through monarchy, and toward the corruption and irresponsibility of democracy to have been identical with the growth of the leviathan state.

This unique book brings together George Bernard Shaw's witty and iconoclastic take on Wagner's masterwork, The Ring of the Nibelungen, with the composer's own essay on the role of art in revolution.

Is philanthropy, by its very nature, a threat to today's democracy? Though we may laud wealthy individuals who give away their money for society's benefit, Just Giving reveals how such generosity not only isn't the unassailable good we think it to be but might also undermine democratic values and set back aspirations of justice.

In 63 BC, frustrated by his failure to be elected leader of the Roman Republic, the aristocrat Catiline tried to topple its elected government. Backed by corrupt elites and poor, alienated Romans, he fled Rome while his associates plotted to burn the city and murder its leading politicians. The attempted coup culminated with the unmasking of the conspirators in the Senate. In How to Stop a Conspiracy, Josiah Osgood presents a brisk, modern new translation of the definitive account of these events, Sallust's The War with Catiline.

The definitive edition of the late Sir Roger Scruton's philosophical and political essays and reviews, now collected in one volume, edited by Mark Dooley. The philosopher Roger Scruton was the leading conservative thinker of the post-war years. In this audiobook are assembled the very best of his essays and commentaries, arranged thematically. The selection has been made and edited by Mark Dooley, Scruton’s literary executor.

African Americans have had every reason to doubt America’s democratic experiment. Yet African American activists, intellectuals, and artists who have sought to transform the United States into a racially just society have put forward some of the most original and powerful ideas about how to make America live up to its democratic ideals. In The Darkened Light of Faith, Melvin Rogers provides a bold new account of African American political thought through the works and lives of individuals who built this vital tradition, which is urgently needed today.

Award-winning journalist Mike Hixenbaugh delivers the immersive and eye-opening story of Southlake, Texas, a district that seemed to offer everything parents would want for their children—small classes, dedicated teachers, financial resources, a track record of academic success, and school spirit in abundance.

The Communist Manifesto, originally the Manifesto of the Communist Party (German: Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei), is an 1848 political document by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Commissioned by the Communist League and originally published in London just as the Revolutions of 1848 began to erupt, the Manifesto was later recognised as one of the world's most influential political documents.

Common Sense by Thomas Paine is the most compelling case for freedom ever made. It's the most influential book in American History. It's not just a book for Americans but a case for humanity and it's ideas are as relevant today as ever. There's just one problem. Published in 1776 it was written in Old English and it could very well be another language for someone trying to read it today. The original manuscript is nearly impossible to understand. For the first time ever it's been translated into modern English so that everyone can consume it and understand it.

The Age of Genius explores the eventful intertwining of outward event and inner intellectual life to tell, in all its richness and depth, the story of the 17th century in Europe. It was a time of creativity unparalleled in history before or since, from science to the arts, from philosophy to politics. Acclaimed philosopher and historian A. C. Grayling points to three primary factors that led to the rise of vernacular (popular) languages in philosophy, theology, science, and literature.

Featuring texts by Saul Alinsky, Edmund Burke, Rachel Carson, Carl von Clausewitz, Francis Fukuyama, Mahatma Gandhi, Friedrich Hayek, Thomas Hobbes, Martin Luther King, Niccolo Machiavelli, Karl Marx, J. S. Mill, George Orwell, Thomas Paine, Plato, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Alexis De Tocqueville, Mary Wollstonecraft, and many more.