Government Philosophy

Dorothy A. Brown became a tax lawyer to get away from race. As a young black girl growing up in the South Bronx, she’d seen how racism limited the lives of her family and neighbors. Her law school classes offered a refreshing contrast: Tax law was about numbers, and the only color that mattered was green. But when Brown sat down to prepare tax returns for her parents, she found something strange: James and Dottie Brown, a plumber and a nurse, seemed to be paying an unusually high percentage of their income in taxes. When Brown became a law professor, she set out to understand why.

A classic work in political philosophy, intellectual history and economics, The Road to Serfdom has inspired and infuriated politicians and scholars for half a century.

Lev Davidovich Trotsky burst onto the world stage in November 1917 as coleader of a Marxist Revolution seizing power in Russia. It made him one of the most recognized personalities of the 20th century, a global icon of radical change. Yet just months earlier, this same Lev Trotsky was a nobody, a refugee expelled from Europe, writing obscure pamphlets and speeches, barely noticed outside a small circle of fellow travelers. Where had he come from to topple Russia and change the world? Where else? New York.

We pursue power, pleasure, and profit. We want as much as we can get, and we deploy instrumental reasoning-cost-benefit analysis-to get it. We judge ourselves and others by how well we succeed. It is a way of life and thought that seems natural, inevitable, and inescapable. As David Wootton reveals, it is anything but. In Power, Pleasure, and Profit, he traces an intellectual and cultural revolution that replaced the older systems of Aristotelian ethics and Christian morality with the instrumental reasoning that now gives shape and purpose to our lives.

Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness by William Godwin (1756-1836) was first published in February 1793, the month following the execution of Louis XVI of France. It proved to be immediately popular and influential. Godwin, the son of a Calvinist preacher, was educated at Hoxton Academy, after which, he became a minister to a dissenter congregation in Ware.

私たちはどこにいるのか。そして、どう生きるべきか――。

From one of the leading critics of leftist orientations comes a study of the thinkers who have most influenced the attitudes of the New Left. Beginning with a ruthless analysis of New Leftism and concluding with a critique of the key strands in its thinking, Roger Scruton conducts a reappraisal of such major left-wing thinkers as E. P. Thompson, Ronald Dworkin, R. D. Laing, Jurgen Habermas, Gyorgy Lukacs, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek, Ralph Milliband, and Eric Hobsbawm. Scruton delivers a critique of modern left-wing thinking.

Listeners will find here not only the country’s leading conservative thinker offering a pas­sionate defense of limited government, but also a highly independent mind whose views - on feminism, evolution and the death penalty, for example - defy ideological convention. Things That Matter also features several of Krautham­mer’s major path-breaking essays - on bioeth­ics, on Jewish destiny and on America’s role as the world’s superpower - that have pro­foundly influenced the nation’s thoughts and policies.

In Talking Across the Divide, social justice activist Justin Lee explains how to break through the five key barriers that make people resist differing opinions. With a combination of psychological research, pop-culture references, and anecdotes from Justin's many years of experience mediating contentious conversations, this book will help you understand people on the other side of the argument and give you the tools you need to change their minds - even if they've fallen for "fake news."

When Moral Politics was first published two decades ago, it redefined how Americans think and talk about politics through the lens of cognitive political psychology. Today, George Lakoff's classic text has become all the more relevant, as liberals and conservatives have come to hold even more vigorously opposed views of the world, with the underlying assumptions of their respective worldviews at the level of basic morality.

Sir Thomas More's Utopia has spurred debate, reflection, and critical thinking since its original publication in the 16th century. More's fictional island of Utopia provides an exploration of issues that shook him and his contemporaries and that continue to be problematic in the modern day.

How to Win an Election is an ancient Roman guide for campaigning that is as up-to-date as tomorrow's headlines. In 64 BC when idealist Marcus Cicero, Rome's greatest orator, ran for consul (the highest office in the Republic), his practical brother Quintus decided he needed some no-nonsense advice on running a successful campaign.

Building a Resilient Tomorrow does not dwell on overhyped descriptions of apocalyptic climate scenarios, nor does it travel down well-trodden paths surrounding the politics of reducing carbon emissions. Instead, it starts with two central facts: Climate impacts will continue to occur, and we can make changes now to mitigate their effects.

In 2014, northeastern Syria might have been the last place you would expect to find a revolution centered on women's rights. But that year, an all-female militia faced off against ISIS in a little town few had ever heard of: Kobani. By then, the Islamic State had swept across vast swaths of the country, taking town after town and spreading terror as the civil war burned all around it. From that unlikely showdown in Kobani emerged a fighting force that would wage war against ISIS across northern Syria alongside the United States.

To the modern mind, the idea of honor is outdated, sexist, and barbaric. It evokes Hamilton and Burr and pistols at dawn, not visions of a well-organized society. But for philosopher Tamler Sommers, a sense of honor is essential to living moral lives. In Why Honor Matters, Sommers argues that our collective rejection of honor has come at great cost. Reliant only on Enlightenment liberalism, the United States has become the home of the cowardly, the shameless, the selfish, and the alienated. Properly channeled, honor encourages virtues like courage, integrity, and solidarity.

Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural phenomenon - one that is at odds with our heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern, secular knowledge and science. With mordant wit, Jacoby surveys an antirationalist landscape extending from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of "junk thought".

"La República" es la más conocida e influyente obra de Platón, y es el compendio de las ideas que conforman su filosofía. Se trata de un diálogo entre Sócrates y otros personajes, como los discípulos o parientes del propio Sócrates. El tema central de la República es la reflexión sobre qué es la justicia y cómo se expresa en el hombre, lo que lleva a Platón a abordar la organización de la ciudad-estado ideal.

Meena Menon was The Hindu's correspondent in Islamabad till she was expelled by the Pakistani authorities in May 2014. In spite of her truncated stay and the restrictions placed on her movements, Menon managed to write on a range of subjects covering swathes of life in Islamabad.

Un an après la parution du "Voyage autour du monde" de Bougainville, Diderot, intéressé par l'opposition des mœurs entre les Français et les Tahitiens telle que décrite dans le rapport qu'en fait l'auteur, décide d'ajouter un supplément à ce récit sous forme d'un dialogue philosophique et sociologique entre deux personnages fictifs dénommés A et B.

In this timely new edition of his classic book A Political Philosophy, celebrated conservative philosopher Roger Scruton interrogates contemporary values, virtues and morality. What principles should govern our relations to animals, the nation state, the environment and other ways of life? What does modern marriage look like? What is Enlightenment, and how has its inheritance made itself known? How should we approach religion, evil and death? What explains the rise of totalitarianism, and how should we respond to nihilism?