Government Philosophy

How remarkable that an Italian living in the 15th and 16th centuries should lend his name to a word still in common usage in the English language today. Nicolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) wrote only one major work as a gift for his ruling Prince, Lorenzo de Medici. Machiavelli held office as a senior civil servant for 14 years until the downfall of the Republic in 1512. No longer officially employed to impart advice, instead Machiavelli poured out his ideas and resentment in his writings.

鋼のメンタル王・ひろゆきが教えるいつでもどこでもマイペースを貫く、逆転の思考法!◎イライラが消える!◎他人に振り回されない!◎どんな相手にもビビらない、ブレない!

If a country's Gross Domestic Product increases each year, but so does the percentage of its people deprived of basic education, health care, and other opportunities, is that country really making progress? If we rely on conventional economic indicators, can we ever grasp how the world's billions of individuals are really managing? In this powerful critique, Martha Nussbaum argues that our dominant theories of development have given us policies that ignore our most basic human needs for dignity and self-respect.

Lawyers don’t often admit this in mixed company, but Madiba Dennie wants to let you in on a secret: There's no one true way to interpret the Constitution. Americans saw just how subjective it can be when the Supreme Court denied basic bodily autonomy to millions of people in its Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision, suggesting that our rights and liberties are frozen in a cherry-picked version of history. This is a line of constitutional interpretation called originalism—a framework that says we must be constrained by the meaning of the Constitution's text when it was written.

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 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.

In closely reported stories from the streets of New York to the seats of intellectual power, MacDonald shows how bad ideas get started and then acquire a life of their own. Her reports trace the transformation of influential opinion-makers and large philanthropic foundations from confident advocates of individual responsibility, opportunity, and learning into apologists for the welfare state.

Après avoir échoué dans sa collaboration à l'Encyclopédie, Voltaire conçoit l'idée de condenser dans un seul ouvrage l'essentiel de ses pensées philosophiques.

"El príncipe" habla de las monarquías hereditarias y especialmentede las monarquías formadas a partir de "principados nuevos". Paraello describe como a través del contexto histórico ciertos hombresy principados han logrado mantener el poder y hacerse con nuevosterritorios y dominios políticos. Entre los hombres que toma como modelos de príncipes están "Cesar Borgia" y "Francesco Sforza", elprimero gracias a la gran fortuna de su padre y el segundo por méritopropio.

Taking stock of our fragmented political landscape, Michael Patrick Lynch delivers a trenchant philosophical take on digital culture and its tendency to make us into dogmatic know-it-alls. The internet - where most shared news stories are not even read by the person posting them - has contributed to the rampant spread of "intellectual arrogance". In this culture, we have come to think that we have nothing to learn from one another; we are rewarded for emotional outrage over reflective thought; and we glorify a defensive rejection of those different from us.

From the French Revolution of the 18th century to the Mexican, Russian, German, Chinese, anticolonial, and Iranian revolutions of the 20th, Chirot finds that moderate solutions to serious social, economic, and political problems were overwhelmed by radical ideologies that promised simpler, drastic remedies. But not all revolutions had this outcome. The American Revolution didn't, although its failure to resolve the problem of slavery eventually led to the Civil War, and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe was relatively peaceful, except in Yugoslavia.

This is an ideal introduction to the ideas of a man whom many regard as the greatest thinker of our time. Here we encounter the stages in the development of his unique philosophy of consciousness, his key intellectual breakthroughs, his theory of history, and his diagnosis of the political ills of the modern age. The book provides a veritable catalog of the thinkers who created the intellectual foundation of the twentieth century.

The dystopian future we've been warned of is here. Dave Rubin has been on the front lines of the culture wars for years. Now, he offers tactics you can use to protect yourself from today’s authoritarian rule—from resisting the grip of Big Tech to staying sane in a post-truth world. What’s more, he offers a vision for the next generation of patriots who will need to face the future head-on, holding fast to their values and creating a meaningful life no matter how frenzied and fabricated the news of the day is.

In 1848, THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO was published by two émigrés from Germany. Marx and Engels' apocalyptic vision of an insatiable system that penetrates every corner of the world reduces every relationship to that of profit, and burst asunder the old forms of production and of politics. It is still a recognisable picture of our world–the vampiric energy of the system being once again highly contentious.

This pacifist manifesto was published in 1917, as the First World War was dragging to a close. The resolution of this catastrophic conflict resulted in a reconstruction of Europe, the fallout from which led to an even more cataclysmic war. Russell delineates the problem as being due to the institutionalizing of national hostilities and the consequent apportioning of blame among the warring parties. In his exposition Russell considers the roles played by a number of institutions, social and political, reserving some his sharpest criticism for organized religion.

The left and right will always have strong policy disagreements, but constructive debate and negotiation are not possible when each side demonizes the other. In this book, social psychologist Ronnie Janoff-Bulman provides a new framework for understanding why and how we disagree. Janoff-Bulman asks listeners to consider the challenging possibility that both liberalism and conservatism are morally based and reflect genuine concern for the country. Understanding that our political differences are rooted in two natural forms of morality can help us begin to detoxify our politics.

Libertarianism emerged in the mid-nineteenth century with an unwavering commitment to progressive causes, from women’s rights and the fight against slavery to anti-colonialism and Irish emancipation. Today, this movement founded on the principle of individual liberty finds itself divided by both progressive and reactionary elements vying to claim it as their own. The Individualists is the untold story of a political doctrine continually reshaped by fierce internal tensions, bold and eccentric personalities, and shifting political circumstances.

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.

In this witty and mischievous book, philosopher Peter Cave dissects the most controversial disputes today and uses philosophical argument to reveal that many issues are less straightforward than we'd like to believe. Leaving no sacred cow standing, Cave uses ingenious stories and examples to challenge our most strongly held assumptions. Is democracy inherently a good thing? What is the basis of so-called human rights? Is discrimination always bad? Are we morally obliged to accept refugees?

As this book argues, every era since Marx's death has reinvented him to fit its needs. There is not one Marx forever and for all time. There are a thousand Marxes. As Thomas Nail contends, one of the most significant contributions of Marx's work is that it treats theory itself as a historical practice. Reading Marx is not just an interpretative activity, but a creative one. As our historical conditions change, so do the kinds of questions we pose and the kinds of answers we find in Marx's writing.