Government Philosophy

"Le Prince" est un traité politique écrit au début du XVIe siècle par Nicolas Machiavel, homme politique et écrivain florentin. Ce livre audio montre comment devenir prince, et le rester. D'aucuns pourrait dire que les princes d'alors sont les dirigeants d'aujourd'hui. Machiavel analyse des exemples de l'histoire antique et de l'histoire italienne de l'époque, et en tire des enseignements. Cet ouvrage est universel et intemporel car il ne donne pas de conseils moraux. Le seul objectif est de conquérir le pouvoir puis de le conserver, par tous les moyens.

The lifeblood of any free society is persuasion: changing other people’s minds in order to change things. But America is suffering a crisis of faith in persuasion that is putting its democracy and the planet itself at risk. Anand Giridharadas takes us inside these movements and battles, seeking out the dissenters who continue to champion persuasion in an age of polarization. As the book’s subjects grapple with how to call out injustices while calling in those who don’t agree with them but just might one day, they point a way to healing, and changing, a fracturing country.

People are now exposed to more information than ever before, provided both by technology and by increasing access to every level of education. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything and all voices demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism.

In the Nicomachean Ethics (so called after their first editor, Aristotle's son Nicomachus) Aristotle sets out to discover the good life for man: the life of happiness or eudaimonia. Happiness for Aristotle is the activity of the soul in accordance with virtue. Virtue is shown in the deliberate choice of actions as part of a worked-out plan of life, a plan which takes a middle course between excess and deficiency.

A stevedore on the San Francisco docks in the 1940s, Eric Hoffer wrote philosophical treatises in his spare time while living in the railroad yards. The True Believer—the first and most famous of his books—was made into a bestseller when President Eisenhower cited it during one of the earliest television press conferences.

On Anarchism provides the reasoning behind Noam Chomsky's fearless lifelong questioning of the legitimacy of entrenched power. In these essays, Chomsky redeems one of the most maligned ideologies, anarchism, and places it at the foundation of his political thinking. Chomsky's anarchism is distinctly optimistic and egalitarian. Moreover, it is a living, evolving tradition that is situated in a historical lineage; Chomsky's anarchism emphasizes the power of collective, rather than individualist, action.

With liberal democracy embattled, public discourse grown toxic, family life breaking down, and drug abuse and depression on the rise, many fear what the future holds. In Morality, respected faith leader and public intellectual Jonathan Sacks traces today's crisis to our loss of a strong, shared moral code and our elevation of self-interest over the common good.

When parents send their children off to college, Mom and Dad hope they'll return more cultivated, knowledgeable, and astute - able to see issues from all points of view. But, according to Ben Shapiro, there's only one view allowed on most college campuses: a rabid brand of liberalism that must be swallowed hook, line, and sinker.

The latest and most bitterly contested battle in the culture war is the controversy over Darwin and intelligent design. But much of what you've heard about it is wrong. Jonathan Wells, a battle-hardened veteran with doctorates in biology and theology, sets the record straight.

In September 2016, the provocative essay "The Flight 93 Election" galvanized many voters by spotlighting the stakes ahead in November and reproaching complacent elements of the Right. Its author, Michael Anton - writing as "Publius Decius Mus" - addressed the main criticisms of his argument soon afterward in a "Restatement on Flight 93". A new criticism emerged that he had painted a dire scenario to be averted, but no positive vision. Here, Anton presents the positive ideal that inspired him - a distillation of his thinking on Americanism and the West, refined over decades.

Few journalists working today have covered Donald Trump more extensively than Maggie Haberman. And few understand him and his motivations better. Now, demonstrating her majestic command of this story, Haberman reveals in full the depth of her understanding of the 45th president himself, and of what the Trump phenomenon means.

Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) was an orator of Black Nationalism, and founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League. He advanced a Pan-African philosophy which inspired a global movement, known as Garveyism. This book, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (1923) was compiled by his wife, Amy Euphemia Jacques Garvey, mainly from his speeches. Promoting unity between Africans and the African diaspora, he campaigned for an end to European colonial rule in Africa and encouraged the political unification of the continent.

The Law was originally published as a pamphlet in French in 1850 by Frederic Bastiat. It is his most famous work and was written two years after the third French Revolution of 1848. It defines, through development, a just system of laws and then demonstrates how such law facilitates a free society. Bastiat was a French classical liberal theorist, political economist, and member of the French assembly.

Myth is our wild way of telling the truth, of sharing stories that have our living earth speaking through them. There is an old insistence that we each have a twin we know nothing about. A wild, curious twin that was thrown out the window the night we were born, taking much of our energy with them. This story is a quest to find and court our wild twin, for they have something important to tell us. If there was something we were here to do in our few, brief years, we can be sure that the wild twin is holding the key.

The Republic, Plato's masterwork, was first enjoyed 2,400 years ago and remains one of the most widely read books in the world. Presented as a dialogue between Plato's teacher Socrates and various interlocutors, it is an exhortation to philosophy, inviting its listeners to reflect on the choices to be made if we are to live the best life available to us. This complex, dynamic work creates a picture of an ideal society governed not by the desire for money, power or fame, but by philosophy, wisdom and justice.

This famous treatise began as a letter to a young French friend who asked Edmund Burke’s opinion on whether France’s new ruling class would succeed in creating a better order. Doubtless the friend expected a favorable reply, but Burke was suspicious of certain tendencies of the Revolution from the start and perceived that the revolutionaries were actually subverting the true "social order". Blending history with principle and graceful imagery with profound practical maxims, this book is one of the most influential political treatises in the history of the world.

Joseph Campbell famously compared mythology to a kangaroo pouch for the human mind and spirit: “a womb with a view.” In Myths to Live By, he examines all of the ways in which myth supports and guides us, giving our lives meaning. Love and war, science and religion, East and West, inner space and outer space - Campbell shows how the myths we live by can reconcile all of these pairs of opposites and bring a sense of the whole.

According to the establishment media, the intelligentsia, and our political chattering class, the greatest threat to American freedom lies in right-wing authoritarianism. We’ve heard that some 75 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump represent the rise of American fascism; that conservatives have allowed authoritarianism to bloom in their midst, creating a grave danger for the republic.

Byung-Chul Han, a star of German philosophy, continues his passionate critique of neoliberalism, trenchantly describing a regime of technological domination that, in contrast to Foucault’s biopower, has discovered the productive force of the psyche.

Born out of the political turmoil of the English Civil War, Leviathan stands out as one of the most in influential political and philosophical texts of the 17th century. It argues for the restoration of the monarchy in light of the republic and calls for a commonwealth ruled by an authoritative, autocratic figure with absolute sovereignty. This would put an end to all controversy, war, and fear and establish peace via social contract.