Political Ideologies

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels was published in London in 1848 in its original German, and two years later in English. It was commissioned by the Communist League and takes an analytical approach to the class struggle and the conflicts of capitalism. The Communist Manifesto summarizes the theories of Marx and Engels on the nature of society and politics, claiming that the history of all societies is a history of class struggles. It also touches on their ideas of how the capitalist society of the time would eventually be replaced by socialism.

Remember when socialism was a dirty word? Now students at America's elite universities are parroting socialist talking points and "sure thing" Hillary Clinton is struggling to win the Democratic nomination against a 74-year-old avowed socialist who promises to make the nation more like Europe. What's happened? Do Americans need a reminder about the dangers of socialist ideology and practices?

The German Revolution of November 1918 is nowadays largely forgotten outside Germany. It is generally regarded as a failure even by those who have heard of it, a missed opportunity that paved the way for the rise of the Nazis and the catastrophe to come. Robert Gerwarth argues here that to view the German Revolution in this way is a serious misjudgment. Not only did it bring down the authoritarian monarchy of the Hohenzollern, it also brought into being the first ever German democracy in an amazingly bloodless way.

From the phony Russia collusion narrative to the coordinated riots laying waste to US cities, it's the same ongoing operation orchestrated by the left and targeting not just President Trump but hundreds of millions of Americans who revere their country and what it stands for. For the first time, crusading investigative journalist Lee Smith reveals who was responsible and the never before known involvement of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and senior military officials who engineered a coup against a sitting president.

Beginning with her solitary childhood in London, it took years for Melanie Phillips to understand her parents' emotional frailties and even longer to escape from them. But Phillips inherited her family's strong Jewish values and a passionate commitment to freedom from oppression. It was this moral foundation that ultimately turned her against the warped and tyrannical attitudes of the Left, requiring her to break away not only from her parents - but also from the people she had seen as her wider political family.

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.

Underdogma is a new "idea book" that shows how our love/hate relationship with power - and those who have power - shape how we look at the world. For many people, those who have less power (underdogs) can do no wrong, even when we do wrong, and those who have more power can do no right - even when they do right. Michael Prell gave this belief system a name - Underdogma - and he reveals how Underdogma is affecting your life right now - and how it threatens America's superpower status.

Award-winning author Mark Gober explains why the institution of government - a monopolistic body with which citizens have no explicit contractual relationship - is inherently hazardous to our freedom. He explores an alternative governing framework that stresses the importance of private-property rights and voluntary exchanges and examines the potential to privatize the government’s poorly managed public sector.

This Could Be Our Future is about how we got here, and how we change course. While the pursuit of wealth has produced innovation and prosperity, it also established an implicit belief that the right choice in every decision is whichever option makes the most money. The answer isn't to get rid of money; it's to expand our concept of value. By assigning rational value to other values besides money - things like community, purpose, and sustainability - we can refocus our energies to build a society that's generous, fair, and ready for the future.

Entrepreneurship, personal responsibility, and upward mobility: These traditions are at the heart of the free enterprise system, and have long been central to America's exceptional culture. In recent years, however, policymakers have dramatically weakened these traditions - by exploding the size of government, propping up their corporate cronies, and trying to reorient our system from rewarding merit to redistributing wealth. Arthur C. Brooks shows that this trend cannot be reversed through materialistic appeals.

Matthew Continetti gives a sweeping account of movement conservatism’s evolution, from the Progressive Era through the present. He tells the story of how conservatism began as networks of intellectuals, developing and institutionalizing a vision that grew over time, until they began to buckle under new pressures, resembling national populist movements. Drawing out the tensions between the desire for mainstream acceptance and the pull of extremism, Continetti argues that the more one studies conservatism’s past, the more one becomes convinced of its future.

Breakthroughs in genetics present us with a promise and a predicament. The promise is that we will soon be able to treat and prevent a host of debilitating diseases. The predicament is that our newfound genetic knowledge may enable us to manipulate our nature - to enhance our genetic traits and those of our children. Although most people find at least some forms of genetic engineering disquieting, it is not easy to articulate why.

Steve Bannon, the chief architect of Trump’s 2016 win, describes Taking Back Trump’s America as “a brass-knuckled insider’s account of the merciless 2020 fall and miraculous 2024 rise of the White House of Trump”. In Peter Navarro’s telling—he was in all of the rooms where it happened—Trump’s fall may be laid squarely at the feet of a coterie of incompetent and disloyal “bad personnel” inside the White House. They continually sought to undermine the commander in chief they putatively served.

In The Long Hangover, Shaun Walker provides new insight into contemporary Russia and its search for a new identity, telling the story through the country's troubled relationship with its Soviet past. Walker not only explains Vladimir Putin's goals and the government's official manipulations of history, but also focuses on ordinary Russians and their motivations. He charts how Putin raised victory in World War II to the status of a national founding myth in the search for a unifying force to heal a divided country, and shows how dangerous the ramifications of this have been.

From the best-selling author of What's the Matter with Kansas?, a wonderfully insightful and sardonic look at how the worst economy since the 1930s has brought about the revival of conservatism. Economic catastrophe usually brings social protest and demands for change - or at least it's supposed to. But when Thomas Frank set out in 2009 to look for expressions of American discontent, all he could find were loud demands that the economic system be made even harsher on the recession's victims....

For more than a century, governments facing financial crisis have resorted to the economic policies of austerity—cuts to wages, fiscal spending, and public benefits—as a path to solvency. Today, an important question remains: What if solvency was never the goal? In The Capital Order, political economist Clara E. Mattei explores the intellectual origins of austerity to uncover its originating motives: the protection of capital—and indeed capitalism—in times of social upheaval from below.

In both Europe and North America, populist movements have shattered existing party systems and thrown governments into turmoil. The embattled establishment claims that these populist insurgencies seek to overthrow liberal democracy. The truth is no less alarming but is more complex: Western democracies are being torn apart by a new class war. In this controversial and groundbreaking new analysis, Michael Lind, one of America’s leading thinkers, debunks the idea that the insurgencies are primarily the result of bigotry and reveals the real battle lines.

Without question one of the most significant books in modern history, The Communist Manifesto is a brief, populist pamphlet that distils the core ideas of communism into accessible prose. Published just months before violent uprisings threatened to destabilise much of the European establishment, it outlines a view of history as a constant battle between the classes that will inevitably result in revolution.

In this timely and explosive book, philosopher and YouTuber Jonas Čeika (a.k.a. Cuck Philosophy) reinvigorates socialism for the 21st century. Leaving behind its past associations with bureaucracy and state tyranny, and its lifeless and drab theoretical accounts, Čeika instead uses the works of Marx and Nietzsche to reconnect socialism with its human element, presenting it as something not only affecting, but created by living, breathing, suffering human individuals.

In this short accessible book, leading democratic theorist Jason Brennan guides listeners through the evolution of the concept of democracy and actual democratic practice over time to help them understand the foundations of this longstanding and yet newly fragile political system. In his wide-ranging tour of the concept, Brennan will examine what democracy meant to the Greeks who first developed the concept before examining how it changed throughout European and later Western history.