Political Philosophy

The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind is a seminal work on crowd psychology by Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931), a French social psychologist. He observes that a crowd forms when an influential idea unites a number of individuals and prompts them to act towards a common goal. In a crowd, the conscious personality of the individual is submerged and dominated by the collective mind. Furthermore, every sentiment becomes contagious to a degree that individuals readily sacrifice their personal interest to the collective.

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.

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!

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.

Power and Persuasion stands apart for its critical evaluation of the concepts, doctrines, and activities that the US Department of Defense and Department of State employ for the art of strategic communication including psychological operations, military information support operations, propaganda, and public diplomacy.

Best selling history writer Thomas Cahill continues his series on the roots of Western civilization with this volume about the contributions of ancient Greece to the development of contemporary culture. Tracing the origin of Greek culture in the migrations of armed Indo-European horsemen into Attica and the Peloponnesian peninsula, he follows their progress into the creation of the Greek city-states, the refinement of their machinery of war, and the flowering of intellectual and artistic culture.

Cultural infrastructure has been designed to maintain structures of inequality, and while it doesn’t seem to be explicitly about race, it often is. Blunt Instruments helps listeners identify, contextualize, and name elements of our everyday landscapes and cultural practices that are designed to seem benign or natural but which, in fact, work tirelessly to tell us vital stories about who we are, how we came to be, and who belongs.

The Parkland school shooting was the most avoidable mass murder in American history. And the policies that made it inevitable have spread to your school....

Cody Wilson, a self-described crypto-anarchist and rogue thinker, combines the controversial yet thrilling story of the production of the first ever 3D printable gun with a startling philosophical manifesto that gets to the heart of the 21st-century debate over the freedom of information and ideas.

We live in an age when the pursuit of authenticity—from living our 'best life' to eating artisan food—matters more and more to us, but where the forces of inauthenticity seem to be taking over. Our world is full of people and products that are not what they seem. We no longer know whether we are talking to a person or a machine. But we can fight back—and this award-winning book shows us how. Authenticity argues that although our counterfeit culture is shaped by the most powerful forces of evolution, economics and technology, we can still come together to reclaim reality.

Post-modernity is the creative destruction that has shattered our present times into fragments. Post-modernism stood for everything modernism rejected: fun, exuberance, irresponsibility. But beneath its glitzy surface, post-modernism had a dirty secret: It was the fig leaf for a rapacious new kind of capitalism. It was also the forcing ground of the "post-truth", by means of which Western values got turned upside down. In his brilliant history of a dangerous idea, Stuart Jeffries tells a narrative that starts in the early 1970s and continues to today.

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.

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.

Long before the United States was a nation, it was a set of ideas, projected onto the New World by European explorers with centuries of belief and thought in tow. From this foundation of expectation and experience, America and American thought grew in turn, enriched by the bounties of the Enlightenment, the philosophies of liberty and individuality, the tenets of religion, and the doctrines of republicanism and democracy.

Among the many books trying to understand the terrifying rise of ISIS, none has given voice to the women in the organization; but women were essential to the establishment of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s caliphate. Responding to promises of female empowerment and social justice, and calls to aid the plight of fellow Muslims in Syria, thousands of women emigrated to join the Islamic State. Guest House for Young Widows charts the different ways women were recruited, inspired, or compelled to join the militants.

America has a huge problem. It faces four major challenges, on which its future depends, and it is failing to meet them. In That Used to Be Us, Thomas L. Friedman, one of our most influential columnists, and Michael Mandelbaum, one of our leading foreign policy thinkers, analyze those challenges - globalization, the revolution in information technology, the nation’s chronic deficits, and its pattern of energy consumption - and spell out what we need to do now to rediscover America and rise to this moment.

Cynthia Fleury, philosophe et psychanalyste, défriche de nouvelles pistes de réflexion sur le courage et l'expérience du découragement. En tant que psychanalyste, elle observe l'intime du découragement chez ses patients, et remarque les effets pervers de l'organisation du monde du travail et de l'espace politique, sur le psychisme des individus.Convoquant tour à tour Victor Hugo, Diogène, Jankélévitch ou bien encore Amartya Sen, Cynthia Fleury questionne les liens entre l'expérience personnelle du découragement et la société.

Read by award-winning narrator Mike Vendetti, Common Sense is a pamphlet written by Thomas Paine in 1775-76 that inspired people in the Thirteen Colonies to declare and fight for independence from Great Britain in the summer of 1776. The pamphlet explained the advantages of and the need for immediate independence in clear, simple language. It was published anonymously on January 10, 1776, at the beginning of the American Revolution and became an immediate sensation.

Der kanadische Philosoph Alain Deneault stellt sich der wohl bedrohlichsten aller Bedrohungen: der Mittelmäßigkeit. Die Mittelmäßigkeit schmückt sich selber zwar mit Bildern der Macht, hat aber nicht mehr zu bieten als Konformismus, das Bedienen von Software oder die Einhaltung von Grundsatzwerten. Wir leben in einer Welt, in der eine mediokre Ordnung zum Modell für die gesamte Gesellschaft erhoben wurde und in der Denkfaulheit belohnt wird. Dabei wird nicht etwa Spitzenleistungen und Elitenbildung das Wort gesprochen. Vielmehr geht es in dieser scharfen Analyse um die Ermutigung zum Gebrauch des eigenen Verstandes.

Many of us find ourselves caught somewhere between unbelieving activists and inactive believers. We can write a check to feed starving children or hold signs in the streets and feel like we've made a difference without ever encountering the faces of the suffering masses. In this book, Shane Claiborne describes an authentic faith rooted in belief, action, and love, inviting us into a movement of the Spirit that begins inside each of us and extends into a broken world.