Social Science Theory

The adviser to Senator Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates, and President Bill Clinton proves that small is big by identifying 75 hidden-in-plain-sight trends that are moving America, revealing that the nation is no longer a melting pot but a collection of communities with many individual tastes and lifestyles. In 2000, The Tipping Point entered the lexicon. Now, in Microtrends, one of the most respected and sought-after analysts in the world articulates a new way of understanding how we live.

Succinct, accessible, and authoritative, Thomas Piketty’s The Economics of Inequality is the ideal place to start for those who want to understand the fundamental issues at the heart of one the most pressing concerns in contemporary economics and politics. This work now appears in English for the first time.

This essential biography, by the author most deeply familiar with the vast archives of the Soviet era, offers an unprecedented, fine-grained portrait of Stalin, the man and dictator. Without mythologizing Stalin as either benevolent or an evil genius, Khlevniuk resolves numerous controversies about specific events in the dictator's life while assembling many hundreds of previously unknown letters, memos, reports, and diaries into a comprehensive, compelling narrative of a life that altered the course of world history.

Richard M. Weaver argues that the decline of Western civilization resulted from the rising acceptance of relativism over absolute reality. In spite of increased knowledge, this retreat from the realist intellectual tradition has weakened the Western capacity to reason, with catastrophic consequences for social order and individual rights. But Weaver also offers a realistic remedy. These difficulties are the product not of necessity, but of intelligent choice.

In 1765, 11 years before composing the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson bought a Qur'an. This marked only the beginning of his lifelong interest in Islam, and he would go on to acquire numerous books on Middle Eastern languages, history, and travel, taking extensive notes on Islam as it relates to English common law. Jefferson sought to understand Islam notwithstanding his personal disdain for the faith, a sentiment prevalent among his Protestant contemporaries in England and America.

Afghanistan traces the historic struggles and the changing nature of political authority in this volatile region of the world, from the Mughal Empire in the 16th century to the Taliban resurgence today. Thomas Barfield introduces listeners to the bewildering diversity of tribal and ethnic groups in Afghanistan, explaining what unites them as Afghans despite the regional, cultural, and political differences that divide them.

In a letter of 1932, Karl Popper described Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie–The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge–as ‘…a child of crises, above all of …the crisis of physics.' The two fundamental problems of knowledge that lie at the center of the book are the problem of induction, that although we are able to observe only a limited number of particular events, science nevertheless advances unrestricted universal statements; and the problem of demarcation, which asks for a separating line between empirical science and non-science.

Finding evidence in new psychological research, the myth of Psyche and Cupid, Shakespeare’s plays, Freud’s case histories, Anne Frank’s diaries and contemporary novels, Carol Gilligan discovers that the roots of a more hopeful view of love are all around us.

In 2013, just two years after the popular overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian military ousted the country's first democratically elected president - Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood - and subsequently led a brutal repression of the Islamist group. These bloody events echoed an older political rift: the splitting of nationalists and Islamists during the rule of Egyptian president and Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. Fawaz Gerges, one of the world's leading authorities on the Middle East, tells how the clash between pan-Arab nationalism and pan-Islamism has shaped the history of the region.

In The Plot to Betray America, New York Times best-selling author and renowned intelligence expert Malcolm Nance reveals exactly how President Trump and his inner circle conspired, coordinated, communicated, and eventually strategized to commit the greatest acts of treachery in the history of the United States: Compromising the presidential oath of office in exchange for power and personal enrichment.

The Berlin Wall was erected in 1961 to end all traffic between the city’s two halves: the democratic west and the communist east. The iconic symbol of a divided Europe, the Wall became a focus of western political pressure on East Germany; as Ronald Reagan’s famously said in a 1987 speech in Berlin, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

An acclaimed nonfiction international political thriller exposing the real reason for Watergate, the hidden death of Howard Hughes, and the illicit activities of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), with the CIA’s worldwide pursuit of John Meier trying to expose it all, including revealing information on the Robert F. Kennedy assassination and critical comments by New York Times best-selling author Jim Hougan.

In The Red Flag, Oxford professor David Priestland tells the epic story of a movement that has taken root in dozens of countries across 200 years, from its birth after the French Revolution to its ideological maturity in 19th-century Germany to its rise to dominance (and subsequent fall) in the 20th century.

In The Power of Strangers, Joe Keohane sets out on a journey to discover what happens when we bridge the distance between us and people we don’t know. He learns that while we’re wired to sometimes fear, distrust, and even hate strangers, people and societies that have learned to connect with strangers benefit immensely.

"The hour of capitalism's greatest triumph," writes Hernando de Soto, "is, in the eyes of four-fifths of humanity, its hour of crisis." In The Mystery of Capital, the world-famous Peruvian economist takes up one of the most pressing questions the world faces today: Why do some countries succeed at capitalism while others fail?

On les appelle spin doctors, génies du faire croire, persuadeurs clandestins ou ingénieurs des âmes. Publicitaires, communicants, cinéastes ou propagandistes politiques, ces hommes ont en commun d’être passés maîtres dans l’art de la manipulation de masse. Ils bouleversent les règles du jeu politique, font et défont des élections, fabriquent le consentement, défendent les intérêts d’industries polluantes, influencent à leur insu le comportement de millions d’individus.

In this classic work, Leo Strauss examines the problem of natural right and argues that there is a firm foundation in reality for the distinction between right and wrong in ethics and politics. On the centenary of Strauss's birth, and the fiftieth anniversary of the Walgreen Lectures which spawned the work, Natural Right and History remains as controversial and essential as ever.

Intellectuals and Race is a radical book in the original sense - one that goes to the root of the problem. The role of intellectuals in racial strife is explored in an international context that puts the American experience in a wholly new light. The book explores the incentives, the visions, and the rationales that drive intellectuals at the highest levels to conclusions that have often turned out to be counterproductive and even disastrous, not only for particular racial or ethnic groups but for societies as a whole.

We live in the age of disinformation - of organized deception. Spy agencies pour vast resources into hacking, leaking, and forging data, often with the goal of weakening the very foundation of liberal democracy: trust in facts. Thomas Rid, a renowned expert on technology and national security, was one of the first to sound the alarm, even before the 2016 election. But this is not new. The story of modern disinformation begins with the clash between communism and capitalism after the Russian Revolution.

Capital is currently cannibalizing every sphere of life-guzzling wealth from nature and racialized populations, sucking up our ability to care for each other, and gutting the practice of politics. In this tightly argued and urgent volume, leading Marxist feminist theorist Nancy Fraser charts the voracious appetite of capital, tracking it from crisis point to crisis point, from ecological devastation to the collapse of democracy, from racial violence to the devaluing of care work.