Political Philosophy

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of A Political History of the World by Jonathan Holslag, read by Roy McMillan. In three thousand years of history, China has spent at least eleven centuries at war. The Roman Empire was in conflict during at least 50 per cent of its lifetime. Since 1776...

The theories and observations in this abridged version of Prussian soldier Carl von Clausewitz's magnum opus have been heeded by military strategists for nearly 200 years. Most have considered this to be the "Bible" of military strategy and tactics.

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.

Revolutions come in waves and cycles. We are again riding the crest of a revolutionary epic, much like 1848 or 1917, from the Arab Spring to movements against austerity in Greece to the Occupy movement. In Wages of Rebellion, Chris Hedges - who has chronicled the malaise and sickness of a society in terminal moral decline in his books Empire of Illusion and Death of the Liberal Class - investigates what social and psychological factors cause revolution, rebellion, and resistance.

Most people believe democracy is a uniquely just form of government. They believe people have the right to an equal share of political power. And they believe that political participation is good for us—it empowers us, helps us get what we want, and tends to make us smarter, more virtuous, and more caring for one another. These are some of our most cherished ideas about democracy. But Jason Brennan says they are all wrong. In this trenchant book, Brennan argues that democracy should be judged by its results—and the results are not good enough.

Roger Scruton’s How to be a Conservative presents the case for modern conservatism not in the terms of an elegy but rather as a practical example of how to live as a conservative despite the pressures to live otherwise. As he writes, the book ‘is not about what we have lost, but about what we have retained, and how to hold on to it’. In this witty and frank account, Scruton draws on his years of experience as a counter-cultural presence in public life.

Many people talk about Donald Trump. Some people love him, and some people hate him. Some people try to explain why people love or hate Trump. Despite the copious conversation and plenteous explanations, there’s a lack of clarity about why people support Trump. Neither academia nor the political pundits can adequately explain the phenomenon that is Trump.

The left views alienation as something to be resisted or overcome, but could it actually form the basis of our emancipation? In Embracing Alienation, Todd McGowan offers a completely different take on alienation, claiming that the effort to overcome it is not a radical response to the current state of things but a failure to see the constitutive power of alienation for all of us. Instead of trying to overcome alienation and accede to an unalienated existence, it argues, we should instead redeem alienation as an existential and political program.

A Behavioral Scientist Notable Book of 2024 “An eye-opening analysis of why our politics have become so polarized….Keith Payne illuminates one of the biggest problems of our time and lights the way toward some promising solutions.” —Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of...

Brought to you by Penguin. 'Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.' These are the famous opening words of a treatise that has stirred vigorous debate ever since its first publication in 1762. Rejecting the view that anyone has a natural right to wield authority over others, Rousseau...

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.

Discovering that reason is the defining feature of our species, we named ourselves the “rational animal”. But is this flattering story itself rational? In this sweeping account of irrationality from antiquity to today - from the fifth-century BC murder of Hippasus for revealing the existence of irrational numbers to the rise of Twitter mobs and the election of Donald Trump - Justin Smith says the evidence suggests the opposite.

A revealing account of National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster’s turbulent and consequential thirteen months in the Trump White House. At War with Ourselves is the story of helping a disruptive President drive necessary shifts in U.S. foreign policy at a critical moment in history. McMaster...

In 1980, Ronald Reagan created one of the dumbest talking points of all time: "I'm not a scientist, but..." Since then, politicians have repeatedly committed egregious transgressions against scientific knowledge prefaced by this seemingly innocuous phrase. Yet, as science journalist Dave Levitan reveals, that line is just the tip of the melting iceberg when it comes to rhetorical tools wielded to attack scientific findings that don't cooperate with political agendas.

The Left seems to be dying a slow death. Bestselling historian Shlomo Sand argues that the global decline of the Left is linked to the waning of the idea of equality that has united citizens in the past and inspired them to engage in collective action. Sand retraces the evolution of this idea in a wide-ranging account that includes seventeenth-century England, the French Revolution, the birth of anarchism and Marxism, the decolonial, feminist, and civil rights revolts, and the left populism of our time.

"The Prince" is a 16th-century political treatise by the Italian diplomat and political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli. From correspondence a version appears to have been distributed in 1513, using a Latin title, "De Principatibus" ("Of Principalities"). However, the printed version was not published until 1532, five years after Machiavelli's death. This was done with the permission of the Medici pope Clement VII, but "long before then, in fact since the first appearance of The Prince in manuscript, controversy had swirled about his writings".

"Критика чистого разума" – книга, которую каждая эпоха заново оценивает и по-своему переосмысливает. Книга, которая остается актуальной вот уже более двух столетий. Книга, которую изучали и пытались интерпретировать абсолютно все значительные философы, творившие после Канта, и которая по сей день занимает умы ученых и писателей, моралистов и политиков. Это opus magnum Канта, он обдумывал этот труд десять лет – а написал за несколько месяцев.

Mohandas Gandhi wrote this book while traveling from London to South Africa on board SS Kildonan Castle between November 13 and November 22, 1909. In the book Gandhi gives a diagnosis for the problems of humanity in modern times, the causes and his remedy. Gandhi's Hind Swaraj takes the form of a dialogue between two characters, The Reader and The Editor. The Reader essentially serves as the typical Indian countryman whom Gandhi would have been addressing with Hind Swaraj.

Meditations is a series of personal writings by Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor from 161 to 180 AD, recording his private notes to himself and ideas on Stoic philosophy. The Meditations is divided into 12 books that chronicle different periods of Marcus' life. Each book is not in chronological order and it was written for no one but himself. The style of writing that permeates the text is one that is simplified, straightforward, and perhaps reflecting Marcus' Stoic perspective on the text.

These early philosophical writings underpinned the Chinese revolutions and their clarion calls to insurrection remain some of the most stirring of all time. Drawing on a dizzying array of references from contemporary culture and politics, Zizek's firecracker commentary reaches unsettling conclusions about the place of Mao's thought in the revolutionary canon.