Political Philosophy

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is a short book first published in 1880 by German-born socialist Friedrich Engels. The work was primarily extracted from a longer polemic work published in 1876, Anti-Dühring. It first appeared in the French language.

We live in a world of outrageous pain. Postmodernity—with its correct critique of pre-modernity's often fundamentalist and dogmatic stories about value—has deconstructed value and said value is not real. At the same time, regressive religious fundamentalism is on the rise all through the world. Fundamentalism, like post-modernism, says there is no universal Field of Value. Instead, it claims that value is mediated only through its particular prism of revelation. Outrageous pain is caused when we fail to recognize that we are all in a shared Field of Value.

In this tour de force essay, Hans-Hermann Hoppe turns the standard account of historical governmental progress on its head. While the state is an evil in all its forms, monarchy is, in many ways, far less pernicious than democracy. Hoppe shows the evolution of government away from aristocracy, through monarchy, and toward the corruption and irresponsibility of democracy to have been identical with the growth of the leviathan state.

The Prince of Evolution is the evolutionary reframing of one of the most important and controversial political texts in history. It reframes Machiavelli's The Prince as a text expressing a revolutionary political theory that expresses an evolutionary 'best practice' framework for political competition.

In his 1992 best-selling book The End of History and the Last Man, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued that the dominance of liberal democracy marked the end of humanity's political and ideological development. Thirty years later, with populism on the rise and the number of liberal democracies decreasing worldwide, Fukuyama revisits his classic thesis. A series of in-depth interviews between Fukuyama and editor Mathilde Fasting, After the End of History offers a wide-ranging analysis of liberal democracy today.

Originalism, the view that the meaning of a constitutional provision is fixed when it is adopted, was once the fringe theory of a few extremely conservative legal scholars but is now a well-accepted mode of constitutional interpretation. Noted legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky gives a comprehensive analysis of the problems that make originalism unworkable as a method of constitutional interpretation. He argues that the framers themselves never intended constitutional interpretation to be inflexible and shows how it is often impossible to know the "original intent" of any provision.

Militarized police officers with tanks and drones. Pervasive government surveillance and profiling. Social media that distract and track us. All of these, contends Bernard E. Harcourt, are facets of a new and radical governing paradigm in the United States - one rooted in the modes of warfare originally developed to suppress anticolonial revolutions and, more recently, to prosecute the war on terror. The Counterrevolution is a penetrating and disturbing account of the rise of counterinsurgency, first as a military strategy but increasingly as a way of ruling ordinary Americans.

Martin Luther King Jr. may be America's most revered political figure, commemorated in statues, celebrations, and street names around the world. But despite his stature, the significance of King's writings and political thought remains underappreciated. In To Shape a New World, Tommie Shelby and Brandon Terry state that the marginalization of King's ideas reflects a romantic consensus history that renders the civil rights movement inherently conservative - an effort not at radical reform but at "living up to" enduring ideals laid down by the nation's founders.

Brought to you by Penguin. This Penguin Classic is performed by Simon Callow, actor and director, known for his roles in Four Weddings and a Funeral, Shakespeare in Love, and the BBC adaptation of A Christmas Carol. As a diplomat in turbulent fifteenth-century Florence, Niccolò Machiavelli knew...

Reparations for slavery have become a reinvigorated topic for public debate over the last decade. Most theorizing about reparations treats it as a social justice project—either rooted in reconciliatory justice focused on making amends in the present; or, they focus on the past, emphasizing restitution for historical wrongs. Olúfemi O. Táiwò argues that neither approach is optimal, and advances a different case for reparations—one rooted in a hopeful future that tackles the issue of climate change head on, with distributive justice at its core.

Activists from Henry David Thoreau and Mohandas Gandhi to the Movement for Black Lives have long recognized that there are times when, rather than having a duty to obey the law, we have a duty to disobey it. Taking seriously the history of this activism, A Duty to Resist wrestles with the problem of political obligation in real world societies that harbor injustice. Candice Delmas argues that the duty of justice, the principle of fairness, the Samaritan duty, and political association impose responsibility to resist under conditions of injustice.

For the last 20 years, John Corvino - widely known as the author of the weekly column "The Gay Moralist" - has traversed the country responding to moral and religious arguments against same-sex relationships. In this timely audiobook, he shares that experience - addressing the standard objections to homosexuality and offering insight into the culture wars more generally. Is homosexuality unnatural? Does the Bible condemn it? Are people born gay (and should it matter either way)? Corvino approaches such questions with precision, sensitivity, and good humor.

Voltaire met ici tous ses talents au service de la justice, après l'exécution de Jean Calas en 1762, dont il est convaincu de l'innocence. Calas est condamné pour le meurtre de son fils qui voulait se convertir au catholicisme. Cette réflexion sur le monde judiciaire reste très actuelle quant à la responsabilité des juges et la présomption d'innocence.

"The Greatest Story Ever ToldDispute over land and kingdom may lie at the heart of this story of war between cousins-the Pandavas and the Kouravas-but the Mahabharata is about conflicts of dharma. These conflicts are immense and various, singular and commonplace. Throughout the epic, characters...

Democracy, free thought and expression, religious tolerance, individual liberty, political self-determination of peoples, sexual and racial equality - these values have firmly entered the mainstream in the decades since they were enshrined in the 1948 U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. But if these ideals no longer seem radical today, their origin was very radical indeed - far more so than most historians have been willing to recognize.

In Aristotle and an Aardvark Go to Washington, our two favorite philosopher-comedians return just in time to save us from the doublespeak and flim-flam of politics in America.

Deploying jokes as well as the occasional insight from Aristotle and his peers, Cathcart and Klein explain what politicos are up to when they state: "The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence"; "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is"; or even, "We hold these truths to be self-evident...."

Is philanthropy, by its very nature, a threat to today's democracy? Though we may laud wealthy individuals who give away their money for society's benefit, Just Giving reveals how such generosity not only isn't the unassailable good we think it to be but might also undermine democratic values and set back aspirations of justice.

The age of human rights has been kindest to the rich. Even as state violations of political rights garnered unprecedented attention due to human rights campaigns, a commitment to material equality disappeared. In its place, market fundamentalism has emerged as the dominant force in national and global economies. In this provocative book, Samuel Moyn analyzes how and why we chose to make human rights our highest ideals while simultaneously neglecting the demands of a broader social and economic justice.

Written with passion and insight, Use the Power You Have offers a wealth of ideas and inspiration for a new generation of engaged citizens interested in fighting back and making change, whether in Washington or in their own communities.

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by Literary Hub A leading microbiologist tackles the scientific and sociopolitical impact of viruses in twelve striking essays. Invisible in the food we eat, the people we kiss, and inside our own bodies, viruses flourish—with the power to shape not only...