Social Science Power

In Bloody Foreigners and The Last Wolf, Robert Winder explored the way Britain was shaped first by migration and then by hidden geographical factors. Now, in Soft Power he explores the way modern states are asserting themselves not through traditional realpolitik but through alternative means: business, language, culture, ideas, sport, education, music, even food...the texture and values of history and daily life.

Questioning, skepticism, reasoning...all these things have one thing in common: They are the traits of a true critical thinker, someone who doesn't just accept something because everyone else is screaming the same claims. You're going to learn more about some of the following things: Inductive and deductive thinking, skeptical reasoning, rationalism and what it entails, how to make better decisions with logic and numbers, and so much more!

Truth Has a Power of Its Own is an engrossing collection of never-before-published conversations with Howard Zinn, conducted by the distinguished broadcast journalist Ray Suarez in 2007, that covers the course of American history from Columbus to the War on Terror from the perspective of ordinary people - including slaves, workers, immigrants, women, and Native Americans.

New York Times White House correspondent Mark Landler takes us behind the speeches and press conferences, to the Situation Room debates and picnic-table lunches, where Obama and Clinton honed their two competing worldviews: his, cautious, inward-looking, suffused with a sense of limits; hers, muscular, optimistic, unabashedly old-fashioned.

Governments and hundreds of corporations are spying on you and everyone you know. They're not just selling your data. They're selling the power to influence you and decide for you. Even when you've explicitly asked them not to. Reclaiming privacy is the only way we can regain control of our lives and our societies. These governments and corporations have too much power, and their power stems from us - from our data. Privacy is as collective as it is personal, and it's time to take back control.

In this brilliantly analytical yet personal book, nondemocratic societies are put under a microscope to reveal the mechanics of tyranny that sustain them. In exposing the inner workings of a "fear society", the authors explain why democracy is not beyond any nation's reach, why it is essential for our security, and why there is much that can be done to promote it around the world.

Over the last 40 years our choices have narrowed, our opportunities have shrunk, and our lives have become governed by a handful of very large and very powerful corporations. Today, practically everything we buy, everywhere we shop, and every service we secure comes from a heavily concentrated market. This is a world where four major banks control most of our money, four airlines shuttle most of us around the country, and four major cell phone providers connect most of our communications.

At the close of World War I, Hitler was an impoverished young artist who scrapped by through selling souvenir paintings, but within a few years, his powerful oratory brought him to the forefront of the Nazi party in Munich and helped make the party much more popular. A smattering of followers in the hundreds quickly became a party of thousands. At the head of it all was a man whose fiery orations denounced Jews, communists, and other "traitors" for bringing upon the German nation the Treaty of Versailles, which had led to hyperinflation and a wrecked economy.

Politics are being transformed by religion, namely in China - within the next 30 years, one-third of this potential superpower could be Christian. If this religious transformation occurs, China would be one of the largest Christian nations in the world.

An exploration of forceful communication strategies and their application in society.

The United States is an exceptionally violent country, increasingly unable or unwilling to stem violence in its many forms. A growing corporate crime wave has gone unprosecuted and unpunished. Meanwhile, the country has doubled down on pursuing people accused of street and drug crimes and immigration offenses. Corporate impunity, the financialization of the economy, militarized policing, the burgeoning carceral state, and the forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere all have fostered corporate, economic, and state violence in America.

Foucault's Power is the antidote to pretentious philosophical obscurity you've been waiting for. This irreverent guide takes you on a sarcasm-soaked journey through Michel Foucault's most influential ideas—from his analysis of prisons and power to his baffling observations about sexuality and truth—all while mercilessly mocking the cult of incomprehensibility that has grown around him.

For decades, James MacGregor Burns has been one of the great masters of the study of power and leadership in America. Now he turns his eye to an institution of government that he believes has become more powerful---and more partisan---than the Founding Fathers ever intended: the Supreme Court. Much as we would like to believe that the Court remains aloof from ideological politics, Packing the Court reveals how often justices behave like politicians in robes.

Amazon Bestseller in Democracy, Political Freedom, Radical Thought, and Fascism. It is a sad fact that the world is awash in political tyrants. Ira Chaleff, an expert in political followership and one of the 100 “Best Minds in Leadership,” reveals how political followers can make or “brake” toxic leaders, and what we can do—no matter our level of political influence or where we sit on the political spectrum—to support beneficial leaders and stop the rise of would-be tyrants.

In Last Chance to Save American Democracy, political strategist Haven Scott McVarish takes us through the intentional dismantling of democracy begun by Republican party funders after Obama's landslide in 2008. These funders and their willing Republican servants weaponized unlimited dark money, extreme gerrymandering, voter suppression, and diversionary propaganda to make it impossible for Democrats to effectively govern or win a majority. Only Trump’s massive unpopularity allowed Democrats to barely win the trifecta in the 2020 elections.

John A. Thompson takes a long view of America's dramatic rise as a world power, from the late 19th century into the post-World War II era. He shows how American leaders from Wilson to Truman developed an ever more capacious understanding of the national interest, and why by the 1940s most Americans came to support the price tag, in blood and treasure, attached to strenuous efforts to shape the world. The beliefs and emotions that led them to do so reflected distinctive aspects of U.S. culture, not least the strength of ties to Europe.

Trump's enemies set out to remove him from office even before his inauguration - which culminated in an election-year impeachment trial.

Is America fated to decline as a great power? Can it recover? With absorbing insight and fresh perspective, foreign policy expert Andrew Imbrie provides a road map for bolstering American leadership in an era of turbulence abroad and deepening polarization at home. This is a book about choices: the tough policy trade-offs that political leaders need to make to reinvigorate American money, might, and clout. In the conventional telling, the United States is either destined for continued dominance or doomed to irreversible decline.

The Moral Powers: A Study of Human Nature is a philosophical investigation of the moral potentialities and sensibilities of human beings, of the meaning of human life, and of the place of death in life. It is an essay in philosophical anthropology: the study of the conceptual framework in terms of which we think about, speak about, and investigate homo sapiens as a social and cultural animal. This volume examines the diversity of values in human life and the place of moral value within the varieties of values.

Los mitos son historias anónimas, transmitidas de generación en generación, y en ellas late la sabiduría y excepcionalidad de las sociedades humanas. El «conócete a ti mismo» ha quedado relegado al «sé tú mismo». El moderno eslogan (principio y fin de tantos libros de autoayuda) nos dice que debemos ser simplemente lo que somos, actuar de manera natural y espontánea, vivir sin complejos, despreocuparnos de todo… Pues bien, los mitos nos curan justamente de eso, nos ayudan a no caer en la trampa de la banalidad.