The best books on how community can save society

When I first realized that community could be the secret ingredient to creating a better society, I started looking for an in-depth book on the subject – and was stunned to find how most of the books available were superficial. The exception is Putnam’s masterwork. He led the research, but after publishing his original paper in 1995, nearly 50 other academics helped produce the results described in his 2000 book. It is a serious read! But Putnam writes well, lightening the statistics with humour, and this is the landmark book on community. In 2012, Barack Obama awarded Putnam the National Humanities Medal, the nation’s highest honor for contributions to the humanities. The London Sunday Times called Putnam “the most influential academic in the world today.”

If you’d asked me before 2009 to make a list of social issues, I would have probably included poverty or deprivation rather than inequality. The Spirit Level changed my understanding. Wilkinson and Pickett show how people of any income, education, or class are healthier if they live in a more equal society. They are epidemiologists, and track the growth and impacts of inequality across time with the methodical attention to detail applied to monitoring the spread of an epidemic. They show how inequality not only makes people miserable (even if they are rich!) but also how it breaks the social cohesion that allows us to fix social issues. It led to a whole new area of research, including other landmark books such as Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

It always seemed to me that public ownership could be a way to unlock better use of resources, and didn’t believe it was the same as Soviet-style economic planning. But I didn’t really know what it did mean!  So, I bought Hanna’s book as soon as it came out in 2018, and wasn’t disappointed. He is Research Director at the Democracy Collaborative, and shows by example how public ownership comes in many varieties. He debunks the myths about it being worse than corporate or private ownership, showing how it can be more efficient and effective. Read this to see how public ownership in one form or another is a sensible and pragmatic option that can help address the really big social challenges such as inequality, sustainability, and fragility.

I can’t say how much I love this book. It explains everything we know intuitively about economics but find hard to justify. Hudson was one of the few who saw the 2008 crisis coming, and he is still one of the few who know what we must do now. Taking the discussion of David Graeber’s extraordinary 2011 book Debt: The First 5000 Years to the next level, Hudson shows how Bronze Age rulers understood economic instability better than we do. When people get into serious debt, their personal crises not only destroy their own lives but ripple outwards to derail society, by giving their creditors enough power to compete with governments. To avoid society being run into the ground, governments must start cancelling debts – as they did long ago.

Idealistic people, young or old, who dream of a society in which society is not based on power structures are constantly told to get real. It’s always been this way, and always will be. Anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow worked together for ten years to show how that’s just nonsense. For thousands of years, between the end of the Ice Age and the start of recorded civilization, societies across the world didn’t put people into a hierarchy in which people dominate those below them. Many of these societies lasted hundreds of years. They had agriculture, technology, and art. They built large cities. It seems that the only thing they didn’t have was the ability to order each other around. The most important book of the twenty-first century?