Here are 100 books that Left and Right fans have personally recommended if you like
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Conformism, religiosity, and tribalism pose an increasingly serious threat to democracy, equality, liberty, and the world order. Many public intellectuals, therefore, argue that we should try to tamp down or eliminate these tendencies. I argue the opposite. Based on decades of collaborative research with psychologists, evolutionary scientists, historians, and archaeologists, I show that the human propensities to copy, believe, and belong are here to stay, and our best hope for the future is to draw on our rich inheritance of biological and cultural evolution to harness and manage these core features of human nature more sustainably, peacefully, and consensually.
Some people are sticklers for following norms and conventions, while others take a more relaxed approach. The same goes for entire cultures, which vary on a continuum from very tight (think Singapore or the military) to very loose (think Amsterdam or hippy communes). This book brings together a wealth of experimental data showing that societal norms tighten or loosen in response to perceptions of threat.
Even though the specific nature of those threats inevitably varies and the cultural systems of the scores of societies in which Gelfand has gathered data are diverse, the same underlying patterns are discernible everywhere. Gelfand’s work explores the profound ramifications of this discovery both for our understanding of history and of the world we live in today.
'A groundbreaking analysis of what used to be an impenetrable mystery: how and why do cultures differ? ... Anyone interested in our cultural divides will find tremendous insight in Rule Makers, Rule Breakers' - Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of Enlightenment Now
Why are clocks in Germany always correct, while those in Brazil are frequently wrong? Why are Singaporeans jailed for selling gum? Why do women in New Zealand have three times the sex of females worldwide? Why was the Daimler-Chrysler merger ill-fated from the start? And why does each generation of Americans give their…
A university professor for 40 years (now emerita), I focused my most recent research on moral psychology. I am also a political junkie, so perhaps it is no surprise that I have combined these two interests. As both a social psychologist and political psychologist, I have conducted numerous studies on the moral underpinnings of our political ideologies. In addition to two books, I have published over 90 papers, many devoted to morality and/or politics, and I was awarded a generous three-year National Science Foundation grant to study the two moralities that are discussed in my book.
In his highly respected research, personality psychologist Dan McAdams has focused on the important role of a life story, or narrative, in creating our human identity.
This book is essentially a case study of Donald Trump that explains why so many of Trump’s actions seem so disconnected from truth and reality.
McAdams persuasively argues that Trump has no inner life story—no integrative narrative—and instead lives compulsively in the moment, crashing his way through life.
The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump provides a coherent and nuanced psychological portrait of Donald Trump, drawing upon biographical events in the subject's life and contemporary scientific research and theory in personality, developmental, and social psychology.
Dan P. McAdams, renowned psychologist who pioneered the study of lives, examines the central personality traits, personal values and motives, and the interpersonal and cultural factors that together have shaped Trump's psychological makeup, with an emphasis on the strangeness of the case-that is, how Trump again and again defies psychological expectations regarding what it means to be a human being. The book's central…
A university professor for 40 years (now emerita), I focused my most recent research on moral psychology. I am also a political junkie, so perhaps it is no surprise that I have combined these two interests. As both a social psychologist and political psychologist, I have conducted numerous studies on the moral underpinnings of our political ideologies. In addition to two books, I have published over 90 papers, many devoted to morality and/or politics, and I was awarded a generous three-year National Science Foundation grant to study the two moralities that are discussed in my book.
This book has become a classic in social psychology, and social dominance, as both a personality trait and a feature of societies, has become an indispensable factor in understanding individual, cultural, and political differences.
In this book social/political psychologists Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto draw on their own excellent research and scholarship to present their influential theory of social hierarchy and the psychological and societal mechanisms that support it.
This book is for anyone interested in our political differences, and in particular factors that contribute to social inequality.
This volume focuses on two questions: why do people from one social group oppress and discriminate against people from other groups? and why is this oppression so mind numbingly difficult to eliminate? The answers to these questions are framed using the conceptual framework of social dominance theory. Social dominance theory argues that the major forms of intergroup conflict, such as racism, classism and patriarchy, are all basically derived from the basic human predisposition to form and maintain hierarchical and group-based systems of social organization. In essence, social dominance theory presumes that, beneath major and sometimes profound difference between different human…
A university professor for 40 years (now emerita), I focused my most recent research on moral psychology. I am also a political junkie, so perhaps it is no surprise that I have combined these two interests. As both a social psychologist and political psychologist, I have conducted numerous studies on the moral underpinnings of our political ideologies. In addition to two books, I have published over 90 papers, many devoted to morality and/or politics, and I was awarded a generous three-year National Science Foundation grant to study the two moralities that are discussed in my book.
This was George Lakoff’s groundbreaking early book linking morality and politics.
Here the renowned cognitive psychologist, draws from his expertise as a linguist to uncover the unconscious worldviews of liberals and conservatives. More specifically, he argues that distinct conceptual metaphors, each associated with the family, underlie the politics of the left and right, specifically the strict father for conservatives and the nurturant parent for liberals.
When Moral Politics was first published two decades ago, it redefined how Americans think and talk about politics through the lens of cognitive political psychology. Today, George Lakoff's classic text has become all the more relevant, as liberals and conservatives have come to hold even more vigorously opposed views of the world, with the underlying assumptions of their respective worldviews at the level of basic morality. Even more so than when Lakoff wrote, liberals and conservatives simply have very different, deeply held beliefs about what is right and wrong. Lakoff reveals radically different but remarkably consistent conceptions of morality on…
I am researching how elites and societies in Russia and East Central Europe have adapted to the social, political, and economic transformation processes following the end of Communism. What fascinates me about this topic is understanding why many of these countries continued to fall back to the same patterns of re-autocratization as they did during the Communist times. My answer is that it is because many institutions and elites in these regions have continued certain policies and behaviors from Communist times, which are still affecting their politics and economics. I also examine the impact of the transformational shock on Russia's international revisionism and democratic backsliding across the region.
This is one of my favorite books on the topic: it explains how and why electorates in postcommunist Europe became disillusioned with the promises of modernization and liberalization following the collapse of the Communist system. It shows how naïve and cheerful they were at first and how skeptical and disillusioned they’ve subsequently become.
The reforms were painful, and the results of those reforms were not always as expected. This disillusionment led to the rise of populism across the region. The authors also trace similar dynamics in Russia and the United States, which led to the rise of Putin and Trump, respectively.
Why did the West, after winning the Cold War, lose its political balance?
In the early 1990s, hopes for the eastward spread of liberal democracy were high. And yet the transformation of Eastern European countries gave rise to a bitter repudiation of liberalism itself, not only there but also back in the heartland of the West.
In this brilliant work of political history, Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argue that the supposed end of Communism turned out to be only the beginning of the age of the autocrat. Reckoning with the history of the last thirty years, they show that…
A philosophy professor, my central interest has always been something historical: what is going on in this strange modern world we live in? Addressing this required forty years of background work in the natural sciences, history, social sciences, and the variety of contemporary philosophical theories that try to put them all together. In the process, I taught philosophy courses on philosophical topics, social theory, and the sciences, wrote books, and produced video courses, mostly focused on that central interest. The books listed are some of my favorites to read and to teach. They are crucial steps on the journey to understand who we are in this unprecedented modern world.
Best recent book examining human morality from a scientific, psychological point of view.
Darwinians used to think humans had to be selfish and immoral. Contemporary evolution argues the opposite, that humans evolved moral limits on our selfishness in order to live together. Haidt’s is the best book presenting this new evolutionary psychology.
But it goes further to connect those scientific issues with contemporary politics, explaining why people from “red” and “blue” states cannot understand each other: they each embody a short list of human moral values, but different ones. This is a great book for thinking carefully about human morality and contemporary politics. Students love it, and so do I.
'A landmark contribution to humanity's understanding of itself' The New York Times
Why can it sometimes feel as though half the population is living in a different moral universe? Why do ideas such as 'fairness' and 'freedom' mean such different things to different people? Why is it so hard to see things from another viewpoint? Why do we come to blows over politics and religion?
Jonathan Haidt reveals that we often find it hard to get along because our minds are hardwired to be moralistic, judgemental and self-righteous. He explores how morality evolved to enable us to form communities, and…
I am a journalist who spent 15 years reporting from all over the world – Kabul, Baghdad, New Delhi, Beijing, Washington D.C. – returning to London in 2015 to report on the UK’s relations with Europe. Then Brexit happened. As a reporter, I’d chronicled the rise of China and India after 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis, but I’d failed to understand how far Britain had been consumed by the forces of populism that have roiled all Western democracies. I’ve spent the last eight years reporting on the fallout, from both sides of the English Channel; trying to unpack what went wrong, and see what we can do about it.
A profound analysis of why the apparently global triumph of Western liberalism in 1989 turned sour for millions of those who believed they were joining a new world order – but came away disappointed.
This book traces how, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the hubris of Western elites helped spawn the populist and opportunistic leaders – from Russia’s Putin, to Hungary’s Orban and Donald Trump in the US – that emerged after the 2008 global financial crisis.
That systemic failure cracked the veneer of the competence of Western capitalism (which had long masked rising inequality and flat middle-class wages) and opened the door to a politics of chaos that seeks to capitalise on that world of chaos, not fix it.
*Winner of the 2020 Lionel Gelber Prize* FINANCIAL TIMES, ECONOMIST, PROSPECT and EVENING STANDARD BOOK OF THE YEAR PICK
A landmark book that completely transforms our understanding of the crisis of liberalism, from two pre-eminent intellectuals
Why did the West, after winning the Cold War, lose its political balance?
In the early 1990s, hopes for the eastward spread of liberal democracy were high. And yet the transformation of Eastern European countries gave rise to a bitter repudiation of liberalism itself, not only in the East but also back in the heartland of the West.
I’m a historian, with a special interest in the 20th century. I’ve written about Freud’s Vienna, the aftermath of the First World War, strikes in the 1920s and 1930s in America’s cotton South, the plot to assassinate Hitler, and the notorious 1940s gangsters nicknamed “Murder, Inc.”. What intrigues me about the 20th century are the era’s underlying values and the shocking and violent collisions among them. In Casablanca’s Conscience, I use the great film as a lens with which to take another look at the tumultuous times just a generation ago.
Robert Pippin is a well-respected philosopher who has written on Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Here, he writes about westerns: Hawks’ Red River, and Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence and The Searchers.
Pippin is interested in both political psychology and political philosophy within an American context, but there is nothing starchy or narrowly academic about this thoughtful reflection on these films.
Neither Hawks nor Ford was a philosopher, but Pippin shows that their movies are charged with philosophical meaning.
In this pathbreaking book one of America's most distinguished philosophers brilliantly explores the status and authority of law and the nature of political allegiance through close readings of three classic Hollywood Westerns: Howard Hawks' Red River and John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Searchers.
Robert Pippin treats these films as sophisticated mythic accounts of a key moment in American history: its "second founding," or the western expansion. His central question concerns how these films explore classical problems in political psychology, especially how the virtues of a commercial republic gained some hold on individuals at a time…
I am a scholar of global politics, and I am drawn to psychoanalysis because it studies the unseen in politics, or rather, those things that are often in plain sight but remain unacknowledged. For example, why is it that, especially in this information economy, we are well aware of the inequality and environmental destruction that our current capitalist system is based on, but we still continue to invest in it (through shopping, taking out loans, using credit cards, etc.)? Psychoanalysis says that it's because we are unconsciously seduced by capitalism—we love shopping despite knowing about the socioeconomic and environmental dangers of doing it. I’m fascinated by that process of disavowal.
For me, Žižek is the most brilliant and insightful, even if controversial, philosopher of our times, and this work is largely considered his masterpiece.
Drawing on popular culture (movies, jokes, science fiction), it provides a psychoanalytic view of ideology, exploring the unconscious foundations of such phenomena as totalitarianism, capitalism, and racism.
Žižek beckons us to pay close attention to any ideology that attempts to present reality as unified or harmonious (e.g., “Make America Great Again,” or “happy shopping”), as it most often hides (“disavows,” in psychoanalysis) its many contradictions (e.g., how “greatness” is often built on a history of colonialism or slavery; or how consumerism most often depends on the exploitation of workers, many of whom are women and racialized people working under sweatshop conditions).
Slavoj Zizek, the maverick philosopher, author of over 30 books, acclaimed as the "Elvis of cultural theory", and today's most controversial public intellectual. His work traverses the fields of philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, history and political theory, taking in film, popular culture, literature and jokes-all to provide acute analyses of the complexities of contemporary ideology as well as a serious and sophisticated philosophy. His recent films The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema and Zizek! reveal a theorist at the peak of his powers and a skilled communicator. Now Verso is making his classic titles, each of which stand as a core…
I’m a Penn State professor of sociology and demography who is interested in social inequality, demography, and public opinion. My family moved frequently when I was growing up—I lived in Colombia, Greece, and Mexico. I attended Brown University and worked at the U.S. Census Bureau as an analyst and Branch Chief for several years before returning to academia. My interest in inequality dates back to living in different countries with different cultures, politics, and standards of living. While I have long been interested in the demographics of poverty and inequality, in more recent years I’ve become interested in political polarization and why people disagree about a variety of social issues.
Liberals and conservatives strongly disagree on the appropriate scope of government. No book has helped me understand why more than Thomas Sowell’s Conflict of Visions.
He describes how the ideological difference results from disagreements about the malleability of human nature. The unconstrained vision, typically associated with liberals, sees human nature as altruistic and perfectible. The government should be used expansively to promote social justice and equality to realize this vision.
In contrast, the constrained vision, typically associated with conservatives, sees human nature as limited, selfish, and imperfectible. The government should play a limited role in society, as elites cannot hope to restructure society without unintended destructive consequences.
In this classic work, Thomas Sowell analyzes the two competing visions that shape our debates about the nature of reason, justice, equality, and power: the constrained" vision, which sees human nature as unchanging and selfish, and the unconstrained" vision, in which human nature is malleable and perfectible. He describes how these two radically opposed views have manifested themselves in the political controversies of the past two centuries, including such contemporary issues as welfare reform, social justice, and crime. Updated to include sweeping political changes since its first publication in 1987, this revised edition of A Conflict of Visions offers a…
