Here are 100 books that Moral Politics 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.
Social Psychologist John Jost is a giant in the field of political psychology. In this book the reader is treated to a collection of his superb essays on political ideology.
From neuroscience to psychology and sociology, Jost draws on research to present a complete picture of the nature, role, and implications of our political ideologies. Anyone interested in politics, and political psychology in particular, would benefit from the knowledge and insights Jost offers in this book.
This book brings together for the first time an updated, revised collection of influential essays and articles that capture some of the most exciting scientific and scholarly contributions to the topic of political ideology. John Jost tackles fundamental questions about how psychology, neuroscience, and societal factors impact political attitudes and group divisions. In what sense, if any, are ordinary citizens "ideological"? Is it useful to locate political attitudes on a single dimension of representation? Are there meaningful differences in the beliefs, opinions, and values of leftists and rights-or liberals and conservatives? How are personality traits related to ideological preferences? What…
Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of…
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…
My entire life I’ve been a historian, a treasure hunter, and a crime solver, which is likely why I became a broadcast journalist and investigative reporter. Having worked cases, worked with police, and asked the questions I believe the public wanted answered, there isn’t much which gets by me. I see every story as a movie and every scene in life as a story that needs telling. One of my passions has always been genealogy which fits right into all of the above. I live by a simple saying, “Be a student of history, not a victim of it.”
Logic! While Machiavelli is looked upon as a shrewd politician he is quite the opposite of John Potenza, the character in my book, but that’s where the similarities begin. Machiavelli was the most logical person ever. I’m fascinated by Logic. So is my crime-solving detective, who uses everything logical to figure out life. Potenza is a loyal Italian, so is Machiavelli. Machiavelli is loyal to himself and his cause, for Potenza it's the cause and family.
If you love logic and intrigue, you will love The Prince. It deals with the logic of human experience; one powerful tool in our repertoire. It certainly was for the politician. The same for a surfing cop trying to keep two biker gangs from going to mattress.
Since I was a teenager, I have thought about the connection between reason and ethics. This preoccupation was present during my formal education (A.B. and A.M., University of Chicago; J.D., Cleveland State University), during my three decades as a practicing lawyer, and, finally, as an independent philosopher during more than a decade of retirement from law practice. My book Reason and Human Ethics is the culmination of my reflection about this philosophical issue. The books I have recommended have been among those references that have been most helpful to me in formulating my own conclusions, though my own views are not identical with those of any other writing.
Plato’s Republicis famous as a work of political philosophy. It describes in speech what the Platonic Socrates suggests is the best political order. However, Socrates admits that his ideal city would probably never become a reality. He also points to possible defects in his proposed best regime. More interesting, to me, is the teaching of the Republicthat a good ethical life involves a person’s using reason to supervise (not eliminate) the passions. The examples of Socratic dialectic in this dialogue are illustrations of the use of human reason and the dangers of fallacious thinking. Plato’s teaching of the importance of reason continues to be relevant in our time.
Focus Philosophical Library's edition of Plato's Republic is an English translation of one of the most intellectually important works in Western philosophy and political theory. It includes an extensive introduction, an extensive afterword "Imitation" by John White, a chapter-by-chapter outline of principal speakers and summary of the content, Stephanus numbers, boldface type to indicate the entrance of a new speaker into the discussion, footnotes, and glossary of key terms with cross-references for the text.
This dialogue includes Socrates and others discussing the definition of justice, the theory of forms, and the immortality of the soul. Plato uses numerous dialogues between…
It didn’t begin with Donald Trump. When the Republican Party lost five straight presidential elections during the 1930s and 1940s, three things happened: (1) Republicans came to believe that presidential elections are rigged; (2) Conspiracy theories arose and were believed; and (3) The presidency was elevated to cult-like status.
I’ve worked top-down with dozens of governments worldwide and bottom-up with many campaigns, start-ups, and social enterprises. I realised that the connecting thread is how to mobilise shared intelligence to address the big challenges like cutting carbon emissions or reducing inequality, and how to avoid the collective stupidity we all see around us. We waste so much of the insight and creativity that sits in peoples’ heads. I thought we were missing both good theory and enough practical methods to make the most of technologies – from the Internet to generative AI – that could help us. I hope that my book – and the work I do – provides some of the answers.
One of my favourite books from a few decades ago is Jane Jacobs’ Systems of Survival.
She is best known for her work on cities, but this has a wider canvas. It explains how all working societies, and organisations, combine contradictory moral syndromes, what she calls the guardian and trader syndromes. She also shows the pathologies that result from mixing them up too much, like when businesses become like governments or governments become too much like businesses.
It is one of the rare books that changes how you see the world – and helps you understand the errors in much social thought.
With intelligence and clarity of observation, the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities addresses the moral values that underpin working life.
In Systems of Survival, Jane Jacobs identifies two distinct moral syndromes—one governing commerce, the other, politics—and explores what happens when these two syndromes collide. She looks at business fraud and criminal enterprise, government’s overextended subsidies to agriculture, and transit police who abuse the system the are supposed to enforce, and asks us to consider instances in which snobbery is a virtue and industry a vice. In this work of profound insight and elegance, Jacobs gives…
I am a historian of twentieth-century Argentina and a professor of modern Latin American history currently teaching at the University of Houston. Born and raised in Argentina, I completed my undergraduate studies at the National University of Rosario and moved to the United States in 2000 to continue my education. I received my M.A. in history from New York University and my Ph.D. in history from Indiana University, Bloomington. I have written extensively about gender, working-class history, consumer culture, and sexuality in Argentina. I am the author of Workers Go Shopping in Argentina: The Rise of Popular Consumer Culture and Destape! Sex, Democracy, and Freedom in Postdictatorial Argentina.
This book contributes greatly to the global history of the Cold War by showing that “moral technocrats” during the military dictatorship in Brazil equated political subversion with sexual subversion: Anticommunist countersubversion included anxieties about gender, sex, and youth. South American Cold War dictatorships have been traditionally understood as modernizing projects but Cowan complicates the definition by exploring the moral panic, and consequent calls and attempts at repression, related to the sexual revolution, new forms of female sexual expression, and pornography.
In this history of right-wing politics in Brazil during the Cold War, Benjamin Cowan puts the spotlight on the Cold Warriors themselves. Drawing on little-tapped archival records, he shows that by midcentury, conservatives-individuals and organizations, civilian as well as military-were firmly situated in a transnational network of right-wing cultural activists. They subsequently joined the powerful hardline constituency supporting Brazil's brutal military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. There, they lent their weight to a dictatorship that, Cowan argues, operationalized a moral panic that conflated communist subversion with manifestations of modernity, coalescing around the crucial nodes of gender and sexuality, particularly in…
David Edmonds is a philosopher, podcaster, and curry fanatic. A distinguished research fellow at Oxford’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, he is the author of many books including Wittgenstein’s Poker (with John Eidinow), The Murder of Professor Schlick, Would You Kill The Fat Man?, and Undercover Robot (with Bertie Fraser). If you eat at his local restaurant, The Curry Paradise, he recommends you order the Edmonds Biriani.
There’s a common prejudice that philosophy has nothing to do with the world in which non-philosophers live. I read Practical Ethics as an undergraduate and it came as a revelation. In crystal-clear prose, and with compelling logic, Singer addresses many issues in applied morality – abortion, capital punishment, charity, animal rights. Although some of his conclusions are radical, they’re hard to dissent from. Not long after reading the book I became a vegetarian. I haven’t eaten meat since.
For thirty years, Peter Singer's Practical Ethics has been the classic introduction to applied ethics. For this third edition, the author has revised and updated all the chapters and added a new chapter addressing climate change, one of the most important ethical challenges of our generation. Some of the questions discussed in this book concern our daily lives. Is it ethical to buy luxuries when others do not have enough to eat? Should we buy meat from intensively reared animals? Am I doing something wrong if my carbon footprint is above the global average? Other questions confront us as concerned…
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.
I have been studying neoliberal political economy and its future transformations since I wrote Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy. One major insight has been the deep entanglement of neoliberal political-economic practices with de facto power relations. The liberal normative bargaining characterizing Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations yields to coercive bargaining in which threats of harm are the surest and best means to get one’s way. If one seeks to understand how systems will evolve when governed by strategic competition, then orthodox game theory is useful. However, if one seeks to live in a post-scarcity society in which genuine cooperation is possible, then we can enact solidarity, trust-based relationships, and collective moral accountability.
Neoliberal political economy assumes either a strategic rational actor or an irrational actor who needs to be “nudged” to act rationally. This theory endorses a theory of individualist agency which holds that ultimately all agents must compete against each other. This system of thought emphasizes a lack of alternatives and recommends institutions that accept that actors are narrowly self-interested: people evolved to be machines that survive and propagate. Against this view of human agency, alternative theorists construct theories of action in which individuals can reason together, act in concert, and together be morally accountable. Schwenkenbecher effectively builds this alternative perspective affording possibilities of intentional cooperation and collective moral action.
Together we can often achieve things that are impossible to do on our own. We can prevent something bad from happening, or we can produce something good, even if none of us could do it by ourselves. But when are we morally required to do something of moral importance together with others?
This book develops an original theory of collective moral obligations. These are obligations that individual moral agents hold jointly but not as unified collective agents. The theory does not stipulate a new type of moral obligation but rather suggests that to think of some of our obligations as…
