Here are 100 books that The Road to Freedom fans have personally recommended if you like
The Road to Freedom.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I'm the New York Times' Global Economics Correspondent. Over the course of three decades in journalism, I have reported from more than 40 countries, including a six-year stint in China for the Washington Post and five years in London for the Times. I have ridden with truck drivers from Texas to India, visited factories and warehouses from Argentina to Kenya, and explored ports from Los Angeles to Rotterdam.
Like any student of globalization, I love this book because it focuses like a laser on how a single critical innovation—the development of the shipping container—effectively shrank the oceans, accelerated the pace of sea cargo, and made it possible for consumers to depend on faraway factories.
In April 1956, a refitted oil tanker carried fifty-eight shipping containers from Newark to Houston. From that modest beginning, container shipping developed into a huge industry that made the boom in global trade possible. The Box tells the dramatic story of the container's creation, the decade of struggle before it was widely adopted, and the sweeping economic consequences of the sharp fall in transportation costs that containerization brought about. But the container didn't just happen. Its adoption required huge sums of money, both from private investors and from ports that aspired to be on the leading edge of a new…
I'm the New York Times' Global Economics Correspondent. Over the course of three decades in journalism, I have reported from more than 40 countries, including a six-year stint in China for the Washington Post and five years in London for the Times. I have ridden with truck drivers from Texas to India, visited factories and warehouses from Argentina to Kenya, and explored ports from Los Angeles to Rotterdam.
This wonderful read takes the reader inside the cab of a long-haul truck and on a journey that clearly shows how deregulation and the pursuit of a perverse form of efficiency have made truck driving something to be avoided like a fatal disease.
Here is a powerful peek into the forces of excessive deregulation sabotaging the fruits of trade.
Long-haul trucks have been described as sweatshops on wheels. The typical long-haul trucker works the equivalent of two full-time jobs, often for little more than minimum wage. But it wasn't always this way. Trucking used to be one of the best working-class jobs in the United States. The Big Rig explains how this massive degradation in the quality of work has occurred, and how companies achieve a compliant and dedicated workforce despite it. Drawing on more than 100 in-depth interviews and years of extensive observation, including six months training and working as a long-haul trucker, Viscelli explains in detail how…
I'm the New York Times' Global Economics Correspondent. Over the course of three decades in journalism, I have reported from more than 40 countries, including a six-year stint in China for the Washington Post and five years in London for the Times. I have ridden with truck drivers from Texas to India, visited factories and warehouses from Argentina to Kenya, and explored ports from Los Angeles to Rotterdam.
This potent book provides a critical historical perspective on the contemporary reality of giant corporations left to dominate markets by regulators who have set aside traditional antitrust enforcement to impede the magical notion of efficiency.
The result is consumers and working people getting fleeced while a handful of dominant companies rake in the profits.
"Every thinking American must read" (The Washington Book Review) this startling and "insightful" (The New York Times) look at how concentrated financial power and consumerism has transformed American politics, and business.
Going back to our country's founding, Americans once had a coherent and clear understanding of political tyranny, one crafted by Thomas Jefferson and updated for the industrial age by Louis Brandeis. A concentration of power-whether by government or banks-was understood as autocratic and dangerous to individual liberty and democracy. In the 1930s, people observed that the Great Depression was caused by financial concentration in the hands of a few…
I'm the New York Times' Global Economics Correspondent. Over the course of three decades in journalism, I have reported from more than 40 countries, including a six-year stint in China for the Washington Post and five years in London for the Times. I have ridden with truck drivers from Texas to India, visited factories and warehouses from Argentina to Kenya, and explored ports from Los Angeles to Rotterdam.
Here is a book ahead of its time, a work that anticipated the breakdown in globalization to imagine something else – manufacturing clustered closer to customers and a rejection of the sort of efficiency that does not bother to measure the costs of not being able to find medicines in the midst of a pandemic.
A sweeping case that a new age of economic localization will reunite place and prosperity, putting an end to the last half century of globalization—by one of the preeminent economic journalists writing today
“This invaluable book is as bold in its ambitions as it is readable.”—Ian Bremmer, New York Times bestselling author of The Power of Crisis
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Kirkus Reviews
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Thomas Friedman, in The World Is Flat, declared globalization the new economic order. But the reign of globalization as we’ve known it is over, argues Financial…
I was initially drawn to economics as a way to understand and address global problems of poverty and hunger, like those I saw in Africa with the Peace Corps and later as a researcher. As my interests broadened toward environmental and other social problems, again I found that economics provides valuable insights about their causes and possible solutions. Economics is unfortunately often misunderstood and defined too narrowly: but as a social science, it encompasses a broad framework to comprehend individuals, families, cities, nations. It encompasses philosophical thought, normative questions, and intangibles like humans’ desire for respect. After decades as an economics professor I still find its insights fascinating and powerful.
The aims of economic development are often said to be higher incomes, industrialization, efficient investment, and poverty alleviation.
Amartya Sen argues for a broader goal: increasing the capability of all human beings to achieve those things that they most value.
Such an agenda implies more ambitious goals for empowering people, especially in poor countries, to begin a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy: education, health care, longevity, and the ability to influence political decisions.
Sen, a Nobel laureate in economics, draws on a lifetime of thought about human predicaments, famines, and poverty, how to define one’s capabilities, and the meaning of one’s ‘standard of living.’
Rather than offering specific recipes, this book provides a provocative framework for thought.
In Development as Freedom Amartya Sen quotes the eighteenth century poet William Cowper on freedom:
Freedom has a thousand charms to show,
That slaves howe'er contented, never know.
Sen explains how in a world of unprecedented increase in overall opulence, millions of people living in rich and poor countries are still unfree. Even if they are not technically slaves, they are denied elementary freedom and remain imprisoned in one way or another by economic poverty, social deprivation, political tyranny or cultural authoritarianism. The main purpose of development is to spread freedom and its 'thousand charms' to the unfree citizens.
I’m
a physicist who ended up doing their PhD in philosophy, because the “so
what” question for me always was more interesting to answer than
finding out
how the physical world is changing.
Working
as a climate scientist I see how climate change and extreme
weather devastate livelihoods on a daily basis. It makes me very aware I
know nothing, but also that the philosophical and humanist ideas we
build our societies upon are much more important
to solve the climate crisis than physics and technology. One of the
most important ones
is to reclaim freedom and actually allow people to live good lives.
This is the most obvious book on this list. If you do read one book about climate change, make it this one.
It’s mainly not about climate change at all, but about the difficult balance between protecting people and freedom of expression. If we want a society that makes life better for all, and I do want that, we need to get this balance right.
It’s hard, as Nelson shows, but also incredibly exciting to identify freedom, in art, in sex, in drugs and in climate. This list isn’t an accident.
'One of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation' OLIVIA LAING
In this invigorating, essential book, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience or talk about freedom. Drawing on pop culture, theory and real life, she follows freedom - with all its complexities - through four realms: art, sex, drugs and climate. On Freedom offers a bold new perspective on the challenging times in which we live.
'Tremendously energising' Guardian
'This provocative meditation...shows Nelson at her most original and brilliant' New York…
We’ve all experienced the overwhelming level of political and social divisiveness in our country. This invisible “virus” of negativity is, in part, the result of the name-calling and heated rhetoric that has become commonplace among commentators and elected leaders alike.
My book provides a clear perspective on the historical and…
I’m fascinated by the question of where people get their values, particularly in our secular age. If you have a religion, the question is easy to answer: just point to your church or faith. For the unchurched like me, however, it’s tricky. We feel there’s something we should be able to point to, but what? As a professor of politics and philosophy, I’ve been exploring this question for more than a decade. My latest book argues that liberalism has become a comprehensive worldview and may be the key to who you and I are deep down.
Moyn’s book picks up where Rosenblatt left off, asking, in effect, “What the hell happened to liberalism?”
He, too, recognizes that the early liberals of the 19th century were inspired by ideals of perfectionism and progressivism. So why did liberalism become so retrenched in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? His answer is compelling: Cold War liberals, terrified by collectivist and violent governments like Nazi Germany and the USSR, made a conscious commitment to scale liberalism way back to a narrow doctrine of individual rights and protection.
His book is a bracing call for liberalism to get its mojo back.
"[A] daring new book."-Becca Rothfeld, Washington Post
"A fascinating and combative intellectual history."-Gideon Rachman, Financial Times
By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era-among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper,…
I am an intercultural educationalist, having many years of direct Prime Ministers, Culture Ministers, Ambassador of Nepal to the UK/Ireland/Malta, experts, and grassroots community organizations relationships with Nepal and Nepali diasporas (UK and Ireland) regarding research, reports, and major intercultural projects, as well as a published writer on Nepali culture and editor and lead content contributor for internationally respected online Nepal culture information resources (see Nepali Cultural Heritage and Foods of Nepal). An active member of the decolonization movement, I have provided live BBC TV News interviews on the UK Government–Gurkha dispute and led the enablement of a historically important Nepal–England football match.
I was privileged to read Dr O’Brien’s book at his personal invitation before its formal launch. This arose from a shared interest in past/historical through to current threats to the achievements of inclusive, prejudice-free values, freedom of thought and expression, and respecting liberal values in parliamentary democracies.
Through ground-breaking research and masterly thought-provoking analysis of findings, this book evaluates the threats posed by totalitarian and authoritarian non-inclusive ideologies, political forces, and their justifiers and apologists.
It also examines the crucial role of supportive, disingenuous yet effective propaganda—from today's "fake news" (Trumpian, Brexit, anti-Trans, etc.) to state forces manipulating populist sentiments—enabling brutal and ethically unacceptable phenomena such as colonialism/neo-colonialism, 20th-century Nazism, Stalinism, and current menaces.
Authoritarian nationalism is on the rise in Europe and elsewhere. Freedom is endangered in Eastern Europe. In the Middle East, militant Islam threatens peace, stability, and liberty. The US has recently faced an existential crisis, with the rise of populism and the unprecedented polarization of Left and Right. Brexit has endangered the integrity of the EU, which has hitherto operated as a defender of peace and freedom. At the same time, threats have arisen in the West to the traditional value of free speech.
With the fall of the Soviet Union decades ago, liberal capitalism seemed to be consolidating on…
I have immersed myself in the study of seventeenth-century philosophy for almost forty years. Over that time, I have become particularly devoted to Spinoza. This is because, first, I think he got it all pretty much right; his views on religion, on human nature, and especially on what it is to lead a good life have always struck me as correct and relevant. You can be a Spinozist today, three and a half centuries after his death, and it would make perfect sense. Second, Spinoza is endlessly fascinating. I find that every time I read him⎯and I’ve been reading and re-reading him for a long time now⎯it gets more difficult. Just when you think you know him, there are always new questions that arise and new puzzles to solve.
Continuing on the theme of how to make Spinoza accessible to non-specialists, this is an excellent study of the many dimensions of Spinoza’s moral philosophy. For a long time, most of the literature on Spinoza was devoted to his metaphysics and epistemology, essentially Parts One and Two of the Ethics. Kisner’s was one of the first books devoted to the work’s moral dimensions in Parts Three, Four, and Five -- the ethics of the Ethics, so to speak. He covers all the right ground: freedom, happiness, responsibility, benevolence, and so on, and does so in an engaging and illuminating way.
Spinoza was one of the most influential figures of the Enlightenment, but his often obscure metaphysics makes it difficult to understand the ultimate message of his philosophy. Although he regarded freedom as the fundamental goal of his ethics and politics, his theory of freedom has not received sustained, comprehensive treatment. Spinoza holds that we attain freedom by governing ourselves according to practical principles, which express many of our deepest moral commitments. Matthew J. Kisner focuses on this theory and presents an alternative picture of the ethical project driving Spinoza's philosophical system. His study of the neglected practical philosophy provides an…
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.
Dillon Stone Tatum is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Francis Marion University. His research interests are on the history, development, and politics of liberal internationalism, international political theory, and critical security studies.
Italian philosopher and historian Domenico Losurdo’s book Liberalism: A Counter-History represents one of the most ambitious attempts to conceptually and historically tie the liberal tradition to the politics of slavery, empire, and genocide. What I find to be most evocative about Losurdo’s “counter-history” is both his sweeping narrative of the liberal tradition balanced against a close reading of key figures in that tradition. Losurdo provides an important critique of liberalism, and provides us with the analytic and methodological tools to interrogate its legacy, its past, its future.
In this definitive historical investigation, Italian author and philosopher Domenico Losurdo argues that from the outset liberalism, as a philosophical position and ideology, has been bound up with the most illiberal of policies: slavery, colonialism, genocide, racism and snobbery.
