The best books on modernity

This book is a real tour de force, applying the rationale of self-governing and naturally emerging evolutionary mechanisms to explain a wide variety of social, biological, cultural, and civilizational processes.

The book offers wonderful insights into such topics as the emergence of creative ideas, the growth of cities, the evolution of language, why state-controlled health care and education systems are often inefficient, the resilience of free-market economies, the rise of morality and trust as a consequence of natural social interactions, and much more besides.

Readable, entertaining, and full of incredibly useful information.

The world is complicated and confusing, but Harari organizes this complexity into 21 issues covering such diverse topics as liberty, community, war, ignorance, and meaning.

The book is a collection of self-standing essays that can be read independently. The prevailing message is that we can understand the world in which we live, though, at the same time, we cannot always make reliable decisions today or confidently predict the future because we fundamentally don't know what's going on.

Finally, the book offers a warning: modern technology, coupled with artificial intelligence, may challenge human freedom if we lose control of the powerful and evolving forces of hi-tech and AI.

This one is 359 pages and says almost nothing about the 20th century. It is quirky in terms of what it includes and what it leaves out, but reliable in its facts and judgments, and full of insights I haven’t encountered elsewhere. It does not bother with grand theories or overarching narrative, but focuses on what the author finds interesting. Cook is a specialist on the history of Islam, which gives the book an uncommon vantage point. 

David Reynolds is simply one of the smartest and most original historians operating today. Do we imagine that no one thought much about the poems of Wilfred Owen until the 1960s? Do we think about how important the fiftieth anniversary of the Somme was for the politics of Ireland? This book is packed full of perceptive and original insights about the Great War’s very long legacy.

While The Swerve is not exactly a book about posterity, it nonetheless provides a wonderful case study of a text that remained on the verge of destruction for centuries, before going on to play a tremendously influential role in shaping our modern world. This book is none other than On The Nature of Things by Lucretius –one of the foundational texts of Western culture, whose impact was postponed to the fifteenth century, as it would not have seen the light of day without its serendipitous rediscovery in a German monastery by Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459). This gripping work offers a fascinating example of the delayed reception of a prominent cultural object, a proof of its extraordinary resilience, and, at the same time, an illustration of the role played by chance and accidents on the transmission of texts to posterity. 

Describes in depth a brave new world of uncertain constant acceleration and continued change in institutions and social relations.

I like the way Bauman depicts a condensing resonance, a new way of “being in the world.” Specifically, this is an increasing fluidity and fragmentation of social solidarities, where nothing is secure and where everything can be made redundant.

A world that Ulrich Beck, even before the new century, referred to as “the Second Modernity.”

It’s a little weird that this book should find a place on my list. It’s a book about how society has become resistant to anything that is difficult and painful and the kinds of people that we have become as a result. But mathematics is difficult! To understand mathematics you have to think hard, sometimes for a long time. Moreover understanding something hard is discontinuous, it requires a leap to a new way of thinking. You have to start with a problem and this problem might be an ambiguity or a contradiction. A is true and B is true but A and B seem to contradict one another. When you sort out this problem you will have learned something.

The moral here is to embrace things that are difficult if you want to learn significant new things. “No pain, no gain.” You don’t have to worry about some super AI… show more.

I love how Dipesh’s book shows a historian at the height of his powers explaining how history has become geological. Decades ago, Chakrabarty began as someone arguing for a history that made Europe “provincial”. Now he argues that all human history is relative to planetary time. His writing is infused with humanism and is up to date on Earth System Science.

This is the one classic text on my list. Marcuse’s book was like a bible to protesting students in the 1960s, and its critique of the psychic levelling that occurs under capitalism remains just as germane today, if not more so. This is the most successful marriage of Freud and Marx that emerged from the famous Frankfurt School, which was a group of cultural Marxist invested in psychoanalysis. Marcuse grasps how capitalism employs technology to ensure its psychic dominance. 

It may not seem relevant to sobriety to recommend a book on how evil is rooted in man’s very existence, yet I find that both alcoholism and recovery are also rooted in my existence.

It’s a monolithic book, but more than half is Bloom citing his sources. The book challenged my view of the world thus influencing my view of recovery. The 12 Steps taught me that problems are basically of my own making and that self-responsibility is the only path to find my way out.

It is not possible to read his book and not see how we humans lay the seeds of our own destruction, not only in a small personal life, but in all of human history. 

I like to look at the big picture. This book’s picture is huge: it explains three waves of human civilization, from agriculture and land ownership, to centralization and mass manufacturing, to distributed and custom everything—the wave we are in now. It was originally published in 1980 and predicted our current culture and technology with astonishing accuracy. I, and many entrepreneurs of the time, tried to use those predictions to guide our businesses, and many, like Amazon, succeeded as a result. Are there still more third wave things to invent? Yes—think of how streaming video channels are just now taking over from cable and broadcast, not to mention movie theatres. Will this help you invent the next big thing? Maybe. And what will the fourth wave be?

This book inspires me because it discusses the significance of taking responsibility for reflecting on the more difficult and often hidden aspects of ourselves.

It helped to open up my mind to my blind spots and increase self-awareness. Based in medicine and psychology this book promotes the kind of honest and important self-reflection that is an asset in improving leadership culture and how you relate to others, even in conflict. 

Gabor Mate’s book is reflective and deep; it offers information on how adverse experience shapes people.

The author provides rigorously researched information on how all of the intersections of our daily stressors, adverse childhood experiences, toxic work environments, world events, and internal conflicts take their tolls on our minds and bodies, while providing the tools to look within oneself to find the cure.

Geographer Tim Cresswell’s work has helped me convince architectural historians that examining how we move through spaces is vital to understanding the full range of the built environment’s cultural meanings. He states the obvious: we all live in physical bodies. And yet historians emphasize the written word and architects emphasize visualization. What about the other senses? Cresswell argues that mobility is a socially-constructed movement much like place is a socially-constructed space. We can learn so much by paying attention to the ways society controls movement: Who is allowed to occupy which spaces? When? With whom? And how has that changed over time? Cresswell’s ideas helped me analyze the lived experiences of multiple people in the same domestic spaces, and ultimately connect the manipulation of architecture and landscape to modernity’s regulation of bodies and ideas. 

Tagore (1861-1941) is generally known as a Nobel Prize-winning poet, but he was also a frequent commentator on contemporary political affairs and the crises of his age. Nationalism, which was composed over the years 1916-17, features long ruminations on imperialism, modernity, and the question of Indian independence, among other subjects of pressing interest to Tagore and his contemporaries. Each chapter affords the reader with an opportunity to experience in full the author’s talents as he strives to put into words his vision for a future shaped neither by "the colourless vagueness of cosmopolitanism, nor the fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship." Instructors may find the work to be an especially valuable resource for stimulating class discussions.

Hume’s Essays were a great publishing success at soon as they appeared. They established his reputation not only in the UK, but also on the Continent and America. Entertaining, they not only considered issues of the day such as commerce and the progress of civilization but treat of questions that remain relevant today on freedom of the press, political parties, taxes, and divorce. The writing is elegant and helps us understand the making of modernity.

This book has helped me think through the relationship between capitalism, modernity, and romantic anti-capitalist movements both in East Asia and beyond. The book deals with intellectual currents in interwar Japan, (the 1920s to 1945) and shows how conservative philosophers developed a theory to “overcome modernity.” These authors, many from the so-called Kyoto School, targeted the rampant consumer culture, the overturning of ethical relations, and other structural changes. However, Harootunian contends that such critiques did not grasp the fundamental dynamic of capitalism and its relation to such cultural shifts and consequently, such philosophers were “overcome by modernity.”  This means that such critics of modernity were incorporated into the Japanese fascist military complex, which itself claimed to confront capitalist modernity. At a time, when we see right-wing attempts to confront modernity around the world (Trump, Le Pen, Modi) this book remains extremely relevant.  

Essay collections are usually rather variable in quality, but this volume on the multiple ways in which modernity was staged, debated, and contested in Germany between the 1890s and the 1930s, is consistently good. The individual essays are all rich in interesting detail, yet it is the collectively written introduction that is likely to find the widest readership, offering not only a succinct summary of ways in which global discussions about the concept of modernity can help us to understand the course of German history, but also some pointers on how the German case can contribute to global historical discussion. 

By exploring today’s rapidly changing world, Friedman helps you take a step back and consider how we might be able to live life at a reasonable pace. Thank You For Being Late serves as a guide for how to respond to the speed of change around us. By understanding how the world is changing through the possibilities and dangers of Moore’s Law (technology and the internet), the Market (globalization), and Mother Nature (climate change), Friedman encourages us to consider our own adaptability. Rather than complaining and being static as individuals, Friedman suggests we need to embrace change and look at what is in our control to adapt, learn, look forward and still achieve what we want to.

During the early 1990s, I had the good fortune to participate in Habermas’ legendary Monday night philosophy colloquium at the University of Frankfurt.

The experience transformed my understanding of the raison d’être of Critical Theory. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity is not a book about fascism per se. Instead, it tells the story of how, after the war, the titans of interwar German Kulturpessimismus – Nietzsche (albeit, posthumously), Carl Schmitt, and Heidegger – were canonized by the leading advocates of “French Theory” as the new maîtres à penser or “master thinkers.”

Yet, the canonization of German philosophy came at a high cost. After all, historically speaking, the philosophies in question stood in close proximity to fascist ideology.

Hence, the question arises: to what extent did such pro-fascist “ideologemes” infiltrate and inform the basic tenets of French poststructuralism?

While Trueman reviews some of the ideas covered by other thinkers on this list, his new book is notable because it focuses on how personal sexual identity (sexual orientation, gender, desire, etc.) came to be the most important site for the expression of individualism. His analysis underscores the threat that a radically subjectivized sexual ethic posed to longstanding social norms and cultural traditions. This one also includes a gushing foreword by best-selling author Rod Dreher of The American Conservative magazine.