Showing results for "Science and Ideology" in Classics

In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French aristocrat and civil servant, made a nine-month journey through the eastern United States. The result was Democracy in America, a monumental study of the strengths and weaknesses of the nation’s evolving politics. His insightful work has become one of the most influential political texts ever written on America.

Here is the world's most famous master plan for seizing and holding power. Astonishing in its candor, The Prince is a disturbingly realistic and prophetic work on what it takes to be a prince, a king, a president.

Perhaps one of the most influential and controversial books in history, Machiavelli’s The Prince raises issues that are still debated centuries after its publication. The theories he developed in The Prince were derived from his observation of the successes and failures of the ruling class. The Prince was designed as a practical guide for newly appointed rulers and is required reading for all persons in a position of authority who strive for grandeur in business and politics.

This 1902 essay collection by the Russian naturalist and anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin explore the role of mutually beneficial cooperation and reciprocity in the animal kingdom and human societies. It is an argument against theories of social Darwinism that emphasize competition and survival of the fittest, and against the romantic views of writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau who thought that cooperation was motivated by universal love.

The Prince is a treatise that systematically charts the best strategies for successful governing. It unapologetically places realism above idealism, showing would-be kings how to get what they want while appearing to be generous and honourable, and advocates that the means — cruelty, duplicity and horror —justify the ends of secure monarchical rule. But it can also be read as the work of a secret republican subtly undermining the despotism of the ruling Medici family.

Published in 1532 five years after Machiavelli’s death, the philosophies and implications introduced in the manifesto are continually referenced by today’s top business executives for insight into leadership, political theory, and ethics.

This is a mostly polemical essay by Emma Goldman about her deportation from the United States to Russia in December 1919. It was written before disillusionment with Bolshevism, as recounted in "My Disillusionment in Russia" (1923).

"Manifesto of the Communist Party" is an 1848 political pamphlet by the Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It presents an analytical approach to the class struggle and the conflicts of capitalism and the capitalist mode of production.

This rather incoherent work by Russian anarchist philosopher Michael Bakunin is described in a way that he described his own life: a fragment. Rife with criticisms on Christianity and the technocracy, Bakunin presses communist values without fear of bordering extremism. Listening to this work is like walking through Bakunin’s disjointed mind; often cutting off and starting mid-sentence, including footnotes several paragraphs long as if his thoughts suddenly start to wander, as well as ending rather abruptly mid-sentence.

Emma Goldman was initially supportive of Russia’s Bolshevik revolution. This 1918 pamphlet was published in elucidation of the revolution and in justification of the Bolsheviks. Goldman reversed her opinion in the wake of the Kronstadt rebellion and denounced the Soviet Union for its violent repression of independent voices.

Ernest Belfort Bax (1854-1926) was an English barrister, journalist, philosopher, rights advocate, and historian. In this essay, after dismissing St. Simonism, Fourierism, Owenism, and “Continental Nihilists”, Bax attempts to explain what modern socialism, taken broadly, really means. He outlines the three bases of modern socialism as the direction of industry by a democratic state instead of by private capitalists; as a universal Federal Republic to take the place of the present nationalist system; and in religion, a human ideal to take the place of theological cults.