My central argument about America’s role in the world is simple: America’s power, asserting in a dominant fashion the nation’s sovereignty, is today the ultimate guarantor of global stability, yet American society stimulates global social trends that dilute traditional national sovereignty. American power and American social dynamics, working together, could promote the gradual emergence of a global community of shared interest. Misused and in collision, they could push the world into chaos while leaving America beleaguered.

Will America lead the world or dominate it? The Choice is Brzezinski’s guide to the issues facing state planners as they wrestle over how America’s hegemony should be utilized. The former statesman travels across the globe to examine pressures acting on various players, theorizing how America can cultivate a global order. How can the U.S. maximize its domination, but without alienation in the global community? How can it strengthen the international order, but only insofar as it furthers U.S. national interests and creates a common set of values that coincide with America’s. Indispensable whether you support or bemoan his mission.

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

True to Orwell’s writing style, Homage to Catalonia is uncompromisingly honest in its observations of a war’s degrading effects on the population, their liberties, and their consciousness–all the while managing to find moments of triumph for the human spirit. This memoir is not merely a recitation of events and cold numbers detailing logistics and casualties but a nuanced look at humans in conflict over ideas–often springing from propaganda–that are ignorant of the reality but frustratingly adept at masking this fact. Alongside Orwell, you may grow angry and disillusioned with the struggle–but he manages to keep you invested in its outcome.

Man is naturally more disposed to beneficent than selfish actions. This we learn even from the history of savages. The domestic virtues have something in them so inviting and genial, and the public virtues of the citizen something so grand and inspiring, that even he who is barely uncorrupted, is seldom able to resist their charm.

The Limits of State Action works to explain the importance of liberty to human development and where state action is incompatible with it. Recently, it has been adopted by the “libertarian” tradition but this ignores the text’s key points and its context. Humboldt was writing before capitalism had consolidated power in private hands, before private persons had been perverted to include fictitious legal entities, and before said entities gained the power to damage human liberty and the environment from which humans drew their livelihood. This essay is incredibly lucid and clear, essential to understanding human liberty.

In fiscal policy as in monetary policy, all political considerations aside, we simply do not know enough to be able to use deliberate changes in taxation or expenditures as a sensitive stabilizing mechanism.

Whether you are a capitalist or socialist, Capitalism and Freedom serves as a great overview of the philosophical foundations that inform neoliberalism today. The book works not by connecting general freedom to economic freedom, but economic freedom to individual freedom within a market and market freedom from government intervention. My biggest issue, however, was that the arguments were not economic but moral, allowing Friedman to focus on liberty of some (corporate persons vs. employees) or ignore historical context for developments claimed prove the compatibility of capitalism and democracy. In another world, this book is called The Negative Liberties of Capitalism.

Either we shall find what it is we are seeking or at least we shall free ourselves from the persuasion that we know what we do not know

Centered around dialogues and monologues between Socrates and a cast of supporting mouth-pieces, Plato uses The Republic to explore what the perfect state entails. It’s an unapologetic argument for an enlightened totalitarianism which is enough to stop some from reading or engaging with it, but that would be in error. The questions he raises surrounding justice and the nature of citizenship, social life, and political life are all immensely important. Most of his conclusions are thought provoking and the book’s importance is in its sweeping examination of the underlying values that inform human action, knowingly or not.

The road back to reality, we suggest, begins by making two affirmations about nature: the uniqueness of the universe and the reality of time. These together have an immediate consequence which is the central hypothesis of our program: that the laws of nature evolve, and they do so through mechanisms that can be discovered and probed experimentally because they concern the past.

While touted as accessible to non-scientists, The Singular Universe was by far the most difficult book I’ve read in a long time. Unger and Smolin are mavericks within their respective fields of legal studies and physics, writing this brick to reject the standard view of cosmology and its philosophical implications. There are not multiple universes, but one. Time is not a dimensional illusion but the ultimate reality. The universe is not defined by preeminent laws but constantly changing relationships. They may be right or wrong but their investigation takes the discussion to new territory that may help develop our understanding.

The program of radical democracy has a more troubled relation to the strengthening and cleansing of solidarity. The fulfillment of its proposals does not ensure us of coexisting in peace. It does not take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. But it does enable us to live out more fully the tense, ambiguous, ennobling connection between solidarity and empowerment, between the experience of mutual acceptance and the development of our faculties, between our longing for one another and our efforts to find particular expressions for the impulse within us that rebels against all particularity. What more could we ask of society than a better chance to be both great and sweet?

Unger envisions a radical transformation of society that expands democracy and politics to every sphere of life, offering within False Necessity an alternative to neoliberalism and social democracy. His review of social theory works to lay bare the limitations of previous analyses, requiring you to rethink most of the institutional and ideological assumptions we hold about how humans should act and why they do. At the root of his book is the idea that there are no stable sets of institutions or ironclad laws of historical development limiting humans. We are the greatest barriers to the freedom we all deserve.

Despite my firm convictions, I have been always a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.

One of the few books I return to every year, it never ages because it continues to find relevance. The struggles that Malcolm endured still find expression today whether it be in the South, the urban core, prison cells, or public airwaves debating the reality of it all. The magic of this autobiography is that it’s a testament to Malcolm X’s willpower more than anything else; constant growth and synthesis, an unsettling self-awareness, coupled with searing critiques of race, class, and cultural divisions that plagued America. The autobiography is ultimately a story about the power we all have to evolve.

Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who so survive.

Decades later, Dune still is an epic unmatched in genre. The story follows a young Paul Atreides after his noble family moves to Arrakis and loses everything thanks to a trap set by political rivals. Paul’s journey begins as a boy but ends as a messiah through a sweeping narrative that includes reflections on leaders, friends, ecology, religion, power, human nature, technology, and more, all against a backdrop of numerous factions fighting for control of humanity’s future. It is too vast for 100 words; just know that Dune stands tall as one of the greatest wonders of human imagination.

“To blacks, it was abundantly clear what groups like the NAACP and CORE wanted; the NOI, by contrast and largely by design, had no clear social program that realistically could be implemented.”

Malcolm X’s life was complex enough before A Life of Reinvention was published, working to shed further light on how much of a social force the former Nation of Islam minister was. Malcolm’s life was hell and his autobiography, while magnificent, does lend credence to the idea there was an organized progression between his lives as Malcolm Little, Detroit Red, Satan, Malcolm X, and Malik Shabazz. In reality, Malcolm struggled with questions of his identity and image at every step. Many lambaste this book as an attack on Malcolm X, view it as a sincere homage to this man’s legacy.