More Books

Navigating the Polycrisis – mapping the futures of capitalism and of the earth Michael Albert (2024) I thought this was by the famous political scientist who wrote about participatory democracy but it turns out to be by a British environmentalist from London who has recently been appointed by the University of Edinburgh. Well worth the read...

The 2020s have gotten off to a rocky start (to put it mildly). Words like “permacrisis” and “polycrisis” have become common currency, reflecting a broadening awareness that ours is an age of interconnected systemic cri­ses with no clear end in sight. The year 2021 was already a year of stress in global energy and food markets, ratcheting geopolitical rivalries, record levels of global military spending, and accumulating risks for the world economy—trends that were all turbocharged by Vladimir Putin’s Febru­ary 2022 invasion of Ukraine. It remains far from certain how these ongo­ing crises will unfold. But we know that deeper challenges loom on the horizon, from the climate and mass extinction crises to future pandemics, “net energy decline” for fossil fuels, an unsustainable and unstable global food system, the brewing new cold war between the United States and China, the simmering specter of far-right populism, the nascent threat of weaponized synthetic biology, and the destabilizing impacts of artificial intelligence on work, war, and human freedom. This book asks where the world-system is headed as a result of these intersecting challenges. It makes three overarching arguments.

• First, I argue that that we must devote more systematic attention to the question of possible futures. “Business-as-usual” will come to an end—whether by choice or by disaster. Thus we need more future-oriented scholarship that can illuminate the possible roads ahead, their branching pathways, the dangers that lurk, and the opportunities that may emerge for progres­sive transformation.

• Second, I argue that to illuminate the space of possible planetary futures, we need a holistic approach that highlights the relations and feedbacks between the numerous challenges that compose our planetary predicament. As more and more analysts recognize, we confront not simply a climate crisis, nor simply a collection of numer­ous isolatable problems that can be studied by separate disciplines, but rather a “polycrisis” or nexus of reciprocally entwined crises character­ized by complex feedback loops, blurred boundaries, cascade effects, and (in many cases) mutual amplification.

• Third, I argue that a theoretical framework informed by complexity theory and world-systems theory can provide a new form of critical-futures analysis capable of grappling with the polycrisis condition. But the point here is not to claim superi­ority for a single theoretical approach, but rather to develop a concep­tual framework that can facilitate synthesis across numerous disciplines and theoretical traditions—including international relations (IR), critical political economy, ecological economics, energy studies, the earth system sciences, critical security studies, and many others.

The goal of this book is thus to develop a new way of thinking about planetary futures that can help us create more useful and comprehen­sive maps of the possibility space. Such an approach must be planetary in scope, voraciously synthetic, and utterly indifferent toward disciplin­ary boundaries. In a word, it must be “transdisciplinary,” in the sense of pragmatist scholarship that emerges directly from problems in the world demanding response (rather than from stale disciplinary debates) and that synthesizes knowledge across numerous disciplinary, theoretical, and methodological traditions.

In this sense, as Sanders van der Leeuw writes, transdisciplinary research analyzes “that which is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond each indi­vidual discipline.” Transdisciplinary research has its risks (as I elaborate below). But it is also the necessary precondition of rigorous futures analysis that can inform contemporary strategies for progressive socioecologi­cal transformation. As the late Immanuel Wallerstein wrote more than forty years ago, our “ability to participate intelligently in the evolution” of the world-system is “dependent on [our] ability to perceive the whole. The more difficult we acknowledge the task to be, the more urgent it is that we start sooner rather than later.” In short, if we think the task is daunting, this is all the more reason to get started now.

Adam Smith’s America – how a Scottish philosopher became an icon of America 
Gloria Liu (2022)

Smith’s reputation as an economist is towering. Economists across different subfields have laid claim to Smith’s legacy in behavioral economics, development economics, “mainline” economics, and most recently “humanomics.” The Wealth of Nations has been assigned on over 5,000 college syllabi nationwide, primarily in economics, but also in history, political science, business, philosophy, literature, sociology, anthropology, religion, and law. In 2021, The Wealth of Nations ranked forty-fourth among millions of books assigned in college courses, putting it ahead of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, Alexis De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and even Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Meanwhile, Smith’s first work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ranked far below, appearing on just over 1,000 syllabi

Despite all this, a persistent theme of Smith scholarship of the last several decades has been that Adam Smith was not an economist, or at least not merely an economist. Rather, he is remembered as an ambitious social scientist of the Enlightenment, whose The Wealth of Nations was but one part of a larger “science of man.” This science sought to reveal and explain the hidden forces that governed human behavior and human society. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759, seventeen years before The Wealth of Nations, Smith explored how and why people learn moral behavior through the process of imaginative projection and sympathetic exchange. Smith also planned a work on the general principles of law and government, as well as a history of literature, philosophy, poetry, and rhetoric, both of which he never completed and ultimately had destroyed before his death in 1790. However, Smith did save a few essays for posthumous publication. Moreover, with the later discovery of student notebooks in 1895 and 1958, readers have been able to access Smith’s lost ideas as they were recorded by his students in his lectures on rhetoric and jurisprudence. Today, readers can appreciate the immense range of Smith’s teaching and writings, which were not limited only to economics and moral philosophy, but also included topics such as theories of language, polite learning, the history of science, literary and artistic criticism, poetry, law, and government. Given the breadth and richness of Smith’s oeuvre, it is hardly surprising that intellectual historians, political theorists, and social scientists often complain that distorted notions of self-interest, free markets, and “the invisible hand” have eclipsed Smith’s moral philosophy, jurisprudence, and more, and that Smith has become little more than an emblem for think tanks or a historical sound bite in textbooks. Yet few scholars have asked—let alone answered—the question of how and why these reductive, sloganized, and often politicized versions of Smith came about in the first place. This book is about who Adam Smith was and who he became in America. It charts how Americans have read, taught, debated, and used Smith’s ideas throughout history. It shows how Smith’s reputation as the “father of economics” is an historical invention and that the foundational status of The Wealth of Nations is a belated construction. More importantly, though, this book tries to make sense of the political work that engaging with Smith has done throughout history and what the implications for our political and economic thinking are. Repeated contestation over Smith’s original intentions, his method, and the contemporary import of his ideas has provided opportunities for past and present readers to define the relationship between ethics and economics, between politics and the economy, between past thought and present action.

Weimar – life on the edge of catastrophe  Katja Hoyer (2026)
Hoyer is an anglo-german historian and here evokes the reality of life in a 
German town from the start of WW1Fool’s Gold – how the bold dream of a small tribe at JP Morgan was corrupted 
by Wall Street Greed and unleashed a catastrophe Gillian Tett (2009) 
This by the famous financial journalist who just happens to be an 
anthropologist

The story of the great credit boom and bust is not a saga that can be

neatly blamed on a few greedy or evil individuals. It is a story of how an

entire financial system went wrong as a result of flawed incentives within

banks and investment funds, as well as the ratings agencies; warped

regulatory structures; and a lack of oversight. It is a tale best understood

through the observation of human foibles, as much through economic or

financial analysis. And though plenty of greedy bankers—and perhaps a

few mad, or evil, ones, too—play crucial parts in the drama, the tragedy of

this story is that so many of those swept up in the lunacy were not acting

out of deliberately bad motives.

On the contrary, in the case of the J.P. Morgan team members who form

the backbone of this tale, the bitter irony is that they first developed their

derivatives ideas in the hope that they would be good for the financial

system (as well, of course, for their bank and their bonuses). Even today,

after all the devastation, some of the tools and innovations developed

during the credit boom should be seen as potentially valuable for twentyfirst-

century finance. In order to understand how that could be, though, a

deep understanding of how and precisely why they came to be so abused is

vital. I offer this journey through the story as one attempt to begin to come

to grips with the answers to that crucial question

A Few More Books to Tempt You

Adam Przeworski was born in Poland and has become one of the US's most famous political scientists - here he was interviewed in 2003 by Gerardo Munck  

The Insatiable Machine – how capitalism conquered the world Trevor Jackson 
(2026) reviewed in Jacobin here 
This book is a history of the economic system that we call capitalism. 
It explains the origins, spread, and internal dynamics of this system, with the 
intention of explaining to nonexperts how the world we live in got to be the way it is. 
The book’s scope is the subset of the world economy that can reasonably be 
termed “capitalist,” beginning in dispersed and sporadic parts of the Atlantic world 
in the 16th century and continuing until the global dominance of capitalism 
at the onset of the 20th. In other words, it begins roughly during the life of 
Martin Luther and ends during the life of Vladimir Lenin, and it will use each of them 
(Luther in 1517, Lenin in 1917, and with Isaac Newton in the middle in 1717) 
as an illustrative example of how the global economy changed over the course 
of centuries. This is a book about where capitalism came from, 
how it spread around the world, and how it came to be the dominant way of 
organizing human life. There are good reasons to tell this history again, 
and in a new way. The first is the simple fact that capitalism is the economic 
system we live in today: It spans more of the globe and encompasses more 
aspects of human life than any economic system ever has before. 
Since at least the 2008 crisis, there has been an increasing sense that it may 
have gotten out of control and might now threaten democracy, society, 
the environment, and the habitability of the planet. 
But unlike countries, people, or events, capitalism is an abstraction with 
no agreed-upon definition and no physical location. There is no single place 
to find it, or single person in charge of it, and no single way to understand or 
study it. So how do we tell the story of capitalism? 
The place to start is to think about capital, and capitalists, which is a form of 
power and group of people distinctive to capitalism. 
Over the past half millennium, capitalists have been among the most 
important agents of change in human history, and capital has been the central 
tool they have used to transform the world. 
Historians care a great deal about agency, by which they mean the ability 
of people to effect change in the world. Agency is closely related to power: 
In order to change something, someone must have the power to do so. Artificial Intelligence, Politics and Political Science ed Tucker and 
Persily (2026)

At the time that I launched the Task Force, my untested hypothesis was that political scientists had sorted into three “cultures” on AI. The first being a culture of embrace among those early andeager adopters who took to AI models and tools like a five-year old to their first Lego set. The second being a culture of denial among the Never AI-ers, who would just as eagerly teletransport to an alternate universe where AI did not exist and where its future discovery would be unimaginable. And the third, probably biggest, being a bloated middle culture of those who are infelicitously torn on alternate days between being AI-curious and AI-skeptical, who have dipped their toes into its potential but are not ready to fully reckon with the scope of change that AI portends.

In his essay, C.P. Snow entreated a closing of the gap between cultures so that the pressing problem of his time – global inequality – might be tackled together. In the interceding decades since his essay, global inequality has only deepened. To that wicked problem we now add newer menacing threats from polarized polities and backsliding democracies to the fragmentation of shared facts and the existential threats from climate change, all in a changing political environment of diminishing public investments in knowledge and research. AI may ameliorate these threats, or it may aggravate and accelerate them. What is clear in any scenario is that AI is upon us and that AI will impact our ability to teach, research, and learn about any of these pressing problems.

My aspirations for the Task Force were thus to agenda-set for a reckoning between cultures in political science on AI. Concretely, I hoped to extract from the collective wisdom of Task Force members an empirical foundation and a set of apposite tools and theories to meet AI’s challenges and opportunities. This volume far exceeds my highest expectations. Readers will of course judge for themselves. What should nonetheless be clear by any generous reading is that Persily and Tucker have masterfully orchestrated a remarkably broad and insightful set of contributions that will inform all of us on how AI may alter how we study politics, how we teach about politics, and what politics itself will look like.

Then a change of mood – with a youtube interlude - Berlin in 1933 – 
through the eyes of diplomats

Carbon Democracy – political power in the age of oil Timothy Mitchell (2011)
 reviewed in 3 journals here, here and here

Beyond the Wall – East Germany 1949-90 Katja Hoyer (2022) 
Katja is an East German historian who has made her mark in both Britain 
and Germany with her writing

An Education – my life might have turned out differently if I had just said no 
Lynn Barber (2009) A celebrity journalist now in here 70s tells all

Jobs for the Boys – patronage and the state Merilee Grindle (2018)

Methods of appointments to public office seem a dull focus for a book about the politics of change. Yet how public servants are recruited, how their careers unfold, and how they think about their jobs are central to the historical evolution of countries around the globe and to the conflicts that punctuate and shape that evolution. Kings and parliaments, politicians and their parties, reformers and moralists, demo crats and authoritarians have, throughout history, struggled to control how public offi ce was acquired and used. Their conflicts shaped institutions of governance in widely divergent circumstances and help explain the differences among them. Far from dull, these struggles are intriguing; they are also consequential for states.

This book is about these struggles. It considers how patronage, as a mechanism for staffing the public service, was important in the histories of a variety of countries but also how these systems were challenged and, at times, replaced by those who sought to institutionalize Weberian civil ser vice systems. Research and reflection about these issues address a number of themes that have been of interest to me in prior work— patronage and its uses in government, the role of institutions in shaping the way po liti cal decisions are made and the content of those decisions, and the pro cesses that account for institutional creation or innovation.

Long ago, I studied how a finely constructed patronage system in Mexico was an essential factor in promoting policy change and accomplishing some of the modern activities of government, even while it buoyed an unjust political system and encouraged corrupt behavior (see Grindle 1977). Over the years, I have seen how patronage systems in other Latin American countries are critically important in electoral dynamics, policy change initiatives, regime stability and failure, organi zational trajectories, and concerns about corruption and mismanagement. In writing this book, I have had the opportunity to study a series of initiatives to replace such institutions with merit- based civil service systems. Manichean rhetoric often accompanies these efforts at reform, making them seem essential and even inevitable, yet patronage systems resist change with remarkable consistency.

I have tried to understand such struggles against the background of countries that were— eventually—successful in altering the institutions that manage recruitment to the public sector. In doing so, similarities across countries in terms of how change happens became as evident as the differences among them in how legacies of the past colored what was possible in introducing reform. This work suggests some ideas about why institutional change often does not happen, why and when it sometimes does, and how winners and losers grapple over the shape of change long after major policy decisions have been made.

Jobs for the Boys considers the ubiquity and flexibility of patronage systems in the public ser vice of a signifi cant number of countries, explores the historical process through which they have been replaced by meritbased civil ser vice systems, and attests to ongoing struggles over how the public ser vice is or ga nized and managed. It takes a historical and processoriented perspective on how systems work and how they change. It makes a claim for the primacy of politics in the construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of systems of appointment to public office.

Thus, in contrast to what is often discussed in technical and administrative language— the language of job descriptions, pay scales, criteria for promotion, conditions for dismissal and retirement, rights to pensions and benefi ts, mechanisms of control and delegation, bud get constraints— I focus attention on larger themes of the persis tence, change, and consequences of institutions of governance and on the struggles between advocates of change and those who seek to undermine reform initiatives. My purpose is to explore what we can learn from history and how that knowledge might help in understanding contemporary efforts to alter institutional parameters in government.

STILL READING

Two books with almost the same title – something which always intrigues me – didn’t they realise? Is one actually improving the other? 

See for yourself..
The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Rentier Capitalism – the political economy of the 20th 
and 21st centuries Luiz Bresser-Pereira (2025)
The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Rentier Liberal Capitalism David Kotz (2017)

The Spirit of Place Lawrence Durrell (1956) One of my favourite writers turns 
his hand to travel
Abandoning Democracy for the Nation Filip Milacic (2026) This text about 
how democracy is being reversed by nationalism is one of those with the 
annoying habit of naming books as “elements”

The AI Mirror – how to reclaim our humanity in an age of machine thinking 
Shannon Vallor (2024) A philosophy professor writing about artificial intelligence 
sounds a good way into a subject I find rather boring

Wealth and Power ed M Bennet (2023)

Is political equality viable when a capitalist economy unequally distributes private property? This book examines the nexus between wealth and politics and asks how institutions and citizens should respond to it.

Theories of democracy and property have often ignored the ways in which the rich attempt to convert their wealth into political power, implicitly assuming that politics is isolated from economic forces. This book brings the moral and political links between wealth and power into clear focus. The chapters are divided into three thematic sections.

• Part I analyses wealth and politics from the perspective of various political traditions, such as liberalism, republicanism, anarchism, and Marxism.

• Part II addresses the economic sphere, and looks at the political influence of corporations, philanthropists, and commons-based organisations.

• Finally, Part III turns to the political sphere and looks at the role of political parties and constitutions, and phenomena such as corruption and lobbying.

Fred Harrison is an interesting and understandable economist with a fixation 
about land, explained in 3 books - 

• The Corruption of Economics Gaffney and Harrison (1994) 280pp

• Boom Bust – house prices, banking and the depression of 2010 Fred Harrison (
  1999-2005)

• The Silver Bullet Fred Harrison (The International Union for Land Valuation 2008)

Democracy in Hard Places ed Scott Mainwaring and T Masoud (2022)

They tame grasping, politically ambitious militaries; transcend influences and pressures from autocratic neighbors; and cope with polarized political parties. Without denying that democracy is easier to build and hold onto in societies that are free of such hurdles, this book asks what we can learn about strengthening democracy from those that managed to leap over them. By theorizing about democratic survival from such cases— which, in the parlance of social science, lie “off the regression line”— we capture what Michael Coppedge identifies as “the greatest potential to innovate and challenge old ways of thinking” (Coppedge 2002, 16). Are democracies in hard places the equivalent of lottery winners—Democracies in hard places overcome underdevelopment, ethnol dramatic exceptions to fundamental rules? Or is there something systematic that can be gleaned from such cases about how democracy can be erected and upheld around the world?

To answer these questions, this book presents nine case studies— written by leading experts in the discipline— of episodes in which democracy emerged and survived against long odds. The cases are drawn from almost every region of the world that formed part of what Samuel Huntington called the “third wave” of democracy, which began in southern Europe in the mid- 1970s, spread to Latin America in the late 1970s and 1980s, and to Eastern Europe and sub- Saharan Africa in the 1990s. Six of the cases are ones of long- term democratic survival— Argentina (1983– present), Benin (1991– 2019), India (1977– present), Indonesia (1999– present), South Africa (1995– present), and Timor- Leste (2002– present). The other three have more mixed democratic records— Georgia (2005– present), Moldova (1995– 2005, 2010– present), and Ukraine (1995– 98, 2007– 14). In each case, many of the conditions conventionally associated with durable democracy were either attenuated or absent.

Notes on a Foreign Country – an american abroad in a post-american world 
Suzy Hansen (2017)

Given my interest in writing about foreign places, this is one of the most insightful 
books about countries “revealing their souls” – despite being written by a young 
US woman  

Then 4 books by the same author who was first an adviser to 
Wilson and Callaghan and, eventually, a Minister

Downing St Diary – with Wilson in no 10 Bernard Donnoghue (2005)
volume two  - with James Callaghan (2009)
A Reluctant Minister under Tony Blair Bernard Donnoghue (2016)
Westminster Diary – farewell to office vol 2 Bernard Donnoghue (2018)

Great Planning Disasters Peter Hall (1981) Hall was an urbanist

More Reading

For the 2^nd month running, more than 100,000 clicks this last month (actually 154k!). My recent “flicks” rather than proper reading include -

From Life Itself – Turkey, Istanbul and a neighbourhood of Erdogan Suzy Hansen (2026) 
reviewed here 
Outsourcing Repression – everyday state power in contemporary China 
Lynette Ong (2022) A useful correction to my admiration of the Chinese State
In Search of Berlin John Kampfner (2023) Kampfer lived in Berlin for more than 
a decade
Downfall – lessons for our final century Ilhan Niaz (2022) A voice from 
Pakistan exposes the western myths
Five Irish Women – the Irish Republic 1960-2018 E Nolan (2019) 
insights into the lives of Edna O’Brien, Sinnead O’Connor, Nuala MacFaolain etc
The Edinburgh Companion to Political Realism ed Mutt and Butterworth (2018) 
I count myself a realist – having never forgotten EH Carr’s “The Twenty years’ 
Crisis 1919-39” written in 1946 and read at University
Gaian Economics - Living Well Within Limits ed J Dawson et al (2010) 
useful for reminding us of the fate which awaits us 
The Anthropology of Ireland Thomas Wilson and Hastings Donnan (2007) 
I’ve only once driven around Ireland in the 1970s although I’ve visited both 
Belfast and Dublin
American Fascists – the American Right and the war on America 
Chris Hedges (2006) Hedges is one of my favourite writers
The Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations ed Anthony Jay (1997) 
Jay was the writer behind “Yes Minister”
Isaiah Berlin – an interpretation of his thought John Gray (1996) 
an English philosopher dares to take on the old sage
Socialisms – old and new Tony Wright (1996) A useful guide from a 
Labour politician who was almost a social democrat!
Globalisation and Contestation – the new counter-movement 
Ronaldo Munck (2007) Another thoughtful book which uses Karl Polyani’s 
concept

Ch 1 introduces the globalisation debate. ….We examine the paradigms 

in contention, the ways in which it is changing the world around us and 

the critical problem of ‘governance’, that is, how free market expansion 

can be managed and made sustainable. This chapter also introduces the Polanyi problematic – the tension between free market expansion and societal reaction – that frames the analysis of the great counter-movement against globalization emerging in recent years. My basic argument is that the Polanyi problematic – duly ‘scaled up’ for the era of globalization – provides us with a powerful yet subtle optic for examining the intertwined processes of free market expansion and societal reactions to it.

In Chapter 2, I introduce the various approaches to social movements 
underlying the ‘contestation’ element of my title. That leads me into the 
distinction between the ‘old’ social movements, such as those of labour and 
nationalism, versus the ‘new’ social movements such as the environmental 
and women’s movements. The next section explores the distinctions and 
relationships between ‘progressive’ movements for social change and those 
that seemingly articulate a ‘reactionary’ response to globalization today. 
To simplify we need to understand the ‘bad’ as well as the ‘good’ social 
movements. To conclude I offer some Polanyian perspectives on 
globalization and social movements to complement and answer the Polanyi 
problematic raised in Chapter 1. 

In Chapter 3 we turn from social movement theory to a brief historical 
overview of transnational social movements that did not begin, of course, 
in 1999 in Seattle when the global media detected an anti-globalization 
movement. Modern capitalist society – and the expansion of the free 
market as its driver in particular – has always generated counter-movements.  
Was the colonial revolution simply about nationalism or did it contain 
elements of transnational solidarity? 
Finally, what is the significance and what are the prospects of global civil 
society today and the new cosmopolitanism its proponents advance?

Chapter 4 takes up the story of the contemporary counter-globalization 
movement, which many symbolically associate with the ‘Battle of Seattle’ in 
1999, when protests prevented the World Trade Organization (WTO) 
from reaching a conclusion. 
But Seattle did not spring out of a clear blue sky and we trace the much 
longer lasting and generalized revolt against neoliberalism, especially in 
the global South. This chapter explores the various theoretical perspectives 
developed since Seattle to account for the widest ranging set of 
transnational protests since the global revolution of 1968. 
Are these movements simply attempts to ‘civilize’ globalization and 
make it more socially accountable or are we at the start of another great 
anti-capitalist revolt comparable to that at the start of the twentieth century? 

Chapter 5 moves from the street demonstrations of Seattle (1999), 
Genoa (2001) and Edinburgh (2005) to the transnational political arena, 
such as the World Social Forum that first met in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2001 
to proclaim that ‘another world is possible’. In spite of their distinctive 
dynamics the human rights movement, the women’s movement and 
the World Social Forum are all exemplars of the way transnational 
social movements have created a space for themselves on the global 
political scene. What does this mean for the future of movements 
seeking to foment positive social transformation? 
Has the transnational level of political activity transcended the national scen 
as some globalists believe? In brief, we need to cast a retrospective 
look on transnational political fora to consider what their achievements 
and limitations are. 

Chapter 6 turns towards what we might call ‘local transnationalism’ 
by which I mean social movements that have an international orientation 
but which seek to ‘embed’ themselves in local communities. 
The environmental movement was the first to coin the phrase ‘think globally, 
act locally’ quite early on in the development of globalization as we know it. 
This is also the movement that has probably been most successful in 
creating an impact on the ‘mainstream’ agenda. 
Workers’ organizations have often subscribed to internationalist ideologies – 
‘Workers of the World Unite!’ – but in practice most workers’ struggles 
have been local in character. And peasants, as workers on the land, 
have been most rooted of all in the locality and the community, yet today 
there is an active transnational peasants movement 

The Total State – how liberal democracies become tyrannies Auron Macintyre (2024) 
A repulsively right-wing view which excoriates the state

STOIC SKILLS, IRAN AND POSSESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM

The Stoic Skills substack identifies key skills – critical thinking, attention management, financial literacy, adaptability and self-reflection with the latter being the most important.

Then a couple of recent books about IRAN

Post-revolutionary Conditions – renewed versions of the Iranian Freedom 
Struggle Alborz Ghandehari (2025)
The Long War on Iran – new events, old questions Behrooz Ghamani (2025) 
who spent some years in prison for his Marxist beliefs with a serious cancer, 
then released and allowed to migrate to the US where he is now a sociology 
Professor

Possessive Individualism was a topic which excited me in my university days which has been the subject of no fewer than three books in recent years

Possessive Individualism - a crisis of capitalism Daniel Bromley  (2019)
Reconsidering CB McPerson – from possesive individualism to democratic theory 
and beyond Phillip Hansen (2019)
The Political Thought of CB McPherson Frank Cunningham (2019)
The Political Theory of Possesive Individualism CB McPherson (1962 - 1990 ed)

Cannibal Capitalism Nancy Fraser (2022)    
Politics Without Politicians – the case for citizen rule Helene Landemore (2026) 
A useful look at what rendition offers for electoral politics
Hyperpolitics – extreme politicisation without political consequences Anton Jaeger 
(2026) A short book – a mere 100pp
Braver New World – the countries making things others won't John Kampfner (2026) 
A book which tries to draw lessons from the advantages of other countries eg how 
the Japanese deal positively with old age; how the Finns educate children; or how 
the Indonesians deal with the sick 
Tribal Politics – how Brexit divided Britain Sara Hobolt and James Lilley (2026) 
A more sociological look at how Brexit has divided the UK than the usual talk of 
“anywheres and somewheres”
Public Administration and the Illiberal Challenge Michael Bauer (2026) a short book 
(96pp) which 
addresses the illiberal challenge facing public administration amidst the rise of 
authoritarian populism and democratic backsliding. It investigates how populist 
governments seek to reshape state bureaucracies, often undermining liberal 
democratic principles such as pluralism, expertise, and constitutional safeguards, 
and examines how public administration must respond to safeguard democratic 
integrity. Drawing on global examples, the book identifies strategies of populist 
administrative manipulation, patterns of bureaucratic compliance and resistance 
and critical gaps in scholarly understanding. It develops a framework for 
analyzing these dynamics and proposes normative principles to defend active 
democratic bureaucracy. Through theoretical inquiry and practical recommendations, 
it advocates for robust, ethically grounded public administration capable of 
countering illiberal pressures. Its central thesis underscores the need to restore 
the intellectual foundation of public administration as a social science deeply 
embedded in and committed to the democratic policy process. 

The Russia-Ukraine War and its Origins Ivan Katchanovski (2026) 
Probably the best book on the war
The Fraud – Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the crisis of british democracy  
Paul Holden (2025) A detailed and frightening account of the extent of Starmer’s 
betrayal of the hopes of millions of Brits with extensive notes 
The Weaponization of Expertise – how elites fuel populism Jacob Russell 
and Dennis Patterson (2025)
The Technological Republic – hard power, soft belief and the future of the West 
Alex Karp (2025) Karp is linked to the founders of PALANTIR and anything 
written by him should be taken with a pinch of strong salt.

DEALING WITH VALUES

I had missed Mark Carney’s latest book Values – Building a better word for all which came out in 2021. Its summary reads thus -

Whenever I could step back from what felt like daily crisis management, the same deeper issues loomed. What is value? How is it grounded? Which values underpin value? Can the very act of valuation shape our values and constrain our choices? How do the valuations of markets affect the values of our society? Does the narrowness of our vision, the poverty of our perspective, mean we undervalue what matters to our collective wellbeing?

These are the questions that this book seeks to explore. It will examine how our society came to embody Wilde’s aphorism –knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing. How by elevating belief in the market to an inviolable truth we moved from a market economy to a market society. And how we can turn this around. In many respects, this book is a belated response to a question posed a few summers ago when a range of policymakers, business people, academics, labour leaders and charity workers gathered at the Vatican to discuss the future of the market system. Pope Francis surprised us by joining the lunch and sharing a parable. He observed that:

Our meal will be accompanied by wine. Now, wine is many things. It has a bouquet, colour and richness of taste that all complement the food. It has alcohol that can enliven the mind. Wine enriches all our senses. At the end of our feast, we will have grappa. Grappa is one thing: alcohol. Grappa is wine distilled.

He continued:

Humanity is many things – passionate, curious, rational, altruistic, creative, self-interested. But the market is one thing: self-interest. The market is humanity distilled.

And then he challenged us:

Your job is to turn the grappa back into wine, to turn the market back into humanity.

This isn’t theology. This is reality. This is the truth. This book draws on my experience in the private sector and public policy to examine the relationship between value and values. How they shape each other, and how, by doing so, they can determine our livelihoods, identities and possibilities. And how, once we recognise these dynamics, we can turn grappa back into wine.

The book is divided into three parts. Part I examines various concepts of value and their roots in political philosophy and, more recently and narrowly, in economic theory and financial practice. It uses a series of valuation paradoxes from art to the environment to illustrate the potential disconnects between valuations in markets and the values of society.

Values and value are related but distinct. In the most general terms, values represent the principles or standards of behaviour; they are judgements of what is important in life. Examples include integrity, fairness, kindness, excellence, sustainability, passion and reason. Value is the regard that something is held to deserve – the importance, worth or usefulness of something. Both value and values are judgements. And therein lies the rub. Increasingly, the value of something, of some act or of someone is equated with their monetary value, a monetary value that is determined by the market. The logic of buying and selling no longer applies only to material goods but increasingly governs the whole of life from the allocation of healthcare to education, public safety and environmental protection. When we decide that certain goods and services can be bought and sold, we decide that they can be treated as commodities, as instruments of profit and use. And we assume, again at least implicitly, that the values of society will remain unchanged in the process. But as Part I shows, when everything is relative, nothing is immutable.

To draw out the relationship between value and values, Chapters 3 and 4 explain how money is used to measure value and what gives money its value. The historic formal backing of money by gold is contrasted with its current informal backing by institutions like central banks. It reveals how the value of such fiat money is grounded in underlying values of trust, integrity and transparency. Chapter 5 then looks forward, exploring key questions about the future of money including whether cryptocurrencies could be solutions to the mistrust of central authorities and how trust scores in social media (and the surveillance state) could ‘monetise’ social capital.

Chapter 6 shows that our deepest challenges are rooted in the narrowing of our values to market fundamentalism, and it explains how this is contributing to the growing exclusivity of capitalism and the rise of populism. In particular, it argues that, just as all ideologies are prone to extremes, capitalism loses its sense of moderation when the belief in the power of the market enters the realm of faith. In the decades prior to the financial crisis, such

radicalism came to dominate economic ideas and became a pattern of social behaviour. In short, we have moved from a market economy to a market society, and this is now undermining our basic social contract of relative equality of outcomes, equality of opportunity and fairness across generations.—

Part II explores the three most significant crises of the twenty-first century – of credit, Covid and climate.

In each case, it examines the underlying causes and describes policy responses. The book argues that, when taken together, these events were driven by a common crisis of values, and that our response could begin to recast the relationship between values and value, providing the basis for the strategies for individual, companies, investors and countries that are described in Part III.

As Chapter 7 shows, market fundamentalism contributed directly to the global credit crisis, in the form of light-touch regulation, a belief that bubbles cannot be identified and a misplaced confidence in a new era. Authorities and market participants fell under the spell of the three lies of finance, believing that ‘this time is different’, that ‘markets are always right’ and that ‘markets are moral’.

Rather than reinforcing social capital, we consumed it. Banks were deemed too big to fail, operating in a ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ bubble. Equity markets blatantly favoured technologically empowered institutions over retail investors. With too few market participants feeling responsible for the system, bad behaviour went unchecked, proliferated and eventually became the norm. In such an environment, means and ends conflate all too easily. Value becomes abstract and relative, and the pull of the crowd overwhelms the integrity of the individual. The resulting unjust sharing of risk and reward widens inequalities and corrodes the social fabric on which finance depends.

Chapter 8 reviews my experience leading the G20’s efforts to create a safer, simpler and fairer financial system. It argues that in order for financial reforms to rebuild social capital they must balance the tension between free-market capitalism, which reinforces the primacy of the individual at the expense of the system, and social capital, which requires from individuals a sense of responsibility for the system. In other words, a sense of self must be accompanied by a sense of solidarity.

Chapter 9 describes the causes and dynamics of Covid-19 which has wrought twin crises of health and economics, both unprecedented in our lifetimes. This global pandemic has moved with alarming speed and virulence because of deep global interconnectedness, but its severity has been magnified by our failure to prepare adequately despite ample and varied warnings. For too long, we undervalued resilience and have been forced to pay the heaviest costs. The economic shock has resulted in deep recessions and enormous jobs losses, and it now threatens to widen the fissures of inequality in the years to come. Despite these tragedies, as Chapter 10 outlines, this crisis could help reverse the causality between value and values. When pushed, societies have prioritised health first and foremost, and then looked to address the economic consequences. Cost–benefit analyses, steeped in calculations of the Value of Statistical Lives, have mercifully been overruled, as the values of economic dynamism and efficiency have been joined by those of solidarity, fairness, responsibility and compassion.

Basing our response on objectives derived from these values, and not on an economic determination of where the net benefit lies, will be the key to building back better. This is completely achievable; our limited historical experience with such epochal events is that afterwards the aspirations of society focus not just on the rate of growth but also on its direction and its quality. In the aftermath of the health crisis, it’s reasonable to expect public demands for improvements in the quality and coverage of social support and medical care, for greater attention to be paid to managing tail risks and for more heed to be given to the advice of scientific experts.

How we address the climate crisis will be the test of these new values. After all, climate change is an issue that i) involves the entire world, from which no one will be able to self-isolate, ii) is predicted by science to be the central risk tomorrow, and iii) we can address only if we act in advance and in solidarity. Climate change is the ultimate betrayal of intergenerational equity. It imposes costs on future generations that the current generation has no direct incentives to fix.

As Chapter 11 explains, we face the ‘tragedy of the horizon’ in which the catastrophic impacts of climate change will be felt beyond the traditional perspectives of most business, investors, politicians and central bankers. In other words, once the physical effects of climate change become the defining issue for a critical mass of decision makers, it could be too late to stop their catastrophic effects.

Like the financial crisis, the tragedy of the horizon represents a crisis of valuation and values. Compare the valuations of Amazon and the Amazon region. Amazon’s $1.5 trillion equity valuation reflects the market’s judgement that the company will be very profitable for a very long time. In contrast, it is only once the rainforest is cleared and a cattle herd or soya plantation is placed on the newly opened land that the Amazon region begins to have market value. The costs to the climate and biodiversity of destroying the rainforest appear on no ledger.

Chapter 11 highlights how changes in climate policies, new technologies and growing physical risks will prompt reassessments of virtually every financial asset. Firms that align their business models with the transition to a net-zero carbon economy will be rewarded handsomely; those that fail to adapt will cease to exist.

To address the climate crisis we need innovation on every front, and Chapter 12 on climate change details how the financial system can be retooled to make the markets a part of the solution. With comprehensive climate disclosure, a transformation in climate risk management by banks and the mainstreaming of sustainable investment, we can ensure that every financial decision takes climate change into account.

This new sustainable finance can work alongside private innovation and aggressive government action to help deliver net zero. The importance of this goal cannot be overstated: the task is large, the window of opportunity is short and the risks are existential. How our economy conceptualises value has been standing in the way.

Both the climate and Covid crises demonstrate the value of society forging a consensus around common goals, and then letting market dynamism determine how to achieve them rather than pursuing a trade-off between what society values and optimising current financial values as priced in the market.

Part III of the book builds on the responses to the three crises to draw out common themes and to create action plans for leaders, companies, investors and countries. It concludes with a new platform-based approach to managing the global commons in the wake of the demise of the rules-based international order.

To rebuild an inclusive social contract, it is essential to recognise the importance of values and beliefs in economic life. Economic and political philosophers from Adam Smith (1759) to Friedrich Hayek (1960) have long stressed that beliefs are part of inherited social capital, which provides the social framework for the free market. The experience of the three crises suggests that the common values and beliefs that underpin a successful economy are:

– dynamism to help create solutions and channel human creativity;

– resilience to make it easier to bounce back from shocks while protecting the most vulnerable in society;

– sustainability with long-term perspectives that align incentives across generations;

– fairness, particularly in markets to sustain their legitimacy;

– responsibility so that individuals feel accountable for their actions;

– solidarity whereby citizens recognise their obligations to each other and share a sense of community and society; and

– humility to recognise the limits of our knowledge, understanding and power so that we act as custodians seeking to improve the common good.

These beliefs and values are not fixed. They need to be nurtured. Just as any revolution eats its children, unchecked market fundamentalism devours the social capital essential for the longterm dynamism of capitalism itself. Markets on their own will never be adequately incentivised to build social capital, which requires a sense of purpose and common values among individuals, companies, investors and countries. Conversely, values are like muscles that grow with exercise. The book therefore turns to the imperatives of how to recognise and reinforce these essential social foundations of the common good.

Chapter 13 on leadership examines the traits and behaviours necessary for leaders to catalyse change, help their colleagues realise their potential and encourage their organisations to fulfil their missions. To inspire the confidence and trust for their initiatives to be most effective, leaders must engage, explain and emote. Leaders must continually earn their legitimacy, and to maximise the impact of their organisation they must stay true to its purpose – a purpose grounded in the objectives of clients, colleagues and community. Great leadership isn’t just effective, it’s also ethical, building both value and virtue through its exercise.

How purposeful companies create value is the focus of Chapter 14. It reviews the evidence of the alignment between purpose and long-term value creation – dynamism – from the perspectives of both companies and societies. The chapter then describes various strategies for purposeful corporations to benefit all stakeholders. True corporate purpose drives engagement with stakeholders, including employees (by being a responsible and responsive employer), suppliers and customers (through honest, fair and lasting relationships in the supply chain) and communities (as good corporate citizens that make full contributions to society). Corporate purpose embeds solidarity at local, national and supranational levels, and recognises the paramount need for sustainability across generations. By uniting broader interests behind a common purpose, purposeful companies can be more impactful, dynamic and profitable.

Chapter 15 then outlines how investors can both reinforce these initiatives and be rewarded by them. A critical element of rebalancing value and values will be developing and embedding comprehensive and transparent approaches to measuring stakeholder value creation by companies. The chapter shows how best to measure sustainable and financial value, the dynamic relationship between these two sources of value and the strategies investors can pursue to maximise both.

Sustainable investing is developing into an essential tool to bring the values of the market into line with those of society. It improves the measurement of what society values from workplace diversity to the Sustainable Development Goals, the SDGs. It is being deployed to increase shareholder value through multiple channels by helping companies to attract and retain the best people, to increase their resilience, improve efficiency, align better with stakeholders and maintain social licence. When social needs – such as climate change– are tackled with a profitable business model, the answers to many of the most deeply rooted problems we face become scalable and self-sustaining.

The many policy strands discussed in the book are brought together in Chapter 16 to develop a framework for countries to build value for all. This is built on traditional foundations of strong institutions, and investments in physical and human capital. Given the far-reaching changes wrought by new technologies from artificial intelligence to bio-engineering, there must be a heavy emphasis on mandatory workforce training, universal skills development, the balancing of rights of all stakeholders, incentives to promote an enterprise society, and free trade for small and medium-sized enterprises.

Country strategies must make existing markets work better and build new markets. But markets alone won’t solve our most intractable problems. We need political processes to define our goals and objectives – to set our values. Markets can then be marshalled to help discover and drive solutions in a form of mission-oriented capitalism. As we shall see, however, given that the marketisation of society has created some of our problems, the market simply cannot be the answer to every question.

Carney’s book is best read in conjunction with Mariana Mazzucato‘s The Value of Everything – making and taking in the global economy (2018)