The election of Donald Trump has exposed American society's profound crisis of hope. By 2016 a generation of shrinking employment, rising inequality, the attack on public education, and the shredding of the social safety net, had set the stage for stunning insurgencies at opposite ends of the political spectrum. Against this dire background, Ronald Aronson offers an answer. He argues for a unique conception of social hope, one with the power for understanding and acting upon the present si...

Earthly Engagements: Reading Sartre after the Holocene brings together scholars from the Sartre studies community to think through the planetary ecological crisis. Edited by Matthew C. Ally and Damon Boria, the collection explores ways in which Sartre’s existential thought can be read socio-ecologically, illuminating the tightly imbricated earthly and worldly crises of our post-Holocene epoch. Contributors variously discuss phenomenology, ethics, politics, ontology, and metaphysics. Earthl...

Ronald Aronson has a mission: to demonstrate that a life without religion can be coherent, moral, and committed. Optimistic and stirring, Living Without God is less interested in attacking religion than in developing a positive philosophy for atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, skeptics, and freethinkers. Aronson proposes contemporary answers to Immanuel Kant's three great questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope? Grounded in the sense that we are deeply...

Governor General's Award Winner Tenth Anniverary Edition, with a new preface Our society, John Ralston Saul argues in his 1995 CBC Massey Lectures, is only superficially based on the individual and democracy. Increasingly it is conformist and corporatist, a society in which legitimacy lies with specialist or interest groups and decisions are made through constant negotiations between these groups. The paradox of our situation is that knowledge has not made us conscious. Instead, we have so...

The greatest obstacle to sound economic policy is not entrenched special interests or rampant lobbying, but the popular misconceptions, irrational beliefs, and personal biases held by ordinary voters. This is economist Bryan Caplan's sobering assessment in this provocative and eye-opening book. Caplan argues that voters continually elect politicians who either share their biases or else pretend to, resulting in bad policies winning again and again by popular demand.Boldly calling i...

The national bestseller that shows how the American Dream is languishing, surpassed worldwide by a powerful alternative in the lifestyle of the new Europe.

George Soros is one of the world's leading philanthropists. Over the past 30 years, he has provided more than 7 billion to his network of foundations, known collectively as the Open Society Institute, for projects around the world and in the United States.In this e-book, Soros writes in detail for the first time about his vision for philanthropy. "I have always been leery of philanthropy," he writes, "Philanthropy is supposed to be devoted to the benefit of others,...

In his 1964 CBC Massey Lectures C. B. Macpherson examines the rival ideas of democracy - the communist, Third World, and Western-liberal variants - and their impact on one another. He suggests that the West need not fear any challenge to liberal democracy if it is prepared to re-examine and alter its own values.

Brzezinski provides a stark and realistic look at the world's economy and moral crisis in a brilliant analysis of today's geopolitical order.If America is to reassert its moral legitimacy, Brzezinski argues, it must address its basic dilemmas, including deepening poverty, inadequate health care and education, a greedy wealthy class opposed to progressive taxation, and the mass media's promotion of sex and violence. In the new world of rival global power clusters, B...

An incisive political tract that calls for a return to humanist values: equality, liberty, a return to community, mutual respect, freedom from poverty, and an end to theocracy and fundamentalism. The authors argue that a return to these values constitutes “a path to hope,” leading the way out of the present worldwide malaise brought on by economic collapse, moral failure, and an ignorance of history.For the authors, 20th-century fascism was no mere abstraction—it w...

How should state-sponsored atrocities be judged and remembered? This controversial question animates contemporary debates on transitional justice and reconciliation. This book reconsiders the legacies of two institutions that transformed the theory and practice of transitional justice. Whereas the Nuremberg Trials exemplified the promise of legalism and international criminal justice, South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission promoted restorative justice and truth commissions. Lee...

A practical and insightful look at what leaders do, how and why they do it, and the challenges they faceLeadership is essential to collective human endeavor, from setting and accomplishing goals for a neighborhood block association, to running a Fortune 500 company, to mobilizing the energies of a nation. Political philosophers have focused largely on how to prevent leaders from abusing their power, yet little attention has been paid to what it actually feels like ...