Pandemonium – Saving Europe
By: Luuk van Middelaar – Leiden University
As member states shut their borders and scrambled for supplies, the European Union at first appeared irrelevant. But once shaken from its torpor by a public cry for help, the EU has coordinated a formidable response to the chaos, including an unprecedented level of financial assistance. This reaction, argues van Middelaar, demonstrates the Union’s enduring strength and how it has learnt to deal with real world events. Indeed, the EU’s response to the pandemic reveals how far it has come on its journey from regulatory body to geopolitical actor.
The pandemic highlighted that Europe’s next challenge will most likely come from its uneasy position between a strategically assertive China and a more self-centred United States. Facing this will require a greater political will than that mustered in the health emergency. To become a true power among powers, Van Middelaar contends, Europe must give firmer political shape to its own historical and cultural identity.
The New Economics: A Manifesto
By: Steve Keen – UCL
In 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the wall of Wittenberg church. He argued that the Church’s internally consistent but absurd doctrines had pickled into a dogmatic structure of untruth. It was time for a Reformation. Half a millennium later, Steve Keen argues that economics needs its own Reformation. In Debunking Economics, he eviscerated an intellectual church – neoclassical economics – that systematically ignores its own empirical untruths and logical fallacies, and yet is still mysteriously worshipped by its scholarly high priests. In this book, he presents his Reformation: a New Economics, which tackles serious issues that today’s economic priesthood ignores, such as money, energy and ecological sustainability. It gives us hope that we can save our economies from collapse and the planet from ecological catastrophe.
The Man from the Future – The Visionary Life of John von Neumann
The smartphones in our pockets and computers like brains. The vagaries of game theory and evolutionary biology. Self-replicating moon bases and nuclear weapons. All bear the fingerprints of one remarkable man: John von Neumann.
Born in Budapest at the turn of the century, von Neumann is one of the most influential scientists to have ever lived. His colleagues believed he had the fastest brain on the planet – bar none. He was instrumental in the Manhattan Project and helped formulate the bedrock of Cold War geopolitics and modern economic theory. He created the first ever programmable digital computer. He prophesied the potential of nanotechnology and, from his deathbed, expounded on the limits of brains and computers – and how they might be overcome.
Taking us on an astonishing journey, Ananyo Bhattacharya explores how a combination of genius and unique historical circumstance allowed a single man to sweep through so many different fields of science, sparking revolutions wherever he went.
The War of Words – A Glossary of Globalization
By: Harold James – Princeton University
Nationalism, conservatism, liberalism, socialism, and capitalism are among the most fiercely debated ideas in contemporary politics. Since these concepts hark back to the nineteenth century, much of their nuanced meaning has been lost, and the words are most often used as epithets that short-circuit productive discussion. In this insightful book, Harold James uncovers the origins of these concepts and examines how the problematic definition and meaning of each term has become an obstacle to respectful communication.
Noting that similar linguistic misunderstandings accompany such newer ideas as geopolitics, neoliberalism, technocracy, and globalism, James argues that a rich historical knowledge of the vocabulary surrounding globalization, politics, and economics—particularly the meaning and the usefulness that drove the original conceptions of the terms—is needed to negotiate the gaps between different understandings and make fruitful political debate once again possible.
