Social Science Theory

This book explores the evolutionary roots of loving our team and hating the enemy team, and why groupish caveman instincts linger in our minds today. It answers: If tribalism is hardwired into us, what changed in the last twenty years? How did partisanship get so loud, toxic, and obnoxious, and ruin last Thanksgiving? Finally, it says what we can do about it as individuals navigating relationships, and as society as a whole.

From one of the world’s leading data scientists, a landmark tour ofthe new science of idea flow, offering revolutionary insights into the mysteries of collective intelligence and social influence.

Over two decades, Rick Perlstein has published three definitive works about the emerging dominance of conservatism in modern American politics. With the saga's final installment, he has delivered yet another stunning literary and historical achievement. In late 1976, Ronald Reagan was dismissed as a man without a political future: defeated in his nomination bid against a sitting president of his own party, blamed for President Gerald Ford's defeat, too old to make another run.

Capitalism has blessed the world with wealth and technological miracles. It has also cursed it with urban slums, powerless workers, and the vicious boom-and-bust economy. If only there were some way to fix the problems of capitalism and keep all its benefits. In 1897, Henry George published his solution to this puzzle, Progress and Poverty. He suggested that, unlike all other taxes, a tax on land doesn't discourage entrepreneurship. A single tax on land can raise the revenues we need to help the poor without destroying the incentive to create wealth.

With the sweep and vitality of a great novel, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough presents the enthralling story of John Adams. This is history on a grand scale - an audiobook about politics, war, and social issues, but also about human nature, love, religious faith, virtue, ambition, friendship and betrayal, and the far-reaching consequences of noble ideas. Read by History Channel host Edward Herrmann!

Reform or Revolution, also titled Social Reform or Revolution?, is an 1899 pamphlet by Polish-German Marxist theorist Rosa Luxemburg, in which she argues that trade unions, reformist political parties, and the expansion of social democracy could not create a socialist society as Eduard Bernstein, among others, argued. She contends from a historical materialist perspective that capitalism is economically unsustainable and will eventually collapse and that a revolution is necessary to transform capitalism into socialism.

Former congressman and current Fox News contributor Jason Chaffetz explains how we ended up with a politicized federal bureaucracy that actively works to promote the Democratic Party's agenda and undermine Donald Trump.

From war powers to health care, freedom of speech to gun ownership, religious liberty to abortion, practically every aspect of American life is shaped by the Constitution. This vital document, along with its history of political and judicial interpretation, governs our individual lives and the life of our nation. Yet most of us know surprisingly little about the Constitution itself, and are woefully unprepared to think for ourselves about recent developments in its long and storied history.

Neoliberalism - the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action - has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Writing for a wide audience, David Harvey, author of The New Imperialism and The Condition of Postmodernity, here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage.

Political science is the scientific study of politics. It is a social science dealing with systems of governance and power, and the analysis of political activities, political thought, political behavior, and associated constitutions and laws.

In Putin’s People, the investigative journalist and former Moscow correspondent Catherine Belton reveals the untold story of how Vladimir Putin and the small group of KGB men surrounding him rose to power and looted their country. Delving deep into the workings of Putin’s Kremlin, Belton accesses key inside players to reveal how Putin replaced the freewheeling tycoons of the Yeltsin era with a new generation of loyal oligarchs, who in turn subverted Russia’s economy and legal system and extended the Kremlin's reach into the United States and Europe.

Addressing today’s conversation about race, empowerment, and inclusion in America, Koa Beck, writer and former editor-in-chief of Jezebel, boldly examines the history of feminism, from the true mission of the suffragists to the rise of corporate feminism with clear-eyed scrutiny and meticulous detail. She also examines overlooked communities - including Native American, Muslim, transgender, and more - and their ongoing struggles for social change.

In the long history of American demagogues from Huey Long to Donald Trump, never has one man caused so much damage in such a short time as Senator Joseph McCarthy. We still use "McCarthyism" to stand for outrageous charges of guilt by association, a weapon of polarizing slander. From 1950 to 1954, McCarthy destroyed many careers and even entire lives, whipping the nation into a frenzy of paranoia, accusation, loyalty oaths, and terror. When the public finally turned on him, he came crashing down, dying of alcoholism in 1957.

Do you really want the crooked baby-kissers and fake news to tell you what your rights are? Wouldn’t you rather discover them for yourself? The founders fought tirelessly to guarantee these God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But let’s face it - the Bill of Rights is hard to understand. Its text is flowery and puzzling. It’s full of legal and political jargon.

The highest-ranking Soviet bloc intelligence official ever to defect to the West, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa is at it again. A quarter century ago, in his international bestseller Red Horizons, Pacepa exposed the massive crimes and corruption of his former boss, Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu, giving the dictator a nervous breakdown and inspiring him to send assassination squads to the U.S. to find his former spy chief and kill him. They failed.

Charlotte Beradt began having unsettling dreams after Adolf Hitler took power in 1933. She envisioned herself being shot at, tortured and scalped, surrounded by Nazis in disguise, and breathlessly fleeing across fields with storm troopers at her heels. Shaken by these nightmares and banned as a Jew from working, she began secretly collecting dreams from her friends and neighbors, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Disguising these "diaries of the night" in code and concealing them in the spines of books from her extensive library, she smuggled them out of the country one by one.

In Artificial You, Susan Schneider says that it is inevitable that AI will take intelligence in new directions but urges that it is up to us to carve out a sensible path forward. As AI technology turns inward, reshaping the brain, as well as outward, potentially creating machine minds, it is crucial to beware. Homo sapiens, as mind designers, will be playing with "tools" they do not understand how to use: the self, the mind, and consciousness.

Exploring more than 80 of the big ideas and key theories in the field of sociology in a clear and simple way, narrated by Laurel Lefkow. This is the perfect introduction to the study of how humans live and interact with each other. Covering diversity and equality, globalization, human rights, modern urban living, and the role of work and institutions, The Sociology Book looks at the big questions of how we cooperate: What is society? What makes it tick? Why do we interact in the way that we do with our friends, co-workers, and rivals?

Fuelled by a surge of migration to cities, the country's growth appears to be defined by urbanisation and by its growing, prosperous middle class. It is also defined by progressive and liberal young Indians, who vote beyond the constraints of identity, and paradoxically, by an unchecked population explosion and rising crimes against women. Is it, though?

In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to have dinner at the executive mansion with the First Family. The next morning, news that the president had dined with a Black man-and former slave-sent shock waves through the nation. Although African Americans had helped build the White House and had worked for most of the presidents, not a single one had ever been invited to dine there. Fueled by inflammatory newspaper articles, political cartoons, and even vulgar songs, the scandal escalated.