Society Review Library
The Society Review Library carefully selects the most insightful and practical non-fiction books, chosen for their relevance in shaping our future. Each title, sorted by topic, includes a short introduction by an expert, explaining why the text is (still) important today.
Life is too short to read every good book, therefore we aim to curate only the definitive biographies, treatises, and philosophical works that will enrich your life.
If a theory is revised or a more accurate account of someone's life is published, the old version is replaced while keeping the archived edition available for reference.
New titles are added on a weekly basis until January 2026.
Current Affairs
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The rise and decline of great powers and the struggles over international order have marked world politics since the age of Thucydides. No modern book of international relations theory offers a more sweeping, elegant, and influential account of these global power transitions than Gilpin’s 1981 classic. Gilpin saw world politics as a succession of ordered systems created by leading (or hegemonic) states that emerge after war with the opportunity and capabilities to organize the rules and arrangements of interstate relations. Order is built not on the balance of power but on a structured asymmetry of power. These hierarchical orders can persist for decades and even centuries, but eventually the underlying material conditions of power shift, and the ordered relations of states break apart, sometimes violently. Gilpin’s book encourages the reader to place upheavals in contemporary world politics in a deeper historical perspective. Change is inevitable, and no order lasts forever. The question Gilpin leaves the reader with is the most profound: “Is there any reason to hope that political change may be more benign in the future than it has been in the past?”
[Selected by John Ikenberry for Foreign Affairs in 2022]
War and Change in World Politics, Robert Gilpin, 1981, Cambridge University Press, 272 pp.
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Not since the 1930s or the dark days of the Cold War has the future of liberal democracy seemed so uncertain. Political philosophers such as Shklar sought to defend liberalism in a world of rising violence and tyranny. In her many books and essays, Shklar argued that liberalism cannot remake societies or resolve fundamental moral disagreements. Instead, the liberal ethos of forbearance and magnanimity in negotiating differences provides the best institutional framework for protecting humans from the destructive forces of oppression. Shklar laid the groundwork for this view in her 1957 masterwork, in which she traced the religious and Romantic backlash to Enlightenment beliefs in human reason and social progress. Shklar showed that reactionary and critical thinkers have shadowed liberalism from the beginning, rejecting its alleged utopianism and opening the way for an illiberalism rooted in fatalism and social despair. Liberalism can only endure, she insisted, when anchored in people’s mutual vulnerability to suffering and their aversion to the greatest of all “public vices,” cruelty. Safeguarding the delicate accomplishment of liberal societies will require the reaffirmation of the toleration of difference, a noble spirit that Shklar hoped could sustain liberal democracy even in an age of disillusionment.
[Selected by John Ikenberry for Foreign Affairs in 2022]
After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith, Judith Shklar, 1957, Princeton University Press, 330 pp.
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To paraphrase the economist Paul Krugman: when it comes to economic growth, technological progress is not everything, but it is almost everything. Just as the pace and direction of technological change shaped the last economic century, it will equally shape the next. Gordon advances a pessimistic view of the capacity for technological change to continue raising living standards at the rate to which Americans grew accustomed in the last century. He points to “one great wave” of inventions and innovations between 1870 and 1970, such as electricity, indoor plumbing, and the internal combustion engine, and questions whether current advances in artificial intelligence, human genomics, and robotics can improve living standards to the same extent. Many readers will find Gordon’s skepticism regarding today’s new technologies counterintuitive. But they will be forced to think again about the capacity of these developments to improve the human condition.
[Selected by Barry Eichengreen for Foreign Affairs in 2022]
The Rise and Fall of American Economic Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War, Robert Gordon, 2017, Princeton University Press, 784 pp.
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Why Nations Fail is a highly readable excursion into the inner workings of different societies. Released in 2012, Robinson and Acemoglu retroactively prove their theory by predicting the undoing of the Arab Spring and the limits of Chinese economic growth, emphasising political dynamics for the economic directory of a country.
The authors argue, that only with inclusive institutions and centralised state power can a nation prosper over the long term. The level playing field encourages innovation by a broad range of society and investment from the outside. Otherwise, extractive institutions lead to corruption by one elite (Mexico, North Korea) or, without a functioning state, the country turns into an anarchic battlefield (Haiti, Somalia).
Because the elites fear being replaced through the process of creative destruction, the vicious cycle continues. Unfortunately, even new independent leaders, such as those in post-colonial Africa tend to reuse the extractive institutions of their predecessors to stay in power. However once a critical juncture such as the Industrial Revolution opens up, the cards can be reshuffled.
History is not destiny and major changes may occur from minor differences between states. Why Nations Fail puts the puzzle pieces of modernity together, offering a high resolution image that is not only helpful in understanding the past but also in changing the future.
[Selected by Simon Allmer for Society Review in 2024]
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, 2012, Crown Publishing Group, 544 pp.
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New technologies [...] have distributional consequences—as any early-twentieth-century horse-drawn carriage maker would attest. People must acquire skills and training to rise to the demands of new technological competition. Goldin and Katz view this interplay through the lens of U.S. history. They describe how the United States became a leader in the provision of universal education and how it pioneered the “high school movement.” They show how educational attainment advanced faster than technology in the first half of the twentieth century, leading to a drop in economic inequality. In the latter half of the century, however, technology “sprinted ahead” and accentuated distributional problems. The book raises questions about whether educational systems can continue to successfully impart requisite skills and training, whether they will win the political support needed to do so, and how inequality will deepen in the event of their failure.
[Selected by Barry Eichengreen for Foreign Affairs in 2022]
The Race Between Education and Technology, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, 2008, Harvard University Press, 488 pp.
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The global economic future will be shaped, in no small part, by the geostrategic contest between China and the United States and by the performance of their respective economic and political systems. One hesitates to recommend a book on the economic competition between these two countries, given the rapidity of change in their respective economies and polities and, no less, in their bilateral relations. But readers probably can’t do better than Pettis’s 2013 work. He emphasizes policy distortions that artificially boost saving and investment in China while depressing them in the United States, producing trade imbalances, financial weakness in China, and deindustrialization in the United States. Pettis did not predict the election of U.S. President Donald Trump or the economic and political clampdown under Chinese President Xi Jinping, but his analysis highlights the economic vulnerabilities of both countries as they face the next century.
[Selected by Barry Eichengreen for Foreign Affairs in 2022]
The Great Rebalancing: Trade, Conflict, and the Perilous Road Ahead for the World Economy, Michael Pettis, 2013, Princeton University Press, 232 pp.
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Global warming and other environmental crises are threatening to radically change the way people live. In the early 1970s, a variety of thinkers began to offer warnings of the planetary-scale dangers generated by human activity, introducing terms such as “limits to growth” and “spaceship earth.” Falk’s evocative and illuminating 1971 book sounded the alarm and triggered a debate over the reform of the global political order. He argued that the threats to humanity were coming from a set of interlocking features of late-twentieth-century modernity, such as environmental degradation, militarization, population growth, and resource depletion—factors that were driven by the industrial state, military competition, and materialist ideologies of progress. For Falk, the world of sovereign states, with its nationalist impulses and short-termism, was the deep source of the global predicament. He called for a revolution in consciousness that would reimagine how peoples and societies could organize themselves for sustainable life. Falk hoped for a profound transformation in political organization beyond the constraints of nation-states and multilateral bodies, one driven by social movements and a global civil society in the service of “ecological humanism.” To date, no such transformation has taken place. The fate of the earth may depend on whether it eventually does.
[Selected by John Ikenberry for Foreign Affairs in 2022]
This Endangered Planet: Prospects and Proposals for Human Survival, Richard Falk, 1972, Vintage Books, 495 pp.
Biographies
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Few individuals encapsulate the American middle-class exceptionalism quite as well as Benjamin Franklin. His innovations in the media, science and politics were always practical, like the daredevil Kite experiment that might have electrocuted him or the Declaration of Independence, in which he crossed out the "sacred and undeniable" truths and changed them to being "self-evident".
Instead of contemporaries from the Old World whose theories might be more acclaimed, Franklin shaped the culture of a whole nations by absorbing the wisdom of ordinary citizens and thereby becoming extraordinary. His work is a testament on what is achievable in one lifetime and that, diametrically opposed to athletes, writers get better with age.
Walter Isaacson's biography offers the most lively telling and achieves its aim of informative entertainment without succumbing to either oversimplification or prolixity. Like the authors other geniuses, from DaVinci to Musk, Franklin is portrayed in light and dark tones but above all, recognisably human.[Selected by Simon Allmer for Society Review in 2024]
Benjamin Franklin, Walter Isaacson, 2003, Simon & Schuster, 586 pp.
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Description coming soon.
Leonardo da Vinci, Walter Isaacson, 2017, Simon & Schuster, 624 pp.
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Description coming soon.
John Sutter: A Life on the North American Frontier, Albert Hurtado, 2006, University of Oklahoma Press, 434 pp.
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Description coming soon.
Barnum's Own Story: The Autobiography of P. T. Barnum, P.T. Barnum, 1927, Dover Publications, 512 pp.
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Description coming soon.
Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, Neal Gabler, 2007, Vintage, 912 pp.
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Description coming soon.
Selection History
This book replaced Kissinger: A Biography (Isaacson, 1992) because of Ferguson's unprecedented access to his subjects private papers and a more nuanced evaluation of Cold War decision making. The complete edition, with the second part being released in 2025 will likely expand this entry.
Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist, Niall Ferguson, 2015, Penguin, 1008 pp.
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Description coming soon.
Moonwalk: A Memoir, Michael Jackson, 1988, Crown Archetype, 320 pp.
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More books coming soon
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