The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire.  Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus. Human societies were markedly egalitarian during hunter-gatherer times, but…

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century. Walter Scheidel. 2017.The author’s thesis is that throughout recorded history extremely violent shocks…

The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Karl Polanyi. 1944.In 1944, the opposing monumental classics, The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek and The Great Transformation…

Capital and Ideology.  Thomas Piketty. This book is a follow up to Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century, the 1000+ page definitive economic documentation and review of global inequality.  Capital…

The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution. Ganesh Sitaraman. 2017.The author, from the Vanderbilt Law School and the Center for American Progress, maintains that the number one threat to American constitutional…

Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. Benjamin M. Friedman.                                                                (Review Michael Shermer in The American Scholar—considerably abridged). Market Morality: The divine underpinnings of Western prosperity Over the years, some religious…

The Reactionary Mind.  Corey Robin.Corey Robin’s book is a collection of his essays and hence does not provide a straight-line analysis explaining conservatism. Part one focuses first on historical topics…

How Will Capitalism End? Wolfgang Streeck. 2016.Professor Streeck, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Research in Cologne, begins with a review of the 2013 book Does Capitalism Have…