Legitimacy was borrowed from a future time…

Francis Fukuyama, a leading public intellectual, for the first time, charts his political and intellectual evolution across fiv3e transformative decades. We follow him from the circle of students around the conservative intellectual Allan Bloom at Cornell, into the halls of power in Washington and at the RAND Corporation, and into private conversations with world leaders from Muammar Qaddhafi to China’s powerful elite. Fukuyama touches on his family’s story, including his relatives’ internment during World War II along with other Japanese Americans. And, in surprisingly personal terms, he reflects on the experiences that led him to reevaluate his own thinking, most … Continue reading Legitimacy was borrowed from a future time…

Ruthless exploitation of technology, people and the colonies

Ruthless is a revelation of Britain’s industrial revolution the result of its machines, which produced goods with miraculous efficiency and exploitation that enabled it. Was it the country’s natural abundance, which provided coal for its engines, ones for its furnaces and food for its labourers? Or was it Britain’s colonies, where a brutalised enslaved workforce produced cotton for its factories? Historian Edmond Smith reveals how the world’s first industrial nation was founded on the ruthless exploitation of technology, people and the planet. This economic system linked the plantations of the Caribbean with the colossal cotton mills of northern England, applied … Continue reading Ruthless exploitation of technology, people and the colonies

Capitalism’s permanent revolution

We are faced with fundamental questions about the sustainability and morality of the economic system, Capitalism and its Critics provides a kaleidoscopic history of global capitalism, from colonialism and the Industrial Revolution to the ecological and artificial intelligence. British-American staff writer and economic journalist at the New Yorker, John Cassidy author of Dot.con, which examined the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s, and How Markets Fail, which illuminates the origins of the great financial crisis of 2007-08. Cassidy starts with the colonial monopoly capitalism of the East India Company, as seen through the critical eyes of William Bolts, a disgruntled … Continue reading Capitalism’s permanent revolution