Penguin Books Australia

In A Discourse on Inequality Rousseau sets out to demonstrate how the growth of civilization corrupts man's natural happiness and freedom by creating artificial inequalities of wealth, power and social privilege.

The Leviathan is the vast unity of the State. But how are unity, peace and security to be attained? Hobbes's answer is sovereignty, but the resurgence of interest today in Leviathan is due less to its answers than its methods. Hobbes sees politics as a science capable of the same axiomatic approach as geometry: he argues from first principles to human nature to politics.

This book's appeal to the twentieth...

One of the great classics on democracy, Rights of Man was published in England in 1791 as a vindication of the French Revolution and a critique of the British system of government. In direct, forceful prose, Paine defends popular rights, national independence, revolutionary war, and economic growth - all considered dangerous and even seditious issues. In his introduction Eric Foner presents an overview...

Soon China will rule the world.

But in doing so, it will not become more 'Western'.

Martin Jacques' celebrated book overturns conventional thinking about the ascendancy of China, showing how its impact will not just be economic, but cultural. As China's powerful civilization reasserts itself, it will signal the end of the global dominance of the Western nation-state, and a future of 'contested modernity'...

The stories, interviews, and pictures behind the acclaimed HBO® documentary by Emmy® Award winner Alexandra Pelosi

TAKE A NATIONWIDE ROAD TRIP WITH AN AWARD-WINNING FILMMAKER AND AMERICA'S NEWEST CITIZENS.

Buddhist monks, homosexuals, scientists with PhDs, cancer patients, Obama haters, Obama lovers, Muslim imams, Christian missionaries, tech geniuses, movie directors, and a wrestler with...

In the tradition of Malcolm Gladwell, Gardner explores a new way of thinking about the decisions we make

We are the safest and healthiest human beings who ever lived, and yet irrational fear is growing, with deadly consequences - such as the 1,595 Americans killed when they made the mistake of switching from planes to cars after September 11. In part, this irrationality is caused by those - politicians...

'My interests in politics began when I noticed that I acted differently than I spoke, that I had seen 'the government' commit sixty years of fairly unrelieved and catastrophic error nationally and internationally, that I not only hated every wasted hard-earned cent I spent in taxes, but the trauma and misery the produced...'

The foundations of capitalism are being battered by a flood of altruism, which is the cause of the modern world's collapse. This is the view of Ayn Rand, a view so radically opposed to prevailing attitudes that it constitutes a major philosophic revolution. In this series of essays, she presents her stand on the persecution of big business, the causes of war, the default of conservatism, and the evils...

The Captive Mind analyses the power of tyrannical regimes...