Born of modest origins in Scotland in 1835, Andrew Carnegie is best known as the founder of Carnegie Steel.... Carnegie, the son of an impoverished linen weaver, moved to Pittsburgh at the age of thirteen. The embodiment of the American dream, he pulled himself up from bobbin boy in a cotton factory to become the richest man in the world. He spent the rest of his life giving away the fortune he had accumulated and crusading for international peace. For all that he accomplished and came to represent to the American public - a wildly successful businessman and capitalist, a self-educated writer, peace activist, philanthropist, man of letters, lover of culture, and unabashed enthusiast for American democracy and capitalism - Carnegie has remained, to this day, an enigma. -http://www.booksinprint.com.

The New York Times bestselling author of The Forgotten Man and Coolidge offers a stunning revision of our last great period of idealism, the 1960s, with burning relevance for our contemporary challenges. "Great Society is accurate history that reads like a novel, covering the high hopes and catastrophic missteps of our well-meaning leaders." --Alan Greenspan Today, a battle rages in our country. Many Americans are attracted to socialism and economic redistribution while opponents of those ideas argue for purer capitalism. In the 1960s, Americans sought the same goals many seek now: an end to poverty, higher standards of living for the middle class, a better environment and more access to health care and education. Then, too, we debated socialism and capitalism, public sector reform versus private sector advancement. Time and again, whether under John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, or Richard Nixon, the country chose the public sector. Yet the targets of our idealism proved elusive. What's more, Johnson's and Nixon's programs shackled millions of families in permanent government dependence. Ironically, Shlaes argues, the costs of entitlement commitments made a half century ago preclude the very reforms that Americans will need in coming decades. In Great Society, Shlaes offers a powerful companion to her legendary history of the 1930s, The Forgotten Man, and shows that in fact there was scant difference between two presidents we consider opposites: Johnson and Nixon. Just as technocratic military planning by "the Best and the Brightest" made failure in Vietnam inevitable, so planning by a team of the domestic best and brightest guaranteed fiasco at home. At once history and biography, Great Society sketches moving portraits of the characters in this transformative period, from U.S. Presidents to the visionary UAW leader Walter Reuther, the founders of Intel, and Federal Reserve chairmen William McChesney Martin and Arthur Burns. Great Society casts new light on other figures too, from Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, to the socialist Michael Harrington and the protest movement leader Tom Hayden. Drawing on her classic economic expertise and deep historical knowledge, Shlaes upends the traditional narrative of the era, providing a damning indictment of the consequences of thoughtless idealism with striking relevance for today. Great Society captures a dramatic contest with lessons both dark and bright for our own time.

"Was Marx's Capital intended as a study of capitalism as a whole or was it meant as an analysis of capital? In Beyond 'Capital', Michael A. Lebowitz explores the implications of the book on wage-labour that Marx originally intended to write. Focusing on critical assumptions in Capital that were to be removed in Wage-Labour and upon Marx's methodology, Lebowitz stresses the one-sidedness of Marx's Capital and argues that the side of the workers, their goals and their struggles in capitalism have been ignored by a one-sided Marxism characterized by determinism, reductionism and a silence on human experience. In this completely reworked edition of his 1992 book, Lebowitz introduces three new chapters and explores problems in Marx's wage theory, the place of the workers' state in Marx's theory and the importance of the concept of the collective worker."--BOOK JACKET.

Ellen Meiksins Wood is a leading contemporary political theorist who has been described as the founder, together with Robert Brenner, of Political Marxism,' a distinct version of historical materialism which has inspired a research program that spans a number of academic disciplines. Organized thematically, this Reader provides an overview of her original interpretations of capitalism, and many different topics.

Murray Bookchin was one of the most important radical thinkers of the twentieth century. This is his final book, completed just before he died in 2006. It is the first book to comprehensively explain his political ideas. In the 1960s Murray Bookchin introduced the concept of ecology into progressive politics, and he is widely regarded as the foremost theorist of the green and anarchist movements. Bookchin argued that capitalism and the nation state, as well as oppressive social relations in general, must be abolished if we are to have a rational and ecological society. According to Bookchin, we must fundamentally remake society along ecological lines, based on principles of confederation, humanism, non-hierarchy and direct democracy. In a time when the left is highly defensive, Bookchin's ideas of social ecology present a strong vision of an alternative society. With today's huge improvements in communications, his bold ideas are increasingly practical and, faced with ecological catastrophe, they are increasingly necessary. This is a must-read for students of political theory and anti-globalisation activists.

With capitalism in deep crisis, this urgent and impassioned book shows how and why growing populist nationalism across the world threatens the bonds that keep our societies prosperous, strong and united.