Books like Imagining After Capitalism — picked by fans

The late Leslie Allan Combs was a deep thinker about consciousness, a word with a world of definitions.

I would suggest that this small book follows books about the sensoria of animals, plants, and the cosmos into the human umwelt. Consciousness has its own multiple taxonomies, states, structures, functions, hierarchies, and facets. From an individual’s point of view, consciousness is the umwelt because our senses are our only windows onto the so-called exterior world.

Because the subject sprawls like an indolent and unwelcome visitor on the couch, it needs explanation. There is no better primer of the subject than this, which one could describe as an explanation of our umwelt’s umwelt. In other words, this is a delightful entry into our most contentious “hard problem.”

This was a best-seller and rightly so.

It covers the broad and often astounding range of animal senses and how they perceive and understand the world they inhabit, their umwelt. Consciousness depends on it, for without senses we would have no path toward self-awareness. While not the same as consciousness, self-awareness is its most important feature.

Dogs and smell, whales and echolocation, bees and ultraviolet light, sharks and electric fields, all shape how differently animals experience their worlds. Knowing this expands our own understanding and appreciation of the one we inhabit. At the same time, it is humbling to acknowledge how the creatures we share the planet with have such different perceptions. In that is great responsibility.

Plants, too, have an umwelt, which makes this a companion to An Immense World.

Plants may not seem like a subject for ethics and philosophy, but the author makes a crucial case for humans changing their behavior toward them. They are neither mute nor static objects; they have senses. They feel things, solve complex problems, communicate with each other in various ways we would call ingenious.

At times, they communicate with animals. Their world is more alien to us than the animals’. I know someone who describes evolution as a story of planimals and aniplants. I initially thought this was a whacky idea, but consider the emerald green sea slug (Elysia chlorotica), a tiny animal that appropriates chloroplasts from algae and photosynthesizes food for the rest of its year-long life.

There is such magic on every page of this book.

This book appeared in 1997 and remains controversial today, but its wildly imaginative and intriguing proposal is well worth reading.

Life in the cosmos, he suggests, is like any familiar organism in important ways; it evolves, grows increasingly complex, matures, and reproduces to create the next generation. Thus, it fits into the theme of these books.

Smolin is not a science fiction writer; however, he’s a theoretical physicist. His suggestions, though they seem wild, carry heft. They also offer poetry, a greater achievement.

Imagine that black holes are the children of a universe. Imagine they have the potential to grow into new universes that can, in turn, engender a sufficient number of such ‘light eaters’ (like black holes or plants) to ensure the survival of one or more; it can perpetuate a procession of universes, an evolutionary success. The scale may be immense, but like animals and plants, it creates… show more.

Lessig’s book argues that the pretense we live in America in a capitalist economy that follows the rules of the markets, with profit maximization and copyright protection (dating back to the Constitution), is by now completely discarded. Focusing on the entertainment industry and the arts, Lessig illustrates the limits of such thinking given the conduct of millions who download music, films, and videos without permission and continue to “remix” them within the legal limits of “fair use.”   

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 1990s saw the model of democratic capitalism prevail. Thirty years later, democracy is being questioned, and capitalism has been threatened by growing inequality.

Martin Wolf’s book provides a deep study of the underlying causes of this worrying development, something I very much appreciate. For all its flaws, Wolf argues that democratic capitalism remains the most promising economic model to provide individual freedom and shared prosperity, but it will require a revisiting of the concept of citizenship to foster a shared belief in the common good.

Gold has fascinated humanity for a considerable swathe of history, and it continues to do so today.

I saw this book online and immediately had to get it. I already knew that the creation of modern money as debt was fundamentally rooted in war and geopolitics, but I did not know the extensive history of how gold and war were interconnected over 500 years. 

I think that this is a captivating study for anyone who is interested in the links between war, gold, and geopolitical capitalism. 

A fascinating and essential read for explaining how we arrived at where we are today. 

I really loved this book!

Desan’s work filled multiple gaps in my knowledge regarding the historical circumstances that contributed to modern money.

In my view, it is the best and most comprehensive book for anyone who wants to know how we arrived at current monetary arrangements. The research and writing are masterful, comprehensive, and there are many ‘oh my, I didn’t know that’ moments. 

A real eye-opener and an essential read for anyone interested in money, finance, and the emergence of capitalism.

Easily the best and most authoritative book since Dickson’s The Financial Revolution In England – a must-read!

The book that gave birth to the slogan... This is an iconoclastic look at the capitalist economy from a man who trained as an academic economist and worked for the National Coal Board. Schumacher thought creatively and wrote and spoke in a lively and engaging way and the book is an accessible introduction to a different way of thinking about what the purpose of an economy, or economics, is.

Also, Schumacher was invited to become the first Director of the Anglo-German Foundation for the Study of Industrial Society, but felt that he was already too old for the job. Many years later, I became the Foundation’s last Director.

Margaret Thatcher famously argued that “there is no alternative;” this book is the ultimate rebuttal.

I read this for the first time as an undergrad, and it forever changed me. What’s so powerful about it is that Schweickart lays out a simple but powerful model for a fundamentally different kind of society–a democratic socialist society based on economic democracy. He then carefully demonstrates that this alternative is not only feasible but that it would work far better than capitalism in pretty well every regard.

For anyone who has been searching for a clear and coherent alternative–this book is for you.