Books like Knowledge And Decisions — picked by fans

This is the rare book that is as eye-opening for the novice in economics as it is stimulating for the professional economist. Hazlitt will show you why economics is the golden key to unlocking an endless series of social mysteries.

If you really take his classic 1946 “Lesson” to heart, you can outthink many professional economists who have mistaken mathematical pyrotechnics for economic insight. 

Whether you instantly recognize this book as economics depends on whether you internalized the last quarter of Kirzner’s The Economic Point of View. Economics is not merely about human behavior in one narrow domain (say, traditional markets using traditional money).

Wherever human beings make choices, economics applies. Read this book, and marvel as your economic intuition expands with every page. 

The greatest book ever written in economics isn’t Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, or John Maynard Keynes’ The General Theory, but this book by Ludwig von Mises. If you only ever read one book in economics, make it this one—even if it takes five years to traverse. You’ll be digesting the insights for a lifetime.

Everything is here. How we ought to think about economics. How we can most fruitfully analyze society. How can humans live better together than they could apart? What makes some societies rich and others poor? Mises originally thought of calling the book “Social Cooperation,” two words that deftly capture the essence of this 800+ page treatise. 

Ask ten different people to define economics, and you’ll get ten different answers. Does it have something to do with money, finance, the “economy”? Is it about wealth creation? Worse, does it assume people are self-centered greed monsters who care only about maximizing their own happiness, which is assumed to be achievable solely through material acquisition? Worse still, does economics justify or condone such behavior?

Kirzner’s book, which was his dissertation written under the guidance of Ludwig von Mises, shows us the way out of this mess. Read this book to learn why economics is the best tool we have for making sense of the social world. Plus, no unrealistic assumptions about humans are needed! 

I like to look at the big picture. This book’s picture is huge: it explains three waves of human civilization, from agriculture and land ownership, to centralization and mass manufacturing, to distributed and custom everything—the wave we are in now. It was originally published in 1980 and predicted our current culture and technology with astonishing accuracy. I, and many entrepreneurs of the time, tried to use those predictions to guide our businesses, and many, like Amazon, succeeded as a result. Are there still more third wave things to invent? Yes—think of how streaming video channels are just now taking over from cable and broadcast, not to mention movie theatres. Will this help you invent the next big thing? Maybe. And what will the fourth wave be?

This list could only end with the book that changed everything for me, yet which I only discovered, incomplete, on the desk of my suddenly-deceased mentor David Fleming…

Delving, I was absolutely captivated by its insight, humour, and startlingly realistic vision, to the extent of devoting my next couple of years to bringing it through to posthumous publication, alongside the paperback Surviving the Future that I drew out from it.

I’m deeply proud of that book, but the indescribable, multi-award-winning Lean Logic is where the rarest magic lies, with its remarkable structure of interlinked dictionary entries reflecting perfectly the holism at the heart of its radical post-collapse paradigm.

And now there’s LeanLogic.online, the wonderful fan-built website presenting the full contents for free, in a format perfectly suited to that structure. May they reshape your life as they have mine!

The British edition of this provocative book has the modest title The Scottish Enlightenment with the subheading The Scots’ Invention of the Modern World. I have the original in-your-face American edition though, which rejoices in a title that no Scot would have the brass neck to come up with: How the Scots Invented the Modern World with the subheading The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It. It was given to me by a Philipino-Californian surfing lawyer, Jesse Quinsaat, who studied with me at Edinburgh University in the early 1970s and continues his interest in Scottish culture when surf’s not up or the cases are not too demanding! He had bought the book in San Diego, loved it, and passed it on to me during a visit to Edinburgh.

When I first read this book as a graduate student, Kathleen Davis’s ability to draw unexpected connections—between political power and temporality, feudalism and imperialism, medieval and postcolonial studies—melted my brain (in a good way). It’s not easy to do justice to her complex argument in a few sentences, but basically she shows how early modern jurists deliberately relegated certain ideas (servility, absolutism, religiosity) both to Europe’s medieval past and the present of the nonwestern world in order to justify imperial expansion, colonial domination, and even chattel slavery. A dense critique of both medieval historiography and postcolonial theory, Periodization and Sovereignty isn’t a breezy read but it’s well worth the effort.     

During the early 1990s, I had the good fortune to participate in Habermas’ legendary Monday night philosophy colloquium at the University of Frankfurt.

The experience transformed my understanding of the raison d’être of Critical Theory. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity is not a book about fascism per se. Instead, it tells the story of how, after the war, the titans of interwar German Kulturpessimismus – Nietzsche (albeit, posthumously), Carl Schmitt, and Heidegger – were canonized by the leading advocates of “French Theory” as the new maîtres à penser or “master thinkers.”

Yet, the canonization of German philosophy came at a high cost. After all, historically speaking, the philosophies in question stood in close proximity to fascist ideology.

Hence, the question arises: to what extent did such pro-fascist “ideologemes” infiltrate and inform the basic tenets of French poststructuralism?

I learned, to my great surprise, that instead of being isolated from the world Russian ideas, thinkers, artists, revolutionaries, and political movements changed the world in many ways.

I found interesting stories about Russian anarchists in Japan, Russian ballet dancers in France, Bolsheviks in Mexico, and antisemitic thinkers in Europe in this book. And I was completely engrossed by the movements of Russians and Russian ideas across the globe.

The result is a book that you cannot put down because it challenges everything that you thought you knew about Russia and Russian history. After reading the book, I felt more informed and better educated.