Books like The Need for Roots — picked by fans

Commonly interpreted as the finest account of the ‘gigantic criminality’ of the Nazi and Stalinist totalitarian regimes, Arendt’s book has for me a more immediately visceral significance. It has profound things to say about what she called a "terribly cruel" contradiction lurking within the modern democratic commitment to equality.

She pointed out that although democracy demands that we recognize others as our equals, certain groups, especially for reasons of their past sufferings, are prone to misuse and abuse their democratic freedoms. They do so by violently asserting their rights to live as a "sovereign people" at the expense of others whom they treat as "superfluous."

Would Arendt have been surprised by the way a "democratic" state born of the ashes of genocide is nowadays behaving? Would she have condoned its military efforts to destroy "in whole or in part" (Genocide Convention Article 2c) a "superfluous" people known as Palestinians? Almost… show more.

Brimming with paradoxes and ironies, this 18th-century novel about language and power is more than an ingenious attack on the bland literary fashions of a closed-minded ancien régime of aristocratic power and privilege.

I love its playful celebration of heterodoxy and its witty defense of the clever thoughts of an upstart servant who demands to be treated with respect by daring to call into question his master’s illusions about the meaning of life. 

An exhilarating set of 676 aphorisms composed by the Austrian-British anti-philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein during the final months of his life, On Certainty questions the human will to cock-sure knowledge and mastery of the world. It’s an appeal for greater humility about what we claim to know, a warning against literal-mindedness and self-indulgent talk of "facts" and "objective reality." Facts are artifacts, and what counts as truth varies through time and space, he dared to say.

Wittgenstein went on to imagine a world where instead of saying ‘I know,’ we chose more humbly to say "I believe I know." This suggestion has an important flipside: gloomy convictions that we’re living in a doomed age headed for hell are the conjoined twin of optimistic know-all certainty. Pessimism is optimism turned upside down.

One of those rare pieces of political writing that outlive their moment of birth to become classics, Havel’s grippingly written essay invites us to rethink the meaning of power. The radical idea is that the powerful are never as powerful as they, or we, might imagine.

Since within any institution or political order, the lines of organized power pass like low-current electricity through all its subjects, the downtrodden always have within themselves the power to short-circuit the system and to remedy their own powerlessness by refusing the power of rulers bent on running and ruining their everyday lives. 

One of the few true geniuses in sociology, he lifted the field up into new and innovation dimensions. If there were a Nobel Prize in sociology, he would most likely get it, followed by the three people above (Merton, Mills, and Gouldner). I knew him well. He could walk into a room and an hour later tell you all the power plays, conflicts, and inside dope.

Some of his terms have entered our language: front-stage, back stage (meaning what goes on in front of an audience, meaning your social interactions) are different from what goes on backstage, behind the scenes, kind of like a play. His book, Stigma, is used in many fascinating ways; not just someone blind or disfigured but also a Black person, a gay person, or a hippy; but mostly he shows in terrifying ways, how people hide or cope with their “stigma”—the subtitle tells it all… show more.

Not only do I love Thomas Hübl’s vibe, but I also really appreciate his writing and the way he comprehends the effects of generational trauma. From reading his work, I’m able to see the big picture of humanity and how we must all work together to release global traumas if we’re ever going to get along.

Much of his work focuses on Holocaust victims, survivors, and their families. Even though my family is not directly affected by this horrible chapter in human history, I learned so very much about the dynamics of generational trauma from his work.

Haggai Ram was one of my Master’s thesis advisors. In this book, he shows how the idea of the Iranian threat was developed, partly as a process of Israeli self-reflection. Iranophobia is indispensable for the reader who would like to know about the roots of animosity between Iran and Israel, the history of the imagination of Iran and Israel vis-à-vis The West, and critical gaze on Zionism and Jewish Statehood in the Middle East. This book exemplifies the importance of looking beyond filters of mythmaking and the political tendencies of history writing and being on the lookout when reading contemporary history for political persuasions and connections between politics and academia.

James Waller’s scintillating book is for readers seeking answers to big questions. When studying the Holocaust and similar events, students invariably ask: how could human beings do such things to other people? Waller addresses this question in a tour-de-force that may be the best single book yet written on the “why” of genocide. His study is particularly compelling because he focuses not on race fanatics (Hitler, Himmler) nor ideological zealots (Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung) but on the rank-and-file, without whom the architects of genocide could never build their charnel empires in the first place. 

The second edition of his book is especially useful because he reviews both iconic and newer psychological theories of genocide perpetration. For Waller, the dynamics underlying genocide are complex. His key finding is that the potential for extreme violence resides within each person. Eschewing aberrationist theories that portray such violence as deviant, Waller invites us… show more.

This book is the most relentlessly pessimistic book I have ever read. It will help you overcome optimism. The volume is comprised mostly of short aphorisms, each with their own title, and I’d say the titles alone are worth the price of entry. But more to the point, there is a fantastic essay in the middle called "Faces of Decadence," which tells the story of history as a story of decay and decline. It’s a familiar refrain, but I think the version that appears here is among the best. Certainly the most stylish.

A concise and lucid sociological treatise that relates forgetting to the transitions and rapid changes of contemporary urban life, which has eroded the ways in which societies traditionally remembered the past.