Final Book Club Post of the Year

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Introduction

Welcome to the r/tuesday book club and Revolutions podcast thread!

Upcoming

Done!

As follows is the scheduled reading a few weeks out:

Done!

More Information

The Full list of books are as follows:

Year 1:

• Classical Liberalism: A Primer
• The Road To Serfdom
• World Order
• Reflections on the Revolution in France
• Capitalism and Freedom
• Slightly To The Right
• Suicide of the West
• Conscience of a Conservative
• The Fractured Republic
• The Constitution of Liberty
• Empire​
• The Coddling of the American Mind

Year 2:

• Revolutions Podcast (the following readings will also have a small selection of episodes from the Revolutions podcast as well)
• The English Constitution
• The US Constitution
• The Federalist Papers
• A selection of The Anti-Federalist Papers
• The American Revolution as a Successful Revolution
• The Australian Constitution
• Democracy in America
• The July 4th special: Revisiting the Constitution and reading The Declaration of Independence
• Democracy in America (cont.)
• The Origins of Totalitarianism

Year 3:

• Colossus
• On China
• The Long Hangover
• No More Vietnams
• Republic - Plato
• On Obligations - Cicero
• Closing of the American Mind
• The Theory of Moral Sentiments< - We are here
• Extra Reading: The Shah
• Extra Reading: The Real North Korea
• Extra Reading: Jihad

Explanation of the 2024 readings and the authors: Tuesday Book Club 2024

Participation is open to anyone that would like to do so, the standard automod enforced rules around flair and top level comments have been turned off for threads with the "Book Club" flair.

The previous week's thread can be found here: Jihad Chapter 15 & Conclusion : r/tuesday

The full book club discussion archive is located here: Book Club Archive

[u/coldnorthwz]

For Jihad, the last couple of chapters covered Osama Bin Laden, the start of the "war against the west", the countries and groups around Isreal, and the issues around Turkish Islamists and why they had failed.

The book was written in 2002, and it does show. World events have long proceeded it but its still an informative work. Bin Laden is dead, killed long ago. The battle between Islamism and Arab nationalism is still going, with Arab spring and its aftermath, the most recent casualty on the Arab nationalist side being Bashar Al-Assad. We will see how this one turns out, but its not hopeful. What is interesting is that the Arab Islamists started to turn to democracy after figuring the previous ways were a dead end. Will it continue in Syria where the leader of the rebels is making democracy noises? Turkey, having resisted after so long, has started to finally succumb to Islamism thanks to Erdogan and his Islamism (who is in power partially due to the number of votes from the diaspora in Europe). Something brought up in the book as an example of failure, the re-consecration of the Hagia Sophia as a mosque has happened within the last few years and the power of the military was broken or at least it hasn't attempted any real coups (the last one was possibly self-staged). The Taliban is back in Afghanistan after being forced out of power and remaining there for 20 years.

Overall, a fascinating book that covers the whole history of where the modern islamist movement came from and why it became what it is.

For the final chapters of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, I'm going to have to be brief because it was a couple of weeks ago I read most of the last bits of the book, I just never really got around to doing the write up. I had intended to reread the chapters to refresh myself but I just haven't had time. One of the chapters was about philosophy and Smith spent a lot of time on death, specifically suicide, and why the ancient philosophers were somewhat preoccupied with it. He has many funny quotes in the book, but this is a specific one here:

Three different accounts have been given of the death of Zeno the Stoic. One is, that after enjoying, for ninety-eight years, the most perfect state of health, he happened, in going out to his school, to fall; and though he suffered no other damage than that of breaking or dislocating one of his fingers, he struck the ground with his hand, and, in the words of the Niobe of Euripides, said, "I come, why doest thou call me?" and immediately went home and hanged himself. At that great age, one should think, he might have had a little more patience.

The whole book has these little gems sprinkled throughout, as all the best books have at least a little humor here and there.

This too was an interesting book and a good one to end the year on. The way Smith talks about morality and people, how he describes human nature and motives, is very recognizable. Smith is an important philosopher, he was around until 1790, and his works have been influential, The Wealth of Nations especially.