My god. This is an amazing book and I'm not even 100 pages into it yet. I can't wait to get home to continue reading it. If the rest of the book is as good as the part I've already read then this is the book I would have written had my life taken a different path and I was 10 years older.
http://www.amazon.com/Oligarchy-Jeffrey-A-Winters/dp/0521182980/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343847115&sr=8-1&keywords=oligarchyI challenge and recommend every user on this forum to read this book. Prior to this book I was recommending a host of other books to best illustrate my opinions on such matters as economic theory and social morality. But this book seems to best 'get to the bottom' of what I was trying to illustrate with a myriad of other books. Plus it's shorter and more concisely gets the point across.
The central thesis of the book is something so obvious that it has taken hundreds of hacks, scribblers and paid-off and bankrupt ideologues to confuse the people of the USA what their ancestors used to know, that being:
* That there has always existed an oligarchical class wherever there is large discrepancies of wealth (legitimacy of that wealth notwithstanding)
* That this group is interested above all else in growing and maintaining their wealth
* This is the primary focus to understand the entirety of history, politics, socio-organizations and much else, as it is an ever-present force that is universal in character. It is a universal historical consent, and therefore integral to understanding anything about history and present day events.
Nothing could, in fact, be more obvious than these basic tenets and if present and past events are viewed through this perspective it is infinitely more valuable of an analysis. Yet through the ideology of Classical Liberalism and its most rancid and virulent present form: Libertarianism; us Westerners have been made to forget these most elementary facts.
Read this book and you'll have a greater understanding of where I'm coming from than anything I've previously cited as a thing to read. I can already tell that this book is going to be classic - that is, if we are to have any chance at a future, then it must be.
Who's going to take up the challenge?