Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, by James C. Scott, is an essential work that delves into the reasons behind the failure of states to execute large-scale social planning successfully. It presents an analysis of various disasters, from Russia to Tanzania, probing why such efforts often result in calamity.

The book argues that disasters occur when states impose oversimplified visions on complex realities that they cannot fully comprehend. Scott emphasizes the importance of recognizing local, practical knowledge alongside formal, systematic knowledge. He critiques 'development theory' and state planning that ignores the values and wishes of the people it affects. This persuasive narrative identifies four conditions common to all planning disasters: the state's administrative ordering of nature and society; a 'high-modernist ideology' that overestimates the role of science in improving human life; the use of authoritarian power to implement broad interventions; and the inability of a weakened civil society to resist such plans.

Written with clarity, Seeing Like a State brings to light the intricate nature of the world we inhabit and serves as a cautionary tale about the limits of grand societal engineering.

The Road to Serfdom is a classic work in political philosophy, intellectual and cultural history, and economics. This influential book has both inspired and infuriated politicians, scholars, and general readers for decades. Originally published in England in 1944, The Road to Serfdom offers a passionate warning against the dangers of state control over the means of production.

Friedrich A. Hayek argues that the collectivist idea of empowering government with increasing economic control would inevitably lead not to a utopia, but to the horrors experienced in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. First published by the University of Chicago Press on September 18, 1944, the book garnered immediate attention and popularity. The first printing of 2,000 copies sold out instantly, and within six months, more than 30,000 copies were sold.

A perennial best-seller, The Road to Serfdom has sold over a quarter of a million copies in the United States alone, not including its British edition or the many translations into languages such as German, French, Dutch, Swedish, and Japanese. It stands alongside works by Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and George Orwell for its timeless meditation on the relationship between individual liberty and government authority.

This influential book continues to impact political and social climates, from the rise of socialism after World War II to the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions in the 1980s, and the transitions in Eastern Europe from communism to capitalism in the 1990s.

Free to Choose: A Personal Statement is a powerful and persuasive discussion about economics, freedom, and the relationship between the two. Authored by Milton Friedman and Rose D. Friedman, this book explains how our freedom has been eroded and our prosperity undermined through the explosion of laws, regulations, agencies, and spending in Washington. The Friedmans argue that good intentions often produce deplorable results when the government acts as the middleman.

The book also provides remedies for these ills and offers insights on what can be done to expand our freedom and promote prosperity. This important analysis reveals what has gone wrong in America in the past and outlines necessary steps for our economic health to flourish.

Capital, one of Marx's major and most influential works, was the product of thirty years close study of the capitalist mode of production in England, the most advanced industrial society of his day. This new translation of Volume One, the only volume to be completed and edited by Marx himself, seeks to do justice to the literary qualities of the work.

The introduction is by Ernest Mandel, author of Late Capitalism, one of the only comprehensive attempts to develop the theoretical legacy of Capital.