The Penguin And The Leviathan

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Presents the seventeenth century treatise on power and politics.

Two thousand years of legend and lore about the menace and majesty of dragons, which have breathed fire into our imaginations from ancient Rome to Game of Thrones A Penguin Classic The most popular mythological creature in the human imagination, dragons have provoked fear and fascination for their lethal venom and crushing coils, and as avatars of the Antichrist, servants of Satan, couriers of the damned to Hell, portents of disaster, and harbingers of the last days. Here are accounts spanning millennia and continents of these monsters that mark the boundary between the known and the unknown, including: their origins in the deserts of Africa; their struggles with their mortal enemies, elephants, in the jungles of South Asia; their fear of lightning; the world’s first dragon slayer, in an ancient collection of Sanskrit hymns; the colossal sea monster Leviathan; the seven-headed “great red dragon” of the Book of Revelation; the Loch Ness monster; the dragon in Beowulf, who inspired Smaug in Tolkien’s The Hobbit; the dragons in the prophecies of the wizard Merlin; a dragon saved from a centipede in Japan who gifts his human savior a magical bag of rice; the supernatural feathered serpent of ancient Mesoamerica; and a flatulent dragon the size of the Trojan Horse. From the dark halls of the Lonely Mountain to the blue skies of Westeros, we expect dragons to be gigantic, reptilian predators with massive, bat-like wings, who wreak havoc defending the gold they have hoarded in the deep places of the earth. But dragons are full of surprises, as is this book. For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

A “compelling” (Los Angeles Times) tale of friendship, betrayal, estrangement, and the unpredictable intrusions of violence in the everyday – from the author of the forthcoming 4 3 2 1: A Novel "Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin. . . ." So begins the story by Peter Aaron about his best friend, Benjamin Sachs. Sachs had a marriage Aaron envied, an intelligence he admired, a world he shared. And then suddenly, after a near-fatal fall that might or might not have been intentional, Sachs disappeared. Now Aaron must piece together the life that led to Sach's death. His sole aim is to tell the truth and preserve it, before those who are investigating the case invent an account of their own.

Written during a moment in English history when the political and social structures were in flux and open to interpretation, Leviathan played an essential role in the development of the modern world.

At a time when the national political debate is about inequality and fairness, bestselling au­thor David Horowitz and coauthor Jacob Laksin have written an unsettling book about the distribu­tion of power in America. Thoroughly researched and amply documented, The New Leviathan over­turns the conventional wisdom about which end of the political spectrum represents the rich and pow­erful, and which represents the people. The Democratic Party presents itself to the electorate as the party of working families and the poor. In the 2000 election campaign, Democrat Al Gore ran on the slogan “The People vs. the Powerful,” while President Obama describes him­self as a “grassroots organizer” and a spokesman for “fairness” and “progressive change.” Such is the world of political myth. In reality, the Demo­crats and the Obama progressives represent the richest and most powerful political machine in American history. Backed by a near trillion-dollar treasury in America’s oldest and largest tax-exempt foundations, progressives outspend conservatives by a factor of seven to one. In The New Leviathan, David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin examine this growing financial power of left-wing organizations and politicians. They show how left-wing foundations under­wrote the political career of Barack Obama and how massive funding advantages for progressive proposals have disenfranchised American voters and shifted the national policy debate dramatically to the left. The New Leviathan draws connections between the Obama administration and progres­sive organizations from labor unions to media outlets to nonprofits to political groups, and shows how on key policy fronts—national security, immigration, citizenship, environment, and health care—the sheer force of left-wing financial resources has reconfigured the nation’s political agenda.

What do Wikipedia, Zip Car’s business model, Barack Obama's presidential campaign, and a small group of lobster fishermen have in common? They all show the power and promise of human cooperation in transforming our businesses, our government, and our society at large. Because today, when the costs of collaborating are lower than ever before, there are no limits to what we can achieve by working together. For centuries, we as a society have operated according to a very unflattering view of human nature: that, humans are universally and inherently selfish creatures. As a result, our most deeply entrenched social structures – our top-down business models, our punitive legal systems, our market-based approaches to everything from education reform to environmental regulation - have been built on the premise that humans are driven only by self interest, programmed to respond only to the invisible hand of the free markets or the iron fist of a controlling government. In the last decade, however, this fallacy has finally begun to unravel, as hundreds of studies conducted across dozens of cultures have found that most people will act far more cooperatively than previously believed. Here, Harvard University Professor Yochai Benkler draws on cutting-edge findings from neuroscience, economics, sociology, evolutionary biology, political science, and a wealth of real world examples to debunk this long-held myth and reveal how we can harness the power of human cooperation to improve business processes, design smarter technology, reform our economic systems, maximize volunteer contributions to science, reduce crime, improve the efficacy of civic movements, and more. For example, he describes how: • By building on countless voluntary contributions, open-source software communities have developed some of the most important infrastructure on which the World Wide Web runs • Experiments with pay-as-you-wish pricing in the music industry reveal that fans will voluntarily pay far more for their favorite music than economic models would ever predic • Many self-regulating communities, from the lobster fishermen of Maine to farmers in Spain, live within self-regulating system for sharing and allocating communal resources • Despite recent setbacks, Toyota’s collaborative shop-floor, supply chain, and management structure contributed to its meteoric rise above its American counterparts for over a quarter century. • Police precincts across the nation have managed to reduce crime in tough neighborhoods through collaborative, trust-based, community partnerships. A must-read for anyone who wants to understand the dynamics of cooperation in 21st century life, The Penguin and the Leviathan not only challenges so many of the ways in which we live and work, it forces us to rethink our entire view of human nature.

**Winner of the 2019 Sussex International Theory Prize** -- How climate change will affect our political theory - for better and worse Despite the science and the summits, leading capitalist states have not achieved anything close to an adequate level of carbon mitigation. There is now simply no way to prevent the planet breaching the threshold of two degrees Celsius set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. What are the likely political and economic outcomes of this? Where is the overheating world heading? To further the struggle for climate justice, we need to have some idea how the existing global order is likely to adjust to a rapidly changing environment. Climate Leviathan provides a radical way of thinking about the intensifying challenges to the global order. Drawing on a wide range of political thought, Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann argue that rapid climate change will transform the world's political economy and the fundamental political arrangements most people take for granted. The result will be a capitalist planetary sovereignty, a terrifying eventuality that makes the construction of viable, radical alternatives truly imperative.