Tag Archive for: Roger Hallam

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Suicide | Roger Hallam

 

A hybrid of memoir and political manifesto, Suicide was written during the author’s imprisonment after the high-profile Whole Truth Five trial linked to Just Stop Oil. Hallam, one the founders of Extinction Rebellion, presents the defence he was banned from making in court, exposing the legal system’s failure to confront the climate crisis. Drawing on climate science, legal theory, and personal experience, he argues that the institutions meant to protect society are collapsing. In both his critique of modern thinking and his forceful call for direct action, he urges readers to rethink justice, duty, and truth in an age of ecological emergency.

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The Culture Code | Daniel Coyle

 

Let’s end with something practical. I read a bunch of books on deliberative democracy and citizens’ assemblies. Most of them were — let’s be honest — painfully dull. All stuck in the narrow worldview of academic political science: humans as little utility-maximising machines.

What actually matters — like how people come to love and trust each other through deliberation — is shoved into the footnotes. Seriously.

But then I found The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle. What a joy. Straight-up insights into how teams work: people respond to encouragement and vulnerability; teams beat solo geniuses; leaders do best by being open and human. It’s all there — the culture we need to build revolutionary movements.

 

– Roger Hallam
Read Roger’s top ten list of books from prison here.

Hospicing Modernity | Vanessa Machado de Oliveira

 

This one packs a punch. Machado de Oliveira comes from an indigenous Brazilian background, had a brutal early life, and went on to become a top academic in Canada. Hospicing Modernity is a raw, original fusion of two worlds — and a brutal indictment of our dying culture.

The book challenges the entire structure of Western thought, including its radical wings. It forces us to reckon with grief, death, and the end of the world as we know it — not as a metaphor, but as lived reality. A painful but essential read.

 

– Roger Hallam
Read Roger’s top ten list of books from prison here.

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The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran | Charles Kurzman

 

If Skocpol gives us the structural take, Kurzman gives us the chaos. His study of the 1979 Iranian Revolution shows how everything can change overnight.

Everyone thought the Shah’s regime was unshakable. But it fell like a house of cards. Mobilisation happened because mobilisation happened — a cascade, a feedback loop, with religious students kicking it off. They weren’t trying to win or avoid death — they acted from transcendental belief. And once the tipping point hit, the whole country joined in.

It’s a reminder: just because a regime looks stable doesn’t mean it is.

 

– Roger Hallam
Read Roger’s top ten list of books from prison here.

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States and Social Revolutions | Theda Skocpol

 

This is the go-to academic take on how revolutions happen. Skocpol isn’t messing around. Her point: elites always screw things up eventually, and revolutions become inevitable. They’re not made, they come.

It’s eerily prescient. Just like before the French Revolution, today’s ruling class is gutting the state — refusing to pay for it, grinding down its capacity. Sound familiar? Hello, Mr Trump.

 

– Roger Hallam
Read Roger’s top ten list of books from prison here.

Soldiers of God in a Secular War | Sarah Shortall

 

It’s not exactly a fashionable title, but it’s one of the most important books I’ve read. So important, I read it twice in prison.

It’s a deep dive into how 20th-century Catholic thinkers responded to the Church being booted out of state power in the late 1800s. That crisis forced a radical return to early Christian traditions — ones that refused the idea of religion being pushed into the private, symbolic, or subjective.

The core message? If God is God, then God has to be everywhere — including politics. The world can and must be remade with the divine present in every moment. The challenge is how to make that real. Catholic social movements made a decent go of it, creating a “personalist” alternative to fascism and Marxism, though not without complications. Still, the impulse to re-enchant the world with the wonders of spirituality— that’s where it’s at.

 

– Roger Hallam
Read Roger’s top ten list of books from prison here.

Modernity and the Holocaust | Zygmunt Bauman

 

Bauman is one of the greats — a Polish-Jewish socialist and towering sociologist who ended up in the UK after the war. His work rips apart the smug objectivity of social science, which pretends morality is just a social construct and socialisation is always good. In reality, as Bauman shows, socialisation created the Holocaust.

In Nazi Germany, it was conformity that allowed genocide — not a lack of it. Morality didn’t come from society, it came from within individuals who refused to go along with it. Bauman zeroes in on “proximity” — the distance from the suffering of others that enables barbarism. It hit me hard because my own research at King’s College London focused on the same thing, completely independently.

Proximity breaks down dehumanisation. Disconnection allows it to flourish. We need social designs that build closeness, community, and care. Bauman saw that modernity — with its complexity and instrumental rationality — was leading us to disaster. We see it now as the death project of global carbon emissions.

 

– Roger Hallam
Read Roger’s top ten list of books from prison here.

Theology and Social Theory | John Milbank

 

This foundational text challenges the arrogance of secular reason and invites us to see theology as a serious intellectual tradition capable of reimagining society. It’s about recovering the sacred as central to political and cultural life. Milbank invites us to think beyond binaries and embrace multiple ways of seeing and knowing. These kinds of transcendent modes are critical to any serious revolutionary project in the 21st century.

 

– Roger Hallam
Read Roger’s top ten list of books from prison here.

The Matter with Things | Iain McGilchrist

 

Let’s start with the foundations – the ground-we-stand-on stuff. No question: one of the most important books I’ve read in prison is McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things.

McGilchrist gets the gravity of our situation. He’s laser-focused on the core wisdoms we need: seeing the whole not just the parts; recognising that everything is process and flow; and that the divine and secular, spirit and material, aren’t enemies but complements. He builds from science out into religion and mysticism, shattering the notion that modern science and ancient spirituality are in conflict. They aren’t. We need both to survive.

– Roger Hallam
Read Roger’s top ten list of books from prison here.