Tag Archive for: Social Theory

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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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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.

Lev Shestov: Philosopher of the Sleepless Night | Matthew Beaumont

 

Now for something a bit more fun (in a Russian existentialist sort of way). Shestov is your go-to guy for destroying all illusions. He’s anti-necessity, anti-certainty, anti-bullshit — and Beaumont brings him alive beautifully.

Fleeing the Russian Revolution, Shestov ended up in interwar Paris, raging against science, reason, and the pretensions of philosophy. You can know nothing that matters. Words are a distraction. Anything can happen. He’s the dark prophet of unpredictability, showing why neoliberalism — with its fantasies of objectivity, control, and progress — is completely deranged. Shestov knew it wouldn’t end well. And now here we are.

 

– 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.