Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age by Larry M. Bartels

Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1877 by Walter A. McDougall

The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000 by Peter Brown

Hayek’s Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek by Bruce Caldwell

and finally

Die Philosophie Karl Poppers by Herbert Keuth

Well, at least that‘s the plan.

Are you planning to do some reading? If so, what‘s on your list?

the layer that co-exists as a member of both the Library and the Anti-Library. It is something you may have read, but when read again with a different perspective it exists in another form. These type’s of books are the ultimate for a bibliophile. It is the layer described above and contains the texts that you re-read.

Since a former project by @zenpundit and Soob regarding the antilibrary proved to be great fun, I started to think about my quantum library. So, after careful consideration, here are the books that qualify for the shelves of my quantum library:

Niccolò Machiavelli: Il Principe For a political scientist with a focus on the dos and don‘ts of practical political leadership, this is an embarrassingly obvious choice. Machiavelli’s short text proves different each time around. It was a different book after I visited Firenze, I read it differently after I worked on a political campaign and when I reread it in preparation for my thesis I found yet another text. Now I am waiting for its next incarnation.

Michel de Montaigne: Essays Montaigne is the grand seigneur of all the men of letters. Locking himself away from the world and writing his multi-volume essays was in itself stuff of legends. The scope of his work guarantees different discoveries each time one opens the meanwhile well worn pages.

Jorge Luis Borges: Ficciones and El Aleph Borges’ short stories are always rewarding but I find myself regularly revisiting his stories “The Immortal” and “The Babylon Lottery“. Always rich and always different.

Golo Mann: Wallenstein This incredibly detailed narrative of Wallensteins life and time tells of a man of action who in a time of manic change chose the vita activa. Like all great biographies this account of an active life changes its meaning to the reader with personal experience of battles won and battles lost.

Umberto Eco: Il pendolo di Foucault The first time I read Eco’s Pendulum I read it as a thriller of ideas. Only the second time I found it to be one of the greatest parables on the profession of historians. The permanent rewriting of history from the perspective of an ever advancing present has in all its grotesque splendor been seldom portrayed so accurately and so entertaining.

What would one find on the shelves of your quantum library?

In his great book “The Black Swan“? Nassim Nicholas Taleb introduces the concept of an antilibrary:

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with ‘Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?’ and others – a very small minority- who get the point that a private library is not an ego boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call the collection of unread books an antilibrary.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: “The Black Swan”? 2007: p. 1.

The blogosphere has picked up on the antilibrary starting with the viral post “What is in your Antilibrary?“? by Münzenberg. I found this post via the blog zenpundit by @zenpundit. This made me look at my own shelves. So what books are in my antilibrary?

Through the work on my thesis I started to get more interested in the scientific process of the social sciences. Especially the divide between the formalistic and the hermeneutic approach to the enquiry into social phenomena seems fascinating to me. Therefor the books in my antilibrary show that interest:

Jon Elster: Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences. A great introduction into the basic concepts of social sciences. What are social sciences? What are valid questions that social scientists are able to answer? What is in the methodological toolkit of a social scientist?

Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic and Amos Tversky: Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. And: Thomas Gilovich, Dale Griffin and Daniel Kahneman: Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment. Two great collections of articles dealing with human decisionmaking. A constant reminder how great social science looks like.

Hans-Georg Gadamer: Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik. One of the foundations for the 20th century school of hermeneutics. What are the boundaries of analytical methods for the analysis of social phenomena? What can we gain in understanding through the hermeneutic circle?

Michael Mann: The Sources of Social Power. One of the most ambitious academic projects of modern sociology. What are the constants in the organization of human societies? How is power distributed in societies?

Which books are on the shelves of your antilibrary?