Fareed Zakaria
Guest on The Ezra Klein Show
Products they talk about
A Preface to Morals👍 Recommends
…zakaria recommending influential books on modern society and meaning
“The one book that I have loved and have gone back to over and over is a book by Walter Lipman called A Preface to Morals. It was written in the 1920s during the Jazz Age. And he first identifies, not first, but he identifies very powerfully this problem of modern societies that you lose faith in religion and tradition and community and certainty and you don't replace it with anything and it leaves you with a hollowness inside. And it's a wonderful book called A Preface to Morals.”
on The Ezra Klein Show
A World Safe for Democracy👍 Recommends
…fareed zakaria recommending books explaining rules based international order
“The best scholar who's written on this is a guy named John Eikenberry at Princeton, and I think the book is called A World Safe for Democracy, and encapsulates what is this thing, the rules-based international order, the liberal international order that the U.S. created.”
on The Ezra Klein Show
Escape from Freedom👍 Recommends
…discussion of freedom and autonomy as core liberal values and aspirations
“And if you do that, I think if you offer people the alternative between a right that says at base, we are trying to deprive you of that choice, that autonomy, that freedom, and the left which celebrates those things, but in all spheres, like economic, political, social, I think that's a winning message, it's a forward looking message, it's a message that actually will appeal to young people, the writer Eric Fromm, wrote a book called Escape from Freedom, and he says the real meaning of life is that you get to live it, and what he means is that you, you know, that is the only meaning of life, that you get to live it as you want, and that's a very powerful message I think at heart.”
on The Ezra Klein Show
The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society👍 Recommends
…zakaria recommending daniel bell's book on meritocratic and technocratic elites
“The other one is, we're talking about this technocratic elite, meritocratic elite that I am certainly part of. I would point out Ezra, so are you. The person who wrote about it most intelligently is the great Harvard scholar Daniel Bell who wrote a book called The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society. And he identified presciently that the future was going to belong to people who had knowledge and that knowledge was going to become the most important determinant of whether or not you were elite or not.”
on The Ezra Klein Show
The Irony of American History👍 Recommends
…fareed zakaria recommending books on american foreign policy and virtue
“The second is a book by Reinhold Niebuhr called The Irony of American History, and it's really all about the great danger when you are powerful of believing you are virtuous and believing that might is right, and the call for humility. It ends with a call for a kind of Christian realism in American foreign policy.”
on The Ezra Klein Show
The Lost City👍 Recommends
…zakaria recommending alan ehrenhalt's book on community and modernity
“The final one is, you know, again, back to this question of how do you recreate this life in a modern time? What do you do to bring back old values? There's a wonderful book called The Lost City by Alan Ehrenhalt, a journalist who went back to Chicago wondering why the Chicago of his youth seemed so community oriented and what did they do that was lost? And he discovered that it was so community oriented because everyone was so poor they couldn't move.”
on The Ezra Klein Show
The Quiet American👍 Recommends
…fareed zakaria recommending novels about american foreign policy idealism
“And the final one, in a similar vein, is Graham Greene's book, The Quiet American. I think that one of the, one of, sometimes novels do it better than anything else. There's a novel set in Vietnam through the eyes of a sour, dyspeptic, world-weary British journalist who sees this very idealistic American who believes that America is going to be able to, you know, bring peace, justice, and virtue to Vietnam.”
on The Ezra Klein Show
The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism👍 Recommends
…discussion of theda skocpol's research on tea party motivations and ideology
“And Theda Skocpol, as you know, did a wonderful book. She found that the core concerns of the Tea Party were not what the Republican Party used to be about.”
on The Ezra Klein Show