Interview with Paul Tucker, author of Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World Order
Paul Tucker, author of Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World Order recommends a fantastic flurry of books! Before jumping into the interview, please check out Paul's book:
Description from Bookshop.org: (All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World Order
How to sustain an international system of cooperation in the midst of geopolitical struggle?
Can the international economic and legal system survive today’s fractured geopolitics? Democracies are facing a drawn-out contest with authoritarian states that is entangling much of public policy with global security issues. In Global Discord, Paul Tucker lays out principles for a sustainable system of international cooperation, showing how democracies can deal with China and other illiberal states without sacrificing their deepest political values. Drawing on three decades as a central banker and regulator, Tucker applies these principles to the international monetary order, including the role of the U.S. dollar, trade and investment regimes, and the financial system.
Combining history, economics, and political and legal philosophy, Tucker offers a new account of international relations. Rejecting intellectual traditions that go back to Hobbes, Kant, and Grotius, and deploying instead ideas from David Hume, Bernard Williams, and modern mechanism-design economists, Tucker describes a new kind of political realism that emphasizes power and interests without sidelining morality. Incentives must be aligned with values if institutions are to endure. The connecting tissue for a system of international cooperation, he writes, should be legitimacy, creating a world of concentric circles in which we cooperate more with those with whom we share the most and whom we fear the least.
Buy On:
Bookshop.org UK £22.00
Bookshop.org US $27.95
Blackwells £17.00
Waterstones £22.00
Q. Do you have a favourite smart thinking book (and why that book)?
Masters and Commanders: The Military Geniuses Who Led the West to Victory in World War II by Andrew Roberts. Description from Bookshop.org: (All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Masters and Commanders by Andrew Roberts, which is the best book on group decision making and on strategy I expect ever to read. It is about the tussle between Winston Churchill, Field Marshall Alan Brooke, Franklin Roosevelt and General George Marshall over strategy towards World War 2 after the US joined the fray, when the stakes were extraordinarily high but, fortunately, the protagonists were extraordinarily great.
Masters and Commanders: The Military Geniuses Who Led the West to Victory in World War II
Andrew Roberts's Masters and Commanders: The Military Geniuses who led the West to Victory in WWII tells the story of how four great leaders fought each other over how best to fight Hitler.
During the Second World War the master strategy of the West was shaped by four titanic figures: Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, and their respective military commanders - General Sir Alan Brooke and General George C. Marshall. Each man was tough-willed and strong minded. And each was certain he knew best how to achieve victory.
Drawing on previously unpublished material, including for the first time verbatim reports of Churchill's War Cabinet meetings, Andrew Roberts's acclaimed history recreates with vivid immediacy the fiery debates and political maneuverings, the rebuffs and the charm, the explosive rows and dramatic reconciliations, as the masters and commanders of the Western Alliance fought each other over the best way to fight Adolf Hitler.
Buy On:
Bookshop.org UK £21.85
Bookshop.org US $21.99
Blackwells £23.00
Waterstones £23.00
Q. What's the most recent smart thinking book you've read (and how would you rate it)?
Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M. Forster. Description from Bookshop.org: (All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Maybe Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread, in which by the end some of the characters have come to stare their foolishness in the face. I think many novels are better at penetrating or illuminating our moral psychology than any number of non-fiction books on the “smart thinking” shelves. Sometimes this is by revealing unsmart thinking as in Banffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy, which is about the Hungarian elite’s tragic myopia in the run up to WWI. Perhaps more within the spirit of this site, I’d mention some of the recent papers by Nobel prize winner Roger Myerson, who is among those bringing game theory closer to the ‘game of life’, and is now writing papers without equations on all sorts of historical situations. But maybe the smartest thinking is still found in David Hume, especially Book III of the Treatise, as he recognises the force of interests, power and values, all intermediated via our passions.
Where Angels Fear to Tread
Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) is a novel by English author E.M. Forster. The work was Forster’s first novel, and its success helped launch his lengthy and critically acclaimed career as a writer of literary fiction. Where Angels Fear to Tread—the title is drawn from Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism (1711)—is a moving meditation on class, gender, social convention, and the grieving process.
Following the death of her husband, a widow named Lilia Herriton travels to Tuscany with her friend Caroline Abbott. In Italy, Lilia falls in love with a young Italian named Gino, with whom she decides to remain. This prompts a fierce backlash among members of her deceased husband’s family, who privilege their honor and name over Lilia’s happiness. Although they send Philip, her brother-in-law, to Italy in order to retrieve her, Lilia has already married Gino, and is pregnant with their child. When she dies in childbirth, however, a fight ensues over the care of the boy, whom the Herritons want to be raised as an Englishman in their midst. Philip returns to Italy with his sister Harriet, meeting Caroline and devising a plan to wrest control of the boy from Gino, a loving and caring father. Where Angels Fear to Tread is a novel that traces the consequences of selfish decisions, the politics of family life, and the social conventions which hold women prisoner to those who claim to support them. The novel was an immensely successful debut for Forster, who would go on to become one of England’s most popular and critically acclaimed novelists of the twentieth century.
With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of E.M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.
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Bookshop.org UK £9.49
Bookshop.org US $12.08
Blackwells £9.99
Waterstones £9.99
Q. Do you have a favourite childhood book?
Winnie-the-Pooh Classic Collection by A.A. Milne. Description from Bookshop.org: (All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Not really, which is strange because I have not stopped reading novels since early teenage years. I read Enid Blyton for too long. Maybe Winnie the Pooh, which made me laugh, and still does.
Winnie-the-Pooh Classic Collection
In the aftermath of the American Civil War, the members of The Baltimore Gun Club find themselves in a dilemma--without a war, there is no demand for their innovative gun designs. Eager for a new challenge, the club's President Barbicane sets an ambitious goal: to build the largest gun in the world, powerful enough to shoot a man to the moon.
Such a gun has never been attempted, so the club faces a myriad of challenges including what to make it from, where to build it, when to shoot it, and--most importantly--how to ensure that a passenger inside the gun's projectile can survive the trip.
In From Earth to the Moon, the members of the gun club undertake the engineering challenge, and Around the Moon follows the three voyagers on their journey to the moon and back.
Buy On:
Bookshop.org UK £37.96
Bookshop.org US $32.55
Blackwells £39.96
Waterstones £35.00
Q. Do you prefer reading on paper, Kindle or listening to an audiobook?
Paper, for both novels and non-fiction, and whether I’m reading for pure pleasure, to try to understand things just a bit more, or for research for my own books. That’s maybe because I flip back to earlier passages, and pause a lot when reading, my thoughts rambling all over the place making connections.
Q. Do you have a favourite bookshop (and why that shop)?
Daunt Books
In London, Daunts, because it displays older novels that are new for me; years ago, I discovered William Maxwell and Sibyl Bedford there, for example. And it’s a favourite despite their not stocking my Global Discord.
In the US, the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge MA, a beacon of light in the midst of tragic decline among university-town bookstores. Unlike the Harvard Co-Op, covid did not drive retreat, so grateful applause.
Many thanks to Paul for recommending a fantastic flurry of books! Please don't forget to check out Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World Order.
Daryl
Image Copyrights: (Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World Order), Penguin Books Ltd (Masters and Commanders: The Military Geniuses Who Led the West to Victory in World War II), Mint Editions (Where Angels Fear to Tread), HarperCollins Publishers (Winnie-the-Pooh Classic Collection).
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