AP Literature Reading List 127 Great Books for Your Prep

AP Literature Reading List 127 Great Books for Your Prep SAT / ACT Prep Online Guides and Tips A lot of students wonder if there’s a specific AP English reading list of books they should be reading to succeed on the AP Literature and Composition exam. While there’s not an official College-Board AP reading list, there are books that will be more useful for you to read than others as you prepare for the exam. In this article, I’ll break down why you need to read books to prepare, how many you should plan on reading, and what you should read- including poetry. Why Do You Need to Read Books for the AP Literature Test? This might seem like kind of an obvious question- you need to read books because it’s a literature exam! But actually, there are three specific reasons why you need to read novels, poems, and plays in preparation for the AP Lit Test. To Increase Your Familiarity With Different Eras and Genres of Literature Reading a diverse array of novels, poetry and plays from different eras and genres will help you be familiar with the language that appears in the various passages on the AP Lit exam’s multiple choice and essay sections. If you read primarily modern works, for example, you may stumble through analyzing a Shakespeare sonnet. So, having a basic familiarity level with the language of a broad variety of literary works will help keep you from floundering in confusion on test day because you’re seeing a work unlike anything you’ve ever read. To Improve Your Close-Reading Skills You’ll also want to read to improve your close-reading and rhetorical analysis skills. When you do read, really engage with the text: think about what the author’s doing to construct the novel/poem/play/etc., what literary techniques and motifs are being deployed, and what major themes are at play. You don’t necessarily need to drill down to the same degree on every text, but you should always be thinking, â€Å"Why did the author write this piece this way?† For the Student Choice Free-Response Question Perhaps the most critical piece in reading to prepare for the AP Lit test, however, is for the student choice free-response question. For the third question on the second exam section, you’ll be asked to examine how a specific theme works in one novel or play that you choose. The College Board does provide an example list of works, but you can choose any work you like just so long as it has adequate â€Å"literary merit.† However, you need to be closely familiar with more than one work so that you can be prepared for whatever theme the College Board throws at you! Want to get a perfect 5 on your AP exam and an A in class? We can help. PrepScholar Tutors is the world's best tutoring service. We combine world-class expert tutors with our proprietary teaching techniques. Our students have gotten A's on thousands of classes, perfect 5's on AP tests, and ludicrously high SAT Subject Test scores. Whether you need help with science, math, English, social science, or more, we've got you covered. Get better grades today with PrepScholar Tutors. Note: Not an effective reading method. How Many Books Do You Need to Read for the AP Exam? That depends. In terms of reading to increase your familiarity with literature from different eras and genres and to improve your close-reading skills, the more books you have time to read, the better. You’ll want to read them all with an eye for comprehension and basic analysis, but you don’t necessarily need to focus equally on every book you read. For the purposes of the student choice question, however, you’ll want to read books more closely, so that you could write a detailed, convincing analytical essay about any of their themes. So you should know the plot, characters, themes, and major literary devices or motifs used inside and out. Since you won’t know what theme you’ll be asked to write about in advance, you’ll need to be prepared to write a student choice question on more than just one book. Of the books you read for prep both in and out of class, choose four to five books that are thematically diverse to learn especially well in preparation for the exam. You may want to read these more than once, and you certainly want to take detailed notes on everything that’s going on in those books to help you remember key points and themes. Discussing them with a friend or mentor who has also read the book will help you generate ideas on what’s most interesting or intriguing about the work and how its themes operate in the text. You may be doing some of these activities anyways for books you are assigned to read for class, and those books might be solid choices if you want to be as efficient as possible. Books you write essays about for school are also great choices to include in your four to five book stable since you will be becoming super-familiar with them for the writing you do in class anyways. In answer to the question, then, of how many books you need to read for the AP Lit exam: you need to know four to five inside and out, and beyond that, the more the better! Know the books. Love the books. What Books Do You Need to Read for the AP Exam? The most important thing for the student choice free-response question is that the work you select needs to have â€Å"literary merit.† What does this mean? In the context of the College Board, this means you should stick with works of literary fiction. So in general, avoid mysteries, fantasies, romance novels, and so on. If you’re looking for ideas, authors and works that have won prestigious prizes like the Pulitzer, Man Booker, the National Book Award, and so on are good choices. Anything you read specifically for your AP literature class is a good choice, too. If you aren’t sure if a particular work has the kind of literary merit the College Board is looking for, ask your AP teacher. When creating your own AP Literature reading list for the student choice free-response, try to pick works that are diverse in author, setting, genre, and theme. This will maximize your ability to comprehensively answer a student choice question about pretty much anything with one of the works you’ve focused on. So, I might, for example, choose: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare, play, 1605 Major themes and devices: magic, dreams, transformation, foolishness, man vs. woman, play-within-a-play Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte, novel, 1847 Major themes and devices: destructive love, exile, social and economic class, suffering and passion, vengeance and violence, unreliable narrator, frame narrative, family dysfunction, intergenerational narratives. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton, novel, 1920 Major themes and devices: Tradition and duty, personal freedom, hypocrisy, irony, social class, family, â€Å"maintaining appearances†, honor Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys, novel, 1966 Major themes and devices: slavery, race, magic, madness, wildness, civilization vs. chaos, imperialism, gender As you can see, while there is some thematic overlap in my chosen works, they also cover a broad swathe of themes. They are also all very different in style (although you’ll just have to take my word on that one unless you go look at all of them yourself), and they span a range of time periods and genres as well. However, while there’s not necessarily a specific, mandated AP Literature reading list, there are books that come up again and again on the suggestion lists for student choice free-response questions. When a book comes up over and over again on exams, this suggests both that it’s thematically rich, so you can use it to answer lots of different kinds of questions, and that the College Board sees a lot of value in the work. To that end, I’ve assembled a list, separated by time period, of all the books that have appeared on the suggested works list for student choice free-response questions at least twice since 2003. While you certainly shouldn’t be aiming to read all of these books (there’s way too many for that!), these are all solid choices for the student choice essay. Other books by authors from this list are also going to be strong choices. It’s likely that some of your class reading will overlap with this list, too. I’ve divided up the works into chunks by time period. In addition to title, each entry includes the author, whether the work is a novel, play, or something else, and when it was first published or performed. Works are alphabetical by author. Warning: Not all works pictured included in AP Literature reading list below. Ancient Works Title Author Genre Date Medea Euripides play 431 BC The Odyssey Homer epic poem (no date) Antigone Sophocles play 441 BC Oedipus Rex Sophocles play 429 BC 1500-1799 Title Author Genre Date Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes novel 1605 Tom Jones Henry Fielding novel 1749 As You Like It Shakespeare play 1623 Julius Caesar Shakespeare play 1599 King Lear Shakespeare play 1606 A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare play 1605 The Merchant of Venice Shakespeare play 1605 Othello Shakespeare play 1604 The Tempest Shakespeare play 16 Candide Voltaire novel 1759 1800-1899 Title Author Genre Date Emma Jane Austen novel 1815 Mansfield Park Jane Austen novel 1814 Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen novel 1813 Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte novel 1847 Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte novel 1847 The Awakening Kate Chopin novel 1899 The Red Badge of Courage Stephen Crane novel 1895 Bleak House Charles Dickens novel 1853 David Copperfield Charles Dickens novel 1850 Great Expectations Charles Dickens novel 1861 Oliver Twist Charles Dickens novel 1837 A Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens novel 1859 Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoyevsky novel 1866 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert novel 1856 Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy novel 1895 The Mayor of Casterbridge Thomas Hardy novel 1886 Tess of the d’Urbervilles Thomas Hardy novel 1891 The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne novel 1850 A Doll’s House Henrik Ibsen play 1879 The American Henry James novel 1877 The Portrait of a Lady Henry James novel 1881 Moby-Dick Herman Melville novel 1851 Frankenstein Mary Shelley novel 1818 Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy novel 1877 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain novel 1885 The Queen of AP Literature surveys her kingdom. 1900-1939 Title Author Genre Date My ntonia Willa Cather novel 1918 The Cherry Orchard Anton Chekhov play 1904 Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad novel 1902 Sister Carrie Theodore Dreiser novel 1900 Murder in the Cathedral T.S. Eliot play 1935 Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner novel 1936 As I Lay Dying William Faulkner novel 1930 Light in August William Faulkner novel 1932 The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner novel 1929 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald novel 1925 A Passage to India E.M. Forster novel 1924 The Little Foxes Lillian Hellman play 1939 Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston novel 1937 Brave New World Aldous Huxley novel 1931 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man James Joyce novel 1916 Billy Budd Herman Melville novel 1924 Major Barbara George Bernard Shaw play 1905 The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck novel 1939 The Age of Innocence Edith Wharton novel 1920 Ethan Frome Edith Wharton novel 19 The House of Mirth Edith Wharton novel 1905 Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf novel 1925 1940-1969 Title Author Genre Date Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe novel 1958 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Edward Albee play 1962 Another Country James Baldwin novel 1962 Waiting for Godot Samuel Beckett play 1953 The Plague Albert Camus novel 1947 Invisible Man Ralph Ellison novel 1952 Lord of the Flies William Golding novel 1954 A Raisin in the Sun Lorraine Hansberry play 1959 Catch-22 Joseph Heller novel 1961 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’ s Nest Ken Kesey novel 1962 A Separate Peace John Knowles novel 1959 To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee novel 1960 The Crucible Arthur Miller play 1953 Death of a Salesman Arthur Miller play 1949 House Made of Dawn N. Scott Momaday novel 1968 Wise Blood Flannery O’Connor novel 1952 1984 George Orwell novel 1949 Cry, the Beloved Country Alan Paton novel 1948 All the King’s Men Robert Penn Warren novel 1946 The Chosen Chaim Potok novel 1967 Wide Sargasso Sea Jean Rhys novel 1966 The Catcher in the Rye JD Salinger novel 1951 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead Tom Stoppard play 1966 Cat’s Cradle Kurt Vonnegut novel 1963 The Glass Menagerie Tennessee Williams play 1945 A Streetcar Named Desire Tennessee Williams play 1947 Black Boy Richard Wright memoir 1945 Native Son Richard Wright novel 1940 Don't get trapped in a literature vortex! 1970-1989 Title Author Genre Date Bless Me, Ultima Rudolfo Anaya novel 1972 The House on Mango Street Sandra Cisneros novel 1984 â€Å"Master Harold† . . . and the boys Athol Fugard play 1982 M. Butterfly David Henry Hwang play 1988 A Prayer for Owen Meany John Irving novel 1989 The Woman Warrior Maxine Hong Kingston memoir 1976 Obasan Joy Kogawa novel 1981 Beloved Toni Morrison novel 1987 The Bluest Eye Toni Morrison novel 1970 Song of Solomon Toni Morrison novel 1977 Sula Toni Morrison novel 1973 Jasmine Bharati Mukherjee novel 1989 The Women of Brewster Place Gloria Naylor novel 1982 Going After Cacciato Tim O’Brien novel 1978 Equus Peter Shaffer play 1973 Ceremony Leslie Marmon Silko novel 1977 Sophie’s Choice William Styron novel 1979 The Color Purple Alice Walker novel 1982 Fences August Wilson play 1983 The Piano Lesson August Wilson play 1987 1990-Present Title Author Genre Date Reservation Blues Sherman Alexie novel 1995 The Blind Assassin Margaret Atwood novel 2000 Oryx and Crake Margaret Atwood novel 2003 The Memory Keeper’s Daughter Kim Edwards novel 2005 Cold Mountain Charles Frazier novel 1997 Snow Falling on Cedars David Guterson novel 1994 The Kite Runner Khaled Hosseini novel 2003 A Thousand Splendid Suns Khaled Hosseini novel 2007 Never Let Me Go Kazuo Ishiguro novel 2005 The Poisonwood Bible Barbara Kingsolver novel 1998 The Namesake Jumpa Lahiri novel 2004 All the Pretty Horses Cormac McCarthy novel 1992 Atonement Ian McEwan novel 2001 Native Speaker Chang Rae-Lee novel 1995 The God of Small Things Arundhati Roy novel 1997 A Thousand Acres Jane Smiley novel 1991 The Bonesetter’s Daughter Amy Tan novel 2001 The Story of Edgar Sawtelle David Wroblewski novel 2008 Don't stay in one reading position for too long, or you'll end up like this guy. Want to get a perfect 5 on your AP exam and an A in class? We can help. PrepScholar Tutors is the world's best tutoring service. We combine world-class expert tutors with our proprietary teaching techniques. Our students have gotten A's on thousands of classes, perfect 5's on AP tests, and ludicrously high SAT Subject Test scores. Whether you need help with science, math, English, social science, or more, we've got you covered. Get better grades today with PrepScholar Tutors. An Addendum on Poetry You probably won’t be writing about poetry on your student choice essay- most just aren’t meaty enough in terms of action and character to merit a full-length essay on the themes when you don’t actually have the poem in front of you (a major exception being The Odyssey). That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be reading poetry, though! You should be reading a wide variety of poets from different eras to get comfortable with all the varieties of poetic language. This will make the poetry analysis essay and the multiple-choice questions about poetry much easier! See this list of poets compiled from the list given on page 14 of the AP Course and Exam Description for AP Lit, separated out by time period. For those poets who were working during more than one of the time periods sketched out below, I tried to place them in the era in which they were more active. I’ve placed an asterisk next to the most notable and important poets in the list; you should aim to read one or two poems by each of the starred poets to get familiar with a broad range of poetic styles and eras. 14th-17th Centuries Anne Bradstreet Geoffrey Chaucer John Donne George Herbert Ben Jonson Andrew Marvell John Milton William Shakespeare* 18th-19th Centuries William Blake* Robert Browning Samuel Taylor Coleridge* Emily Dickinson* Paul Laurence Dunbar George Gordon, Lord Byron Gerard Manley Hopkins John Keats* Edgar Allan Poe* Alexander Pope* Percy Bysshe Shelley* Alfred, Lord Tennyson* Walt Whitman* William Wordsworth* Early-Mid 20th Century W. H. Auden Elizabeth Bishop H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) T. S. Eliot* Robert Frost* Langston Hughes* Philip Larkin Robert Lowell Marianne Moore Sylvia Plath* Anne Sexton* Wallace Stevens William Carlos Williams William Butler Yeats* Late 20th Century-Present Edward Kamau Brathwaite Gwendolyn Brooks Lorna Dee Cervantes Lucille Clifton Billy Collins Rita Dove Joy Harjo Seamus Heaney Garrett Hongo Adrienne Rich Leslie Marmon Silko Cathy Song Derek Walcott Richard Wilbur You might rather burn books than read them after the exam, but please refrain. Key Takeaways Why do you need to read books to prepare for AP Lit? For three reasons: #1: To become familiar with a variety of literary eras and genres#2: To work on your close-reading skills#3: To become closely familiar with four-five works for the purposes of the student choice free-response essay analyzing a theme in a work of your choice. How many books do you need to read? Well, you definitely need to get very familiar with four-five for essay-writing purposes, and beyond that, the more the better! Which books should you read? Check out the AP English Literature reading list in this article to see works that have appeared on two or more â€Å"suggested works† lists on free-response prompts since 2003. And don’t forget to read some poetry too! See some College Board recommended poets listed in this article. What's Next? See my expert guide to the AP Literature test for more exam tips! The multiple-choice section of the AP Literature exam is a key part of your score. Learn everything you need to know about it in our complete guide to AP Lit multiple-choice questions. Taking other APs? Check out our expert guides to the AP Chemistry exam, AP US History, AP World History, AP Psychology, and AP Biology. Looking for other book recommendation lists from PrepScholar? We've compiled lists of the 7 books you must read if you're a pre-med and the 31 books to read before graduating high school. Want to improve your SAT score by 160 points or your ACT score by 4 points? We've written a guide for each test about the top 5 strategies you must be using to have a shot at improving your score. Download it for free now:

Contemporary Capitalism Essays

Contemporary Capitalism Essays Contemporary Capitalism Essay Contemporary Capitalism Essay We live today in a crucial period in human history, of human thinking, in which one looks for new criteria, new concepts, new values and new certainties. The latest crises and the latest tendencies throughout the world have made the economists change their opinion about capitalism, the right political system, the perfect combination between the political order and the economical order, and so on. New tendencies like: globalization, regionalism, integration, and new technology. We also are faced with new psychological concepts such as, a world without frontier, a world fully open, lack of privacy, the new meaning of individualism, the new powers emerging, the â€Å"green† phenomenon (ecology), and immigration. All of these factors have led to some new (sometimes even controversial) theories about what is the right type of economy and political system of a specific country and how it can keep its sovereignty in this over connected world. We live in a period of history, in which everything is revised; new concepts are brought in to place, creating a new order. There is a search for new concepts, another paradigm, new values and new certainties. We live in postmodernist world. The economists live in a Babel tower, in which no one listens to one another and no one understands each other. â€Å"Leave three economists together and you can be sure that you will have at least four different theories about the economical politics that needs to be implemented†[1]. This has led to the following concepts, some of them best demonstrated in the recent party disputes in Britain. 4. 1 The Third Way The „Third Way† is a label for the need to update left-of-centre thinking in the light of the big changes sweeping through the world, especially the influence of globalization. A notable work on this theme is the one of Anthony Giddens[2]. He approaches one of the most provocative themes of public interest, from the post-communist period. He tries to look for a new political, theoretic and doctrinaire road, outside from the traditional distinction between left and right, a simultaneous transposition between old social-democracy and neoliberalism. The â€Å"First Way† was the traditional left: traditional social democracy, which dominated political thought and practice in the early post-war period. It was based on Keynesian economics and upon the notion that the state should replace the market in major areas of economic life. That approach foundered as the economy became more globalised and as it came to be recognized that the state is often inefficient and clumsily bureaucratic. The â€Å"Second Way† was Thatcherism, or market fundamentalism or neoliberalism the belief that the realm of the market should be extended as far as possible, since markets are the most rational and efficient means of allocating resources. [3] Thatcherism produced some important innovations and restored British economic competitiveness. Yet it too succumbed to its own limitations. Poverty and inequality arose more sharply in the UK during the Thatcher years than in almost any other developed country. Privatization was the order of the day and investment in public services foundered. The legacy of Mrs. Thatcher was a society with growing social and economic divisions and deteriorating public institutions. It was absolutely necessary to look for a third alternative a political approach that sought to reconcile economic competitiveness with social protection and with an attack upon poverty. [4] â€Å"Some have seen the â€Å"Third Way† as a sound-bite, empty PR a political outlook devoid of significant policy content. This view is quite wrong. Labor has won three successive elections for the first time in its history and could very well win a fourth precisely because the â€Å"Third Way† is policy-rich. Gordon Brown is unlikely to use the term, and I have dropped it myself precisely because it has been so widely misconstrued. But he will not revert to Old Labor, and he will certainly follow and further develop the main framework of â€Å"Third-Way† political thinking. †[5] That framework is based upon a number of key policy principles. The first is: hold the political centre-ground. No social democratic party can succeed today. The second is: ensure the economy is strong. Securing greater social justice depends upon a robust economy, not the other way around. The third is, invest heavily in public services, but insist that this is coupled to reform, to make the public services more effective, responsive and transparent. Choice and competition are essential to these aims; they are the means of generating reform and of empowering citizens who use these services. The fourth principle is to create a new contract between state and citizens, based upon responsibilities as well as rights. Government should provide resources to help people shape their own lives; these should regard the multiple problems that an individual or a family faces, about the quality of the jobs, health, children protection, education and transportation[6]; but it should also expect people to deliver on their part of the bargain. For instance, in the past, unemployment benefits have been an unconditional right. But this situation discourages personal responsibility and has the effect of locking workers out of jobs. Those who lose their jobs should have a responsibility to actively to look for work, and should be given retraining opportunities should they need them. Also â€Å"even in the middle of the tendencies of our dislocated society, we are capable to gather and sustain one each other†[7]. Finally and most controversially of all, although crucial to Labors success dont allow any issues to be monopolized by the political right. The right has always tended to dominate in areas such as law and order, immigration and terrorism; we need to look for left-of-centre responses to these problems. Given the impact of living in a more global world, we have to find a new balance between civil liberties and security. Labor has been widely accused of undermining our freedoms, but every country today is finding it hard to settle upon where the balance should lie. For a long time it was believed that those countries that combined capitalism and socialism (for example Sweden and Yugoslavia) can survive because of the qualities of both systems, but later on it was proved that the defects can’t be left without consequences. This debate led to controversies even in Romania, controversies that have been started by amateur politicians regarding doctrinaire problems that have only caught rumors about the discussions held at a European level, so they ended up being distorted. But the discussion about â€Å"the third way† has a strategic importance for Romania. In a country where most citizens voted for the left side, where the occasional social-democracy, the reinvented one, the democratic left but even the reformed communists or the extreme left have prevailed in the 2000 elections, the problem of reinventing social-democracy from the space of prosperous foreign capitalism holds a big attraction. Only a capitalist reform can produce in Romania, like in any other former communist country, an economical prosperity, the only realist base for the â€Å"state of the social protection†. 8] The Marxists left wanted to overthrown capitalism, and replace it with a different system. Also, a lot of social democrats were saying that capitalism can and must be progressively modified so it won’t lose the majority of its defining characteristics. Nobody ever offered an alternative to capitalism- the problem that remains is how much and in what way capitalism must be adjusted and controlled. After Second World War and until the ’70, on the basis of the Keynesians recipes, the State took on to increase its role, functions and powers within society, becoming what was called the â€Å"Welfare State†. The social struggles of the XIX-th century and the XX-th century were finally recognized. They also succeeded in making a new compromise between the work force and the capital (in the benefit of the former one), a new allocation of resources, in which the redistribution in favor of the helpless occupied front row. There has been registered reduction of inequalities of incomes and general increase in standard of living in almost all the western countries. But at the end of the ’60, critics against this type of society began to multiply. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan both opened a new era in the western social-economical and political life, one that was based on the liberal ideology. They replaced taboo words such as â€Å"The State† and â€Å"Citizen† with â€Å"Market† and â€Å"Individual†, and in this era the forces of the capitalism reconquered the lost terrain, reestablishing the balance between capital and work force in the benefit of the latter. The State became a weaker and a more invalid social and economical actor in front of the bigger international firms and in front of the forces of the market, it became less representative and less credible. Books like Anthony’s Giddens, â€Å"The third Way† and Bodo’s Hombach â€Å"Aufbruch die Politik des Neuten Mitte†[9], reference books in current political science, both announce the end of social-democracy as a modern political doctrine. In turn as already presented they present â€Å"The New Center† as a complex and syncretism (combination of different elements belonging to different arts) doctrine, a synthesis of doctrinaire ingredients both from the left and from the right. It supposes to eliminate any type of radicalism and thus to respond to the today’s complex realities, and proposing a so called â€Å"third way†, always searched, always invoked in different spaces, in different times. [10] Many economists criticize this â€Å"Third Way†. For them and for me it is not a viable political system. It is not a new way, but just a combination of two old ways, a combination that fails to bring the best from the two. It cannot define itself but through reference of its two already known poles. It cannot be an authentic doctrine, but a mix specific to each conjuncture in time and space. It cannot be but an exception, transitive and temporary, because it doesn’t have a doctrinaire showing consistency and originality. The main counterargument is that if the capitalist are left to do what they know best make money, but then the state interferes and redistributes it in order for everybody to be equal, than where does it leave the engine, the motifs that propel these capitalists. The Welfare State failed in providing the true social justice because of the excessive redistribution that discouraged and penalized the individual initiative. 4. 2 Capitalism the only plausible way (The misery of capitalism) For certain critiques of capitalism one can sense a double disposition: on one side the desire to counterpoise, to discover all its flaws; on the other side, the temptation of accelerating its flow for the purpose of better hurrying up its fall. The illusion, ghost, already present at Marx and which consist in the fact that it was believed that capitalism will expand everywhere through a blasphemous production, and will extenuate it by overcharging, so it will tilt suddenly in its counterpoint, the golden age. For Marx the â€Å"Golden Age† was socialism. Capitalism self-destroying will only be caused by its planetary expanding: at the end, after its devastation, there will be the flickering of a new aurora.. It is a self firing capitalism, made him self useless because it has succeeded. If everything will become a market, as Jeremy Rifkin[11] predicted, nothing will be a market. This type of expectation can thrill the imagination, but doesn’t hold to common sense: on one side, capitalism is far from ruling everywhere, and even if no rival is present, it is absent in its most fundamental forms. To the other half of the world, capitalism is viewed as a rider of the Apocalypse wearing, in its chaos, the promises of a wonderful horizon, it means to ask capitalism too much, to transfer only to its economical sphere a hope that was once entrusted to religions. We cannot expect from Capitalism anything else but what it knows to do best: produce material goods in an unlimited number, and nothing else. For other writers the question is not if capitalism will survive, because for them it’s a superfluous question, but mainly how capitalism changed and how willing are we the accept it. â€Å"Its survival for over two centuries, capitalism owes it both to its enemies and to its followers†[12] There is no replacement for socialism only slight changes from within. Free-market economy not only did not fulfill its promises, disenfranchising millions of people, but also appears as a simple machine of producing goods with no other purpose, reason but to produce other goods. When it fails, capitalism revolts us with its misery that it brings or maintains; when it succeeds it horrifies us through a depth of ugliness and bad merchandise. We manage to put up with it as much as we accept it, without actually adhering to the stories that make capitalism move forward. â€Å"Capitalism has to sustain its process in front of judges that already have in their pockets the death sentence. These judges prepare to file against the defendant, whatever arguments the lawyers might invocate, the only way the defense might register a success is to change the accusation paper†[13] Pascal Bruckner takes this idea forward and says that this accusation document doesn’t exist. He admits that capitalism is not the best solution, but he also says that by not having adversaries it is the only plausible way. For some writers like Viviane Forrester[14] capitalism is nothing else that the twin brother of Nazism that will finish the program of extermination, fifty years after the failure of the later. She assimilates the â€Å"economical horror† with the concentration camps from The Second World War and foresees â€Å"ready genocide† from the masters of the world. The target is the poor people. Christophe Dejours[15], a psychiatrist, writes a new page in the history of revisionism. In his opinion he assimilates the enterprise personnel with some collaborationists who participate with the boss at oppressing the employees just like numerous Germans collaborated for the extermination of the Jews. Pascal Bruckner also criticizes capitalism because of the publicity that bombards our every day life; because of the way all the countries tend to copy America, (â€Å"everybody can become American because America is already everybody†[16]) even if the only accepted form of racism is anti Americanism; because in his opinion capitalism killed our freedom, by imposing all these rules; because the disparities between the rich and the poor have grown so much; because of the way countries criticize the international system just to actually get better into it; because there is no longer the case of good will, but only one’s interests (â€Å"We cannot rely on the goodwill of the butcher, merchant, beer vendor or baker to supply us the meal, but on the care that they have for their own interests. We do not ever address their humanity, but their selfishness; and we will never tell them our needs, but always their advantages†[17]); because of the consumerism life that subjugate the individual, when the subterfuge of shopping became a prison, where the consumer defines itself through what he/she drinks, eats, listen, and vegetates in an adolescent universe, incapable to prioritize its desires and needs; because the unlimited progress of science did not go hand in hand with the recognition of the consciousness. ; because there the gap between rich people and poor people is growing bigger and bigger (â€Å"In 1960, a fifth of the most wealthy people in the world disposed of an income 30 times bigger than a fifth of the poorest. Today it disposes 82 times more†[18]) Bruckner thinks that it was communism that saved capitalism, and if it was true that capitalism could face its destruction because of its successes it is not longer true because it can let itself be educate d by those who want to delete it from the map and participate without their will at its own resurrection. Bruckner also mocks J. Garello. The later emphasizes that â€Å"In the real capitalism there is no corruption because the politics is held with care away from the economical order. There is no pollution because the responsible polluters must repair the damages that they inflict. There is no trash, dirt, because people learn spontaneously to improve their fate and progress on the later of income thanks to their initiative and their aptitude for work and trade. †[19] According to Bruckner this author thinks about capitalism as â€Å"a piece from the true cross†. Bruckner doesn’t agree that the individual can be reduced to modern Robinson, always rational, self conscious of its own interests and condemned for ever to maximize its potential. The same author also states that capitalism and democracy are less complementary but more supplementary, they sustain each other as much as they are contradictive, they have reports of confliction assistance, they listen to false similarity. 4. 3 Global economy –the end of capitalism as we know it or a new economy emerging? 4. 3. 1 Bleak times â€Å"The capitalists do not believe at all in capitalism. They believe in socialism for the wealthy. They want to be sure that the government takes care only of them and that the other ones don’t realize it. These guys, after all of that stuff theyve been telling us all these years about capitalism, free market, free enterprise they dont believe in any of that. They dont believe in free enterprise or a free market. They want they want socialism for themselves. To hell with everybody else, but give it to them. And I think, really, what were seeing here right now with them, with the banks, were seeing the end of capitalism the end of capitalism as we know it. And I say good riddance. †[20] George Soros believes that the connection between capitalism and democracy is a fragile one. Capitalism and democracy comply themselves to different principles. The stakes are different: for capitalism – wealth, for democracy – political authority. The criteria that are taken into consideration when measurements are made are also different: in capitalism, the measurement unit is the money, in democracy –the citizen’s vote. The values that capitalism and democracy serve are also different: in capitalism one can affirm that is about personal interests, in democracy – public interest. 21] Historically, democracy has been an important counterweight to the capitalist system, but in an era of globalization, Mr. Soros believes, no individual state can resist its power. C ollective decision-making institutions either do not exist or are not able to effectively intervene. While ideological global capitalism has thankfully swept away corrupt states, Mr. Soros worries how long it will be before it undermines reform-minded governments and even destroys itself. [22] Fukuyama also believes that capitalism and democracy do not necessarily have to go together. For him thou, it’s a preferable solution, because in his opinion at the end of history, capitalism will prevail, and liberal democracy is the only viable political system. [23] By â€Å"global capitalist system† Soros doesnt mean what we would understand by the term: capitalism as a world-wide system of production for profit, but the more restricted sense of present world financial arrangements which allow the more or less free movement of capital throughout the world: â€Å"The global economy is characterized not only by free trade in goods and services but even more by the free movement of capital. Interest rates, exchange rates, and stock prices in various countries are intimately interrelated, and global financial markets exert tremendous influence on economic conditions. Given the decisive role that international financial apital plays in the fortunes of individual countries, it is not inappropriate to speak of a global capitalist system† [24] It is these arrangements-this single world financial market-that he is saying is in danger of disintegrating; which of course would not at all be the same thing as the collapse of capitalism that ha s sometimes been mistakenly predicted by some writers in the Marxist tradition Soros, following, consciously or not, a distinction made by one school of anti-imperialist thinkers in the 1970s and 80s, divides the â€Å"global capitalist system† into a centre (US, Western Europe, Japan) and a periphery (Asia, Latin America, Russia, East Europe, Africa). Under this system capital flows from the centre to the periphery and back, supposedly to the mutual benefit of both. He sees the danger of disintegration coming from countries on the periphery taking steps to stop the free flow of capital in a bid to avoid the negative effects of the systems instability on their economies and populations: â€Å"To put it bluntly, the choice confronting us is whether we will regulate global financial markets internationally or leave it to each individual state to protect its own interests as best it can. The latter of course will surely lead to the breakdown of the gigantic circulatory system, which goes under the name of global capitalism† [25] So what Soros means by the â€Å"breakdown† or â€Å"disintegration† of global capitalism is not the collapse of the world-wide system of production for profit based on the exploitation of wage labor, but only states coming to adopt measures that impede the free movement of finance capital. Global institutions must be created to lay down some basic ground rules for the operation of global capitalism. For Soros is no free marketer. In fact part of his book is a devastating attack on those he calls the â€Å"market fundamentalists†, the followers of Von Mises, Von Hayek and others, who advocate that market forces be given complete free reign (laissez-faire) and who came into intellectual prominence in the time of Reagan and Thatcher. Soros levels two charges at them. Firstly, that they think markets have an in-built tendency towards creating a stable situation through supply and demand being in balance, while this is not the case. Second, that they preach that the market is the best way to regulate all human activities. Writing from his own experience, admittedly not of the real economy but only of financial markets, Soros challenges the equilibrium theory. The external shocks which the market fundamentalists invoke are usually, of course, government interventions of one sort or another. According to them, if governments just stood aside and let the magic of the market operate, there would be no slumps just continuous, smooth growth. But there is no evidence for this. Throughout the 19th century British governments pursued a policy of laissez-faire yet slumps still occurred on a regular basis. [26] The fact is that the market system does have a built-in tendency towards creating booms and busts rather than stability and smooth growth. As Marx pointed out, this applies to the real world of market-oriented production and not just financial markets. Soros is even prepared to give Marx some credit here: â€Å"†¦ the capitalist system by itself shows no tendency toward equilibrium. The owners of capital seek to maximize their profits. Left to their own devices, they would continue to accumulate capital until the situation became unbalanced. Marx and Engels gave a very good analysis of the capitalist system 150 years ago, better in some ways, I must say, than the equilibrium theory of classical economics†[27]. He claims, however, that thanks to â€Å"countervailing political interventions in democratic countries† Marxs â€Å"dire predictions did not come true†. This is based on a misunderstanding of Marxs view. The â€Å"dire predictions† that Soros mentions were not, as he seems to assume, that the unregulated profit-seeking of capitalists would lead to the collapse of the capitalist system but simply that their competitive struggle for profits meant that steady, smooth growth was impossible and that growth proceeded by means of booms and slumps. Capitalism has not collapsed because it was never going to, not because of government intervention Marx didnt foresee. And government intervention has not been able to eliminate the boom/slump cycle which Marx saw was an unavoidable feature of capitalism. Soros sees himself as continuing the political philosophy of Karl Popper. As expounded in books such as â€Å"The Open Society and Its Enemies†, Popper argued against the idea of trying to establish a â€Å"perfect† society in favor of accepting an â€Å"open† society as one subject to permanent improvement by piecemeal social engineering, by which he understood capitalism with a political structure involving elected institutions, the rule of law and pluralism, more or less what the West has had for years. 28] For Popper found the main enemies of his â€Å"open society† were the totalitarian ideologies of fascism and â€Å"Marxism† (which, for him, was not just Marxs own views but those mixed up wi th Lenins and Stalins)[29]. Soros adds a third which he says has come into prominence since the collapse of â€Å"communism†: uncontrolled capitalism. Hence the subtitle of his book â€Å"Open Society Endangered†, though he had already expressed this view in a famous article â€Å"The Capitalist Threat† that first appeared in â€Å"The Atlantic Monthly† in February 1997 and which was widely reproduced. Soros sees the danger coming from the penetration of market values into all aspects of life, leading to social disintegration. Monetary values†, he writes, â€Å"have usurped the role of intrinsic values and markets have come to dominate areas of society where they do not properly belong†[30]. He is in fact quite forceful in his criticism of this aspect of global capitalism. Soross mistake is to think that you can have capitalism and somehow keep its money-commodity relations from spreading everywhere. The history of capitalism is the history of the continuous spread of such transactional relationships, the market works its way into more fields of human activity. It is a process that cannot be stoppe d within capitalism as growing marketization is just as much a feature of capitalism as capital accumulation; indeed the two go together. Soros, however, is a supporter of capitalism: â€Å"I want to make it clear that I do not want to abolish capitalism. In spite of its shortcomings, it is better than the alternatives. Instead, I want to prevent the global capitalist system from destroying itself† [31] One might doubt whether he has given serious consideration to the alternative of a global society based on the common ownership of the worlds resources and production directly to satisfy human needs. Not that one would really expect him to. Some of his fellow-capitalists already think he has gone too far in his criticism of their system. [32] 4. 3. 2 The new economy â€Å"The anthems of modernity sing liberalism. Its victory is almost complete, absolute, to the north and south, to the sunset and the sunrise. Globalization signifies liberalization. The horizon is liberal. †[33] The today’s dominant doctrine at a global level gravitates around some key concepts, it cultivates some values that tend to acknowledged almost unanimously. First of all it affirms, and emphasizes the prevalence of the individual, in its quality of an entrepreneur, manufacturer and consumer, and respects its freedom of action and interaction with its neighbors, the ones like him, in order to maximize his individual utility. The state is a minimal one, its action reducing only to protect the negative rights (as described by von Humboldt, Herbert Spencer, and Robert Nozick). Society has at its basis a network of economical transactions between individuals, through which everybody exchanges goods and services, abilities and knowledge, time (understood as fundamental economical resource), with the purpose of maximizing profits and the degree of individual satisfaction. [34] This way the allocation of resources and the social adjustment is no longer directed from above, but are being harmonized and optimized on the horizontal, due to these complex relations between individuals, a characteristic of the free market. This is a second key concept of the liberal model. The market gains its own rights again as a natural form of organizing and regulating not only the economical activities, but also social life in general. Society becomes thus a market society, which attains the true social justice. This new type of society assures the equality of chances, encourages the initiative and free competition between individuals, in order for each of them to take care of themselves and to follow their own ideal of personal wealth, according to their own natural abilities and the own obtained trough education, according to the work they depose and the creativity they are showing. Nobody guarantees the right for work anymore; each one has to demonstrate that he/she is useful because of his/hers work. The initial forming and the continuous role one plays becomes more and more important. In order to insure social equality, the state must ensure everybody’s right to education. Another essential element of the new political-economical orthodoxy is the private enterprise, producer of wealth, of adding value, and the organizer of the social texture. It is the main object in the economical game, directing the transactions and determining the distribution and the redistribution of costs and profits at a global level. Today’s informatics and telecommunication revolutions radically transform the classical private enterprise more likely into a network, a system that works horizontally. The decisions are becoming more and more decentralized, and they give responsibilities to all the employees, through a participatory management and a representative one for all the involved interests. But above all, thrones the great capital, especially the financial one. All the elements of the economic system: people, goods and services, are being appreciated by their contribution to the profitableness of the social capital. At a global level, the politics that need to be promoted must envisage first of all the legacy of human kind, the common interest: protecting and rehabilitating the environmental conditions (air, water, forests so on), through regulation accepted at a global level; common security (regarding food, finance, health so on); peace; protecting and rehabilitation of the cultural legacy, with its wonderful diversity; punishing the crimes committed against humanity, by consolidating The International Criminal Court and others. [35] Braileanu considers also that a minimum intervention of the state is necessary, and only especially for defense, public order, in general for defending the rights and freedoms of its members. But â€Å"If we do not want the state to interfere in all the domains of our private life, if we want to be free and productive, it is necessary to look and establish a precise limit beyond which the State cannot confiscate what belongs to us†[36] He also acknowledges the fact that we are dealing with an integrating process, and that there is no reason or ways to fight it. The main agents of this formidable envelopment are the huge multinational enterprises, groups or chains industrial and financial, conglomerate tentacles that concentrate and dominate the world. Historically, the world was never ruled by so few and so powerful masters. The true global governance is managed by only six major actors: The International Monetary Fund, The World Bank, G7- The group of the seven most industrialized countries in the world, The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and NATO. The influence of technology and information led to acceleration in the process of concentrating the capital, thus the power. The logic of the market leads to monopoly. This idea was also seen by Marx as the last stage of capitalism. He declared that by reaching this point it is going to be easier to pass to a socialist society. In today’s new economy, the balance between capital and work is a different one. The father is the capital, and the mother is the work. In the new condition of this postmodern marriage, the feminine part is asked to be very flexible and mobile. Tiberiu Braileanu admits that the new economy has its dangers. But he says â€Å"in order to avoid them, the principle for durable, long-lasting development must include the necessary human solidarity and reconsideration of the person, of the human being, in the center of the economic preoccupation†[37] 4. 4 Capitalism – an almost complete victory against â€Å"the enemies of the open society†? One can argue that only the capital is anticapitalist, because it works at overthrowing its previous conditions through what Joseph Schumpeter called â€Å"the continuous hurricane of destructive creativeness†, the appearance of new values through destroying the existent goods Less pessimistic than Schumpeter but anxious about the future nonetheless is Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama’s argument is in two stages according to David Reismen in his book â€Å"Conservative Capitalism. The Social Economy â€Å"[38]. First, he argues, ethical absolutes are the precondition for success and not just the icing on the cake: â€Å"Law, contract, and economic rationality provide a necessary but not sufficient basis for both the stability and prosperity of postindustrial societies; they must as well be leavened with reciprocity, moral obligation, duty toward community, and trust, which are based in a habit rather than rational calculation. The latter are not anachronisms in a modern society but rather the sine qua non of the latter’s success. [39] Second, Fukuyama continues, the social capital that is the source of the constraint is being eroded by evolution and it is not being replenished: â€Å"Communities of shared values, whose members are willing to subordinate their private interests for the sake of larger goals of the community as such, have b ecome rarer. And it is these moral communities alone that can generate the kind of social trust that is critical to organizational efficiency. † [40]p. 309 Fukuyama also militates for liberalism, and more than that his perfect system would be a liberal democracy. He, as Tiberiu Braileanu, both see that today this system has some shortcomings. A free society presumably means the abolition of any power, in the idea that human nature is kind and that it can evolve without exterior coercion. To have a number of freedoms doesn’t mean to be free. And then, are we really free? The new technologies affect so much our private lives, that one can say that we are all in a conditional freedom, ever more connected. Also as Pericle said â€Å"If you want to be free, you must work†. Just as Soros, Fukuyama thinks that without its exterior enemies, capitalism tends to self destroy. According to Denis Duclos[41], the major characteristic of the present capitalist system is a phenomenon of â€Å"autofagie† (self eating) and the devouring of the exceeding work. The enterprises swallow each other, the markets devour themselves, and people have to put up with the consequences of this insane recycling, governed by the law of profit by any means. Fukuyama’s book was indeed surprising. Fukuyamas thesis consists of three main elements. First, there is an empirical argument. Fukuyama points out that since the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, democracy, which started off as being merely one among many systems of government, has grown until the majority of governments in the world are termed democratic. He also points out that democracys main intellectual alternatives (which he takes to be various forms of dictatorship) have become discredited. Second, there is a philosophical argument examining the influence of thymos (or human spiritedness). Fukuyama argues that the original battles for prestige among the first men of history, and the willingness of some to risk their lives in order to receive recognition from another is an unnecessary form of human behavior within a democracy. In essence; the roles of master and slave are rationally understood by both parties to be unsatisfying and self-defeating. This follows the work of Hegel and an Anglo-Saxon tradition typified by John Lockes ideas on self preservation and the right to property. Finally Fukuyama also argues that for a variety of reasons, radical socialism (or communism) is likely to be incompatible with modern representative democracy. So the last question for Fukuyama, that tries to look for an end to history, is if liberal democracy is fully satisfying or are there still contradictions that will be kept deep inside the liberal arrangement? Of course liberal democracy has various problems such as unemployment, environmental pollution, drugs, and crime, but beyond these immediate problems lays the question if there are deeper sources of malcontent- if life is fully satisfactory? â€Å"If we can’t see any of these contradictions then we can say together with Hegel and Kojeve[42] that we have reached the end of history. But if we do see them, then we must say that History, in its strict meaning, will continue†. [43] Therefore, in the future, democracies are overwhelmingly likely to contain markets of some sort, and most are likely to be capitalist or social democratic. 1] Milton Fridman, Liber s[pic] alegi , editura ALL, Bucure_[pic]ti, 1999 [2] Anthony Giddens, Baron Giddens (born January 18, 1938) is a British sociologist who is renowned for his theory of structuration and his holistic view of modern societies. He is considered to be one of the most prominent modern contributors in the field of sociology, the author of at least 34 books, published in at least 29 languages, issuing on average more than one book every year. Three notable stages can be identified in his academic life. The most recent stage concerns modernity, globalization and politics, especially the impact of modernity on social and personal life.