Radical Middle Newsletter's Political Book Award Winners

"Radical Middle [newsletter lifts] politics to a higher level of discourse."
-- Carter Phipps, What Is Enlightenment? magazine, June-August 2005

Radical Middle newsletter, founded by the Center for Visionary Law in 1998, issued an annual “Political Book Award” to the book that best exemplifies a politics that was

No author could win more than once, collections and anthologies were not eligible, and Radical Middle editor Mark Satin’s books were not eligible.

Awards prior to 1998 were issued retrospectively (see II below) or by Radical Middle’s predecessor newsletters, New Options and Renewal (see III and IV below).

I. THE WINNERS, 1998 - 2009

2009: Steven Lukes, The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat: A Novel of Ideas, 2nd ed. (Verso). Radical Middle newsletter’s 12th Political Book Award – and Renewal / New Options / Radical Middle’s 30th consecutive (and final!!!) annual book award – goes to a “novel of ideas” by a politics & sociology prof. at NYU that makes beautiful sense of our newsletters’ three-decades-long evolutionary journey from countercultural Correct Line-ism to inclusivity and transpartisanship. This excerpt from the final chapter of Lukes’s novel can give you the flavor:

“You fail to see that nature has linked human ideals together in an indissoluble chain[,” said the owl].

“How do you mean?” Nicholas [Prof. Caritat] asked. . . .

“Consider the countries you have visited, all of which you have left behind. Each was devoted to the pursuit of a worthy objective: one to ensuring order and security [“Militaria”], another to maximizing welfare and happiness [“Utilitaria”], another to securing stable identities where people feel at home with others of their kind [“Comunitaria”], another to the delirious vision of real individual freedom in harmony with all others [“Proletaria”], anoher to the protecting of individuals and their property from interference to live as they choose [“Libertaria”]. Yet each pursued its favored goal to the exclusion of the others and in the process sacrificed countless individual humans at the altar of its abstract ideal. How many human lives have been ruined and destroyed in the name of such ideals? What human folly!”

“What,” Nicholas asked, “is the alternative?”

“Only connect!” replied the owl. “The alternative is to see that none of these ideals is worth anything without the others.”

2008(T): Lawrence Chickering and James Turner, Voice of the People: The Transpartisan Imperative in American Life (daVinci Press). A worthy successor to such books as Ted Halstead and Michael Lind’s The Radical Center (2001 co-winner, see below) and Matt Miller’s The Two Percent Solution (2003 winner, see below) as well as my own book Radical Middle (2004). See our appreciation HERE.

2008(T): Alanna Hartzok, The Earth Belongs to Everyone (Institute for Economic Democracy Press). An “idealistic” book that’s grounded in sophisticated economic theory and impressive numbers-crunching, and includes moving accounts of the grassroots-activist author trying to spread her views. See our appreciation HERE.

2007: Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (Houghton Mifflin). Lively and well-informed attempt to nudge the social change movement away from the "politics of limits" and toward a politics emphasizing optimism, technological innovation, human development, and sensitivity to the material ambitions of the developing world. See our review HERE.

2006: Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman, Ethical Realism: A Vision for America's Role in the World (Pantheon / Random House). Two policy analysts -- one on the left, one on the right -- passionately explicate the emerging radical-centrist alternative to interventionism and neo-isolationism. See our review HERE.

2005: George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (Farrar, Straus). The radical middle take on Iraq. We could have toppled Saddam without prolonged bloodshed -- IF we'd have worked with all Iraq's exile factions, worked more diligently with the rest of the world, refused to demonize the Baath Party, and sent in enough troops to preserve the peace. See our review HERE.

2001(T): Walter Truett Anderson, All Connected Now: Life in the First Global Civilization (Westview / Perseus). The promise of globalization. Reviewed under the subhead “Connectedness Matters” about two-thirds of the way through our article HERE.

2001(T): Ted Halstead and Michael Lind, The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics (Doubleday). First U.S. book to present a full-blown radical middle ideology and program. The authors are co-founders of the New America Foundation. See our review HERE.

2000: Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (Pantheon / Random House). In the long view, both cultural and biological evolution tend toward non-zero-sumness -- i.e., tend toward cooperative, win-win behaviors. See our review HERE.

1999: William Ury, Getting to Peace, now published as The Third Side: Why We Fight and How We Can Stop (Viking / Penguin). Argues that radical middle governments should be teachers, mediators, equalizers, and referees. See our review HERE.

1998(T): Anthony Giddens, The Third Way (Polity / Blackwell). First book to outline a full-blown “radical centrist” (Giddens’s phrase) ideology and program. The author is director of the London School of Economics. Given its props in our article HERE.

1998(T): Alan Wolfe, One Nation, After All (Viking). What culture war? Most middle-class Americans are far more thoughtful, far more creative, and far more accommodating than many academics realize. Discussed in our Lakoff review HERE.

These books were chosen in the year of the Center for Visionary Law's founding (1998) by Mark Satin in consultation with former advisors to New Options newsletter, III below.

New Options was Radical Middle's predecessor, and it eventually became the second largest independent political newsletter in the U.S., with 13,000 paying subscribers. You can learn more about New Options HERE, and a collection of some of New Options's best cover stories is available HERE. The New Options Political Book Award winners were chosen democratically by special marked ballots sent to all New Options subscribers.

Renewal was the newsletter of the New World Alliance. The Renewal Political Book Award winners were chosen by ballots sent to over 100 "transformation identified" academics and policy analysts who'd been in touch with the newsletter or the Alliance.

See our picks of the best visionary political books from the 2000s, HERE; from the 1990s, HERE; from the 1980s, HERE; from the 1970s, HERE.