How the world works

One idea from each of the 12 books on this topic.

• Glaucon restates a view he doesn’t hold: people are just only out of fear. A shepherd named Gyges finds a ring that makes him invisible, and uses it to seduce the queen, kill the king and take the kingdom. Given that ring, a just man would do the same.

  From The Republic by Plato

• Picture yourself as “a puppet of the Gods, either their plaything only, or created with a purpose”. Cords of pleasure, pain, and fear pull you in opposite directions. One cord is soft and golden: reason, which a city calls law. Grab that one and pull with it against the rest.

  From Laws by Plato

• Character grows the way a crop does. A farmer in Sung, worried his corn was too short, pulled the stalks up to make them taller. He came home tired and said, “I have been helping the corn to grow long.” His son ran out and found it all withered.

  From Mencius by Mencius

• Twisting the wording of a deal is its own kind of injustice. A general who agreed to a 30-day truce raided the enemy’s fields at night, because the deal said days. Romans already had a saying for this: “More law, less justice.”

  From On Duties by Cicero

• Pyrrhus beat the Romans at Asculum and lost most of his friends and officers doing it. When someone congratulated him, he answered “that one other such would utterly undo him.” A victory that costs this much is still called Pyrrhic.

  From Parallel Lives by Plutarch

• A country kept quiet only by terror is free from war, not at peace. If people are led about like sheep and learn only slavery, that is a desert with a government name.

  From Political Treatise by Baruch Spinoza

• Look at the rough wool coat on a day laborer. A shepherd, a wool sorter, a spinner, a dyer, a weaver, plus sailors and toolmakers far away all worked on it. So even a poor worker in a rich country depends on thousands of other people.

  From The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

• Girls are said to love dolls and dresses from birth. Sit a girl for hours beside her mother’s mirror and she’ll copy what she sees. Let her run outdoors with her brother and she’ll play as hard as he does.

  From A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

• England needs 100 workers for a year to make some cloth and 120 for some wine. Portugal needs 90 for the cloth and 80 for the wine. Portugal is better at both, yet both countries come out ahead when Portugal makes wine, England makes cloth, and they swap.

  From On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation by David Ricardo

• Landlords get richer just because the country around them grows. “They grow richer, as it were in their sleep, without working, risking, or economizing.” So the future rise in land values could be taxed, as long as today’s market price is left to the owners in full.

  From Principles of Political Economy by John Stuart Mill

• To shut someone up is to act as if you can’t be wrong. Everyone admits they make mistakes, but almost nobody applies that to the beliefs their own circle shares. The chance that made you a churchgoer in London would have made you a Buddhist or a Confucian in Beijing.

  From On Liberty by John Stuart Mill

• When you buy a shirt, you see a shirt and a price. You don’t see the people who grew the cotton, spun it, and sewed it, or how long they worked. Their link to you shows up only as a link between things: the shirt and your money.

  From Das Kapital, Volume I by Karl Marx