This is one of those books that inspires one to dig deeper into the materials lightly touch on by the author. It is a very short book that has only a hundred pages. It covers a few important topics, including government, religion, the earth, war, and socialism. It is not about the history of those topics, but the lessons learned through their history. One of the most exciting inspirations I have received from this book is the lesson one would learn from the development of socialism, or the other form of polity of a country, like capitalism.
The author asserts that it is strange that Marx proposes that socialism will prevail in the end against capitalism even though Marx was a disciple of Hegel who advocates the idea of dialectic. If Hegel’s dialectic is the way to the truth, the perfect form (or the ultimate form) of government would be the synthesis of socialism and capitalism. This led me to think of the only country that successfully adopted the synthesis of socialism and capitalism in our world today – The People’s Republic of China. It is evident that the synthesis works perfectly well in China today that makes her the second-largest economy in the world after the United States. The country has the most advanced technology that applies down to the civilian level and is used in their daily life. The success of China subverts my thinking altogether as in our mind there are only two choices in the world. There are either capitalism or socialism. Shall we take China as an example and rethink our preconception about the options of polity we have? Instead of just following the American imperial discourse to demonize socialism. At the end of the day, one should remember that socialism was once a very popular ideology among the industrial nations. Socialism is also a democratic political form, not a dictatorship form of government as America says.