Texts That Explain Too Much

Totalizing Narratives · Excessive Confidence

These texts are influential not because they are careful, but because they reduce complexity into reassuring coherence. They are useful to study precisely for how they foreclose uncertainty.

Francis Fukuyama — The End of History and the Last Man
Samuel P. Huntington — The Clash of Civilizations
Jared Diamond — Guns, Germs, and Steel
Steven Pinker — The Better Angels of Our Nature
Yuval Noah Harari — Sapiens
Thomas L. Friedman — The World Is Flat
Niall Ferguson — Empire