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Bionomics, by Michael Rothschild
Recommended by David Tepper

Comments: The book explains the biological ground for social behaviour. I can't think of a book that is more important than this one. (It's not an easy read, read it with someone else).

Comments: The architect/author Jonathan Hale, while not using the statist/dynamist dichotomy, none the less provides original and illuminating insights on the modern tendencies to public control of design by thinking this will eliminate risk in the design of contemporary buildings and cities.
When Hale describes the natural appeal of simple 18th-century American houses, he talks of the individual "reason" used in the design. He argues that the early American non-professional builder relied on a combination of his own generally untrained powers of reason and a trust in the unknown, sometimes even his intuition. This contrasts with the modern designer, who out of fear of what cannot be known consciously, typically places power and control ahead of reason and intuition.
The author is critical of nearly all "styles" of architecture and planning including of todayÿs hot planning guru, Andres Duany (Seaside fame). Hale critiques Neo-traditonal planning which he argues convincingly is overly planned and designed using formulistic design codes which do not place any trust in the individual designer.
The author instead argues that "A town plan is structure whose purpose is to make room for life to happen." Tongue-in-cheek he alternatively proposes scrapping all such Neo-traditonal details with a simple code that might read: "The process of design shall be play. The designer shall experience great pleasure in the work or the design shall be deemed a failure...the designer shall not be aware of how this pattern was arrived at." This is hardly a call for the stasism of central planners.
While one can gain a fresh perspective on esthetics and design by reading this ground breaking, yet engaging book, a skeptical eye is always in order... particularly when the author strays into economics and politics and tends to blame the blandness of buildings on commercialism. Overall, though, if one reads this 1994 book AND Venturi's 1972 book Learning From Las Vegas one should be able to understand the central issues of urban planning and contemporary architecture and design from a fresh dynamist viewpoint.

Comments: Human intelligence and intellectual resources are now the world's prime capital. Instant global communication is making international borders irrelevant. In the information revolution, technology is secondary. Both nationally and within the corporation executive power is waning.

Comments: Bronowski (father of Lisa Jardine, whose book is suggested below) was a great dynamist, whose every work embraced the opportunity offered by the interaction of ideas. This is generally considered his greatest book, completed just months before he died. A must-read.

Comments: Human intelligence and intellectual resources are now the world's prime capital. Instant global communication is making international borders irrelevant. In the informationrevolution technology is secondary. Both nationally and within the corporation executive power is waning.

Comments: A truly good book that explains a lot about liberals and stasists.

Comments: Excellent description of how the best of intentions are turned upside down and caused to create the opposite of what was intended with many examples from many fields including environmental quality, human rights, occupational safety, zoning regulations,equal employment opportunities, city planning and management etc.

Comments: Florman, a civil engineer, is not a pure dynamist. He is, however, an interesting and thought-provoking pro-technology author. Read especially his chapter "Technology and the Tragic View." If you get hooked on this stuff (as I have) then you can move on to THE INTROSPECTIVE ENGINEER. Both books are available in paperback from St. Martin's Press.

Comments: I offer this recommendation in a "know the enemy" spirit. Sections 69 and 76 of this book are a classic argument for stasism (and statism). Especially noteworthy is Rawls's claim that a theory of justice must promote the "equilibrium" of "the basic structure" of a "well-ordered society" through the force of law (p. 456-7). Society, in other words, is a machine, and government keeps it in working order by subjecting it to forces sufficient to keep it in stable equilibrium. This becomes a bit problematic when you see that "it" actually refers to "us."

Comments: The authors believe the world is the middle of a "long boom," an unparalleled 40-year long capitalistic expansion driven by new science and technologies, free markets, and globalization.

Comments: Essential reading from a true dynamist -- Gilder simply runs over the enemies of the future.

Comments: A fascinating work on how stasist policies throughout history have led to trouble, strife and unhappiness. The author starts with 19th-century forestry policies and goes on from there. Very wide ranging. He pleads, ultimately, in favour of local knowledge, dear to our chere Virginia Postrel. A useful complement to her own terrific book.

[Note from Virginia Postrel: See also Jesse Walker's review of Seeing Like a State in Reason.

Comments: This book examines the emerging field of computer simulations and how they can be used to model complex systems. It touches on the theme of Virginia Postrel's books by taking a dynamist approach to engineering and modeling. By programing a computer with a simple set of rules and letting it evolve, computer simulations can produce far more interesting and accurate models of complex systems than using a static deterministic approach.

Comments: An examination of human consciousness that argues convincingly against the ability to "plan" a conscious artifact. Edelman argues that rather than attempting to master plan an artificially intelligent machine, the best we can hope for is the creation of a machine capable of experiencing sensory input and evolving by trial and error and the synthesis of that sensory data. Draws heavily on Edelman's work in immunology, and is an attempt to popularize his more abstruse books, The Remembered Present and Neural Darwinism.

Comments: Ground breaking book written in the early 1960's (?) by the guy who coined the term "Post Modernism". Venturi and his associates present a damning critique of modernist architecture and planning and makes the improbable case that Las Vegas and all of its glitz may be visually interesting, and exciting. He uncovers the order in the apparent chaos to the strip. He also drove the Modernist architects nuts and re-introduced the idea of drawing upon historical styles in contemporary architecture: a la "Post Modernism." This book is a classic... that includes much dynamist thought.

Comments: Jardine argues that the market and people's purely commercial urges drove the Renaissance (the biggest development in Western culture outside of beach volleyball). As a summary of the book at Amazon.com puts it, "It was an urge to own, a ceaseless quest for new horizons and exotic treasures, that fueled the cultural output of the Renaissance." Or to put it more succinctly, the Renaissance was a dynamist revolution.

[Note from Virginia Postrel: For more on Jardine's book, and the emerging dynamist cultural-studies movement it exemplifies, see Charles Paul Freund's article, "Buying into Culture" in the July 1998 Reason.]

Comments: What stasists fear more than anything is failure. Petroski shows, however, how the world's greatest feats of engineering were built on previous failures. As in "The Evolution of Useful Things," Petroski employs mind- numbing repetition but otherwise a solid book.

Comments: Schurmann is a retired professor of Sinology from UC Berkeley. His book, published in 1994, uses the terms "motion" and "rest" instead of dynamism and stasis, but muses on the same issues that the "dynamist" group is concerned with. Schurmann's erudition includes non-Western views on growth and progress, particularly the confucian; while he applauds the West and its achievements, he is critical of America for its lack of vision at the end of the 20th century. Following Aristotle and Confucius, Schurmann calls for an understanding of the balance required between motion and rest, something the Dynamists would do well to remember. Excessive motion without order leads to chaos. Excessive rest leads to stasis, exactly as the dynamists detail. What is needed is a golden mean or unwobbling pivot to guide growth. It is the nature of the beast for the globalization of free-market capitalism and Western-style individualism to be a bit messy; the history of Western Culture exemplifies this. However this does not mean that we can or should return to feudal-style economies, or ditch the division of labor. Neither does it mean that our civilization can afford to ignore issues like the global environment, or the psychological trauma that many suffer from with the advent of modernist, capitalist lifestyles. We must avoid a belligerent "21st century, damn the torpedoes" approach that threatens to decay into Ayn Randian pseudoscholarship. I highly recommend this book, and I welcome and look forward to any replies!

Comments: Essential to understanding how (and why) intervention in the market restricts individual freedom, economic growth, and technological advances--and is immoral.