Kuhiro Class Reading Circle

“The thing I am most afraid of is fear.” — Michel de Montaigne

In Fear: A Genealogy of Morals, Corey Robin explores how fear is more than an individual emotion. It is also shaped by political power, social institutions, and the cultural values we grow up accepting.

Drawing on the ideas of thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, Montesquieu, and Alexis de Tocqueville, Robin examines how fear can reinforce authority, encourage obedience, and discourage people from questioning established systems. Fear can operate not only through direct threats but also through social expectations, collective anxieties, and the consequences people anticipate when they challenge the status quo.

The article invites us to look beyond fear as a natural response to danger and consider how it is cultivated, directed, and used to shape society. What we fear, and how we respond to that fear can reveal a great deal about the power structures around…

What happens when development takes place within a system of dependency? 

 In Dependency and Development in Latin America, Fernando Henrique Cardoso revisits Lenin’s theory of imperialism to examine Latin America’s changing relationship with advanced capitalist economies. He argues that foreign investment increasingly moved into industrial production, creating a form of dependent capitalist development. 

 Latin American economies could therefore grow and industrialize while remaining dependent on foreign capital, technology, and markets. This development also produced uneven growth and internal inequality.

Cardoso’s key insight: dependency does not necessarily prevent development—it shapes how development occurs.

Kindly head over to the Kuhiro Class Reading Circle Google Classroom to access the text. Looking forward to hearing different perspectives on the text here in Chautara.

So..How not do die?

What if some of the biggest threats to our health aren’t sudden accidents or rare diseases, but everyday habits we barely notice?

In How Not to Die, physician Michael Greger explores the leading causes of premature death; from heart disease and diabetes to certain cancers, and asks a simple and practical question: what can we do to lower our risk?

The book turns complex health research into ideas that make sense in daily life. Greger looks at how the foods we eat, how active we are, and other lifestyle choices may affect the development and progression of chronic diseases.

Rather than focusing only on medicines and medical treatments, the book highlights the possible benefits of whole plant foods, balanced eating patterns, regular physical activity, and other preventive habits. It connects scientific evidence to familiar choices like what we put on our plates, how much we move,…

Robert Skidelsky’s Keynes’s Road to Bretton Woods traces the development of John Maynard Keynes’s ideas on the international economic system before and during the creation of the Bretton Woods framework.

The paper explores Keynes’s proposals for:

* International monetary cooperation

* Exchange-rate stability

* Regulation of international finance

* Post-war economic reconstruction