Chapter 2 of Brooke Harrington’s book opens with a character that sounds like he belongs in a movie. An Oxford-educated attorney who built a career chasing down ultra-wealthy people who don’t pay their debts. Harrington calls him “Boba Fett for the Jet Set,” and honestly, the name fits perfectly.
In 1770, a group of Polish noblemen asked a Swiss philosopher for help saving their country. That philosopher was Rousseau. The country was Poland. It was being squeezed by Russia, Prussia, and Austria on all sides. Two years later, in 1772, those three empires would carve Poland up between them in the First Partition. Rousseau’s text arrived too late to change anything. But what he wrote is still one of the most interesting political documents of the Enlightenment. Because his advice was not what you would expect.
Most people treat a presentation like a single event. You give the talk, some people buy, the rest leave, and that’s it. Done. Move on to the next one.
Chapter 1 of Offshore: Stealth, Wealth, and the New Colonialism by Brooke Harrington opens with the Panama Papers. In 2016, a massive leak exposed the offshore financial lives of Jackie Chan, Emma Watson, the king of Saudi Arabia, a former CEO of Adidas, and thousands more. It was a global sensation. But Harrington’s point is that the Panama Papers were just a tiny window into something much bigger. And much worse.
Here is the core of Rousseau’s economic vision for Corsica, in one sentence: “Everyone must live and no one must grow rich.” That is the whole philosophy. If you understand that line, you understand everything else in this second half of his proposal.
What if you could give your best presentation every single day, in every time zone, without actually being there? That is the promise of automated webinars. And Chapter 14 of Kennedy’s book, written by guest expert Geoff Ronning, makes a strong case that this is not lazy marketing. It is smart business.
In the Social Contract, Rousseau wrote one line that changed his life: “There is still one country in Europe fit to be given laws: it is the Isle of Corsica.” A Corsican patriot named Matthieu Buttafoco read that and wrote to Rousseau. Would he actually draft a constitution for the island? Rousseau said yes. This is what he came up with.
Most books about finance start with numbers. This one starts with a girl making dinner for her disabled sister on the wrong side of a very rich town.
Kennedy opens this chapter with a line that is hard to argue with: when they watch it on a screen, it is TV.
Most philosophers write about politics from the comfort of a study. Rousseau wrote these letters while in exile, with a warrant out for his arrest. His books had been burned. His own city had turned on him. This is not abstract theory. This is a man fighting back.