Recommended reading for ACTION PHILOSOPHERS #4
Karl Marx, Machiavelli, Isaac ben-Luria and The Kabbalah

Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. Translated from the German by Engels.
Frankly, I'd prefer everyone read Marx's true masterwork, Capital, but this column is advertised as being for the genius on the go. The Manifesto is probably among the top five most influential documents ever produced, and there's good reason why: it succinctly merges Marx's theories of class struggle and dialectical materialism with stirring proletariat propaganda.

Niccolo Machiavelli. The Prince. Translated from the Italian by Luigi Ricci.
Due to its scant length, The Prince is usually combined in book form with Machiavelli's other major theoretical work, The Discourses, which is another product of the exiled diplomat's two-way conversations with his farm's library ... specifically with the first ten books of Titus Livius's monumental history of Rome, Ab Urbe Condita. Machiavelli found the Roman Empire so much more honorable than his own era, and given the hypocrisy, scandals and perpetual warfare of the Late Renaissance, who can argue with him?

Moses de Leon. The Zohar. Translated from the Hebrew by Michael Berg (I think).
There's been enough hooey written about the Kabbalah to make P.T. Barnum blush. It's tough for me to recommend any of the sources I used to write this story since they vary between feel-good self-help fluff (Rabbi Berg's The Way) and impenetrable scholastic dirges (Scholem's On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism). In fact, the best discourse I ever read on the subject was by some British guy on a Usenet site that I printed out around 1997 and haven't been able to locate since. Oh, well.

So, for want of a better option, I'll send you straight to the horse's mouth. The folks at Rabbi Berg's Kabbalah Centre have uploaded the entirety of the "Book of Radiance" on-line in hypertext format. Enjoy! Assuming you can make heads or tails of it, that is...