The Intellectual and His People by Jacques Rancière (Verso, £19.99)
The agitator for a "people's theatre" seeks "to moralise the people through the spread of art"; the sociologist claims to be the only one able to see what is, like Poe's purloined letter, in plain view; and the public intellectual performs the "ideological function of representing the social to the political". This volume of 1970s essays by the French philosopher worries in different ways at the question of the construction of "the people" by those who claim to be speaking for them. Central is a long and fascinating discussion of the role of the intellectual in France, contrasting Sartre's "universal vocation" with Foucault's "local struggles", and sneering at the emerging nouveaux philosophes.

The new philosopher, Rancière writes, is a "Pangloss", an adventurer in "social seismology", a "panoptic thinker", a "traveller without luggage"  which might describe not only the Bernard-Henri Lévy of today but many of our own commentators. The republication of these essays is justified by the frequency with which Rancière's sardonic formulations resonate beyond their original context: "There is no conformist thought today that does not complacently proclaim itself the unprecedented upsetting of everything that everyone believes."

Think Tank: The Story of the Adam Smith Institute by Madsen Pirie (Biteback, £14.99)
Speaking of which  "The Adam Smith Institute is a very important institute," Margaret Thatcher once said, "but it does not decide government policy." Institute co-founder Pirie dedicates his book to Thatcher, sparing no detail of office furnishing over more than three decades in his Panglossian triumphal march through policy concepts taken up by successive governments, inspired by the institute's "philosophy" of tax-cutting libertarianism.

It's a narrative of lunches, seminars, media attention and large cheques written by wealthy industrialists. (No doubt it helps to be running a think-tank whose policy ideas are always to the benefit of wealthy industrialists.) Pirie also gives tips on think-tank marketing. You should frame your output as "a news event", and watch your language. The institute spelled "privatization" with a Z, Pirie explains, "because it made it look newer". And its pamphlet-sized prose-bombs were never called pamphlets: "We wanted our publications to be regarded differently, so we called them 'studies', 'papers', 'reports' and other euphemisms." I'm trying to think of a good euphemism for this column.

Gin by Lesley Jacobs Solmonson (Reaktion, £9.99)
After a hard day's panoptical musing or think-tank driving one might hanker after some botanical refreshment, and hang the authorities  as did William Faulkner, brewing up moonshine gin in his bathtub during prohibition. The author of this effervescent little history traces modern gin's origins (as the Dutch drink genever) and its subsequent use for "medicinal" purposes and in the military ("Dutch courage"), and its demonisation during the London gin panic. "Never again," the author writes wistfully, "would the city of London be as consistently intoxicated as it was between 1720 and 1751."

Gin was later rehabilitated in "gin palaces", and became a standard base in cocktails, until vodka became hipper in the 1960s. (Now, the author happily reports, gin is making a comeback, in "artisanal" form.) As Solmonson shows, our betters have always wanted to control our drinking habits, so raise a glass to the "unnamed bishop in the House of Lords" arguing against a proposed temperance bill in 1892: he would, he said, "prefer to see all England free than England sober". There's a man who really spoke for the public.