Here are 100 books that Democracy in America fans have personally recommended if you like
Democracy in America.
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I have studied nineteenth-century American literature and culture for more than thirty years. My friends roll their eyes when I excitedly share a passage from Charles Chesnutt, Henry James, Herman Melville, or Kate Chopin. I wrote this book because I realized that nineteenth-century thinkers and writers have a lot to teach us about tyranny, particularly the dangers it presents to our nation. I hope you’ll find the challenge of these books as important as I do!
This book imagines a world where the United States succumbs to authoritarianism. Subsequent writers have explored this theme, but I love Lewis’s novel because it captures a precarious historical moment (the 1930s) that has a lot in common with the present day.
“Buzz” Winthrop, the politician turned dictator, whips up fears about threats to America, stressing the need to get back to the nation’s “true” values. It’s a chilling portrait of a nation that loses its way.
“The novel that foreshadowed Donald Trump’s authoritarian appeal.”—Salon
It Can’t Happen Here is the only one of Sinclair Lewis’s later novels to match the power of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith. A cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, it is an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America.
Written during the Great Depression, when the country was largely oblivious to Hitler’s aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a president who becomes a dictator to save the nation from welfare cheats, sex, crime, and a liberal press.
I have studied nineteenth-century American literature and culture for more than thirty years. My friends roll their eyes when I excitedly share a passage from Charles Chesnutt, Henry James, Herman Melville, or Kate Chopin. I wrote this book because I realized that nineteenth-century thinkers and writers have a lot to teach us about tyranny, particularly the dangers it presents to our nation. I hope you’ll find the challenge of these books as important as I do!
Judith Shklar’s account of the social harms caused by everyday cruelty is exceptional in its clarity and ethical value. She walks readers through vices that people often overlook—cruelty, hypocrisy, snobbery, misanthropy, and betrayal—showing how these “ordinary” ways of ignoring the needs of other people fray the norms of society.
The ideas are nuanced but her writing is crystal clear. I think this is the best book on ethics I have ever read.
The seven deadly sins of Christianity represent the abysses of character, whereas Judith Shklar's "ordinary vices"-cruelty, hypocrisy, snobbery, betrayal, and misanthropy-are merely treacherous shoals, flawing our characters with mean-spiritedness and inhumanity.
Shklar draws from a brilliant array of writers-Moliere and Dickens on hypocrisy, Jane Austen on snobbery, Shakespeare and Montesquieu on misanthropy, Hawthorne and Nietzsche on cruelty, Conrad and Faulkner on betrayal-to reveal the nature and effects of the vices. She examines their destructive effects, the ambiguities of the moral problems they pose to the liberal ethos, and their implications for government and citizens: liberalism is a difficult and challenging…
I have studied nineteenth-century American literature and culture for more than thirty years. My friends roll their eyes when I excitedly share a passage from Charles Chesnutt, Henry James, Herman Melville, or Kate Chopin. I wrote this book because I realized that nineteenth-century thinkers and writers have a lot to teach us about tyranny, particularly the dangers it presents to our nation. I hope you’ll find the challenge of these books as important as I do!
Neal Wood was a respected scholar of political thought and he wrote this book to be accessible to many readers, motivated by his conviction that the thorough embrace of capitalist competition was degrading the character and culture of the United States.
When reading this, I could not help but think about the writings of Black Americans in the nineteenth century, who argued that greed was one of the main reasons for slavery. Wood offers a sober reminder that it is useful to think about the consequences, intended and not, of our nation’s choices and priorities.
The US has been subjected to the ruthless and unrelenting tyranny of the world's most advanced capitalism, permeating every aspect of American life. The chief difference from other tyrannies is its facelessness, its dependence on impersonal coercive power more than on direct violence and terror against its subjects. A frightening irony of this new tyranny, dissected by the distinguished historian of political thought Neal Wood, is that it is producing a degenerating society and a politics headed toward collapse. All world empires have decayed from within and eventually fallen. The new tyranny's demise may long be hidden by a sophisticated…
I have studied nineteenth-century American literature and culture for more than thirty years. My friends roll their eyes when I excitedly share a passage from Charles Chesnutt, Henry James, Herman Melville, or Kate Chopin. I wrote this book because I realized that nineteenth-century thinkers and writers have a lot to teach us about tyranny, particularly the dangers it presents to our nation. I hope you’ll find the challenge of these books as important as I do!
This book is based on a historical event: the 1898 overthrow of the democratically elected government in Wilmington, NC, by white supremacists. It is a novel that makes clear how racial hate leads to tyranny.
I think Charles Chesnutt is one of our great nineteenth-century writers and he captures the complications of the Black experience with nuance and unflinching clarity. This is a book that anyone who wants to understand the ongoing legacies of enslavement, as well as the dangers of tyranny, will be eager to read!
Based on a historically accurate account of the Wilmington, North Carolina, "race riot" of 1898, African-American author Charles W. Chesnutt's innovative novel is a passionate portrait of the betrayal of black culture in America.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning…
As a child, I moved with my family. I've moved for school. And I am not sure I could resurrect how many times my family moved for my journalism work. These books help me try to understand my wanderlust. Peter Laufer is an independent journalist, broadcaster, and documentary filmmaker working in traditional and new media. He is the James Wallace Chair in Journalism at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication.
And no such list is complete without Alexis de Tocqueville's classic from the 19th century, Democracy in America. Weighing in just two pages short of Don Quixote's 937 (paperback both, the ECCO Grossman Quixote translation and the Penguin Gerald Bevan de Tocqueville edition), Tocqueville ponders a question most of us contemplate and plenty of us act on: "Why Americans are so restless in the midst of their prosperity..."
French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville's classic treatise on the American way of life.
Over 175 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville, an astute political scientist, came to the United States to evaluate the meaning and actual functioning of democracy. Here, Tocqueville discusses the advantages and dangers of majority rule—which he thought could be as tyrannical as the rule of a monarchy. He analyzes the influence of political parties and the press on the government and the effect of equality on the social, political, and economic life of the American people. He also offers some startling predictions about world politics, which history…
I’m an emeritus professor living in Portland, Oregon, officially retired, but still writing articles and books. Although I am a lifelong US citizen, I spent the heart of my career as the Canada Research Chair of Applied Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto. Most of my books are about aspects of rationality, especially cognitive biases. I have also worked on tools for measuring individual differences in rationality. Lately, I have focused on ways to reduce political polarization by taming the myside bias that plagues all human thought, and by reforming institutions (especially universities) that are currently failing in their role as knowledge adjudicators.
Kronman is particularly good at describing the “tough” reasoning skills that underlie the thinking styles that have produced modern science and modern democracies. An example of these tough skills is what he calls the “ethic of depersonalization”: expressing arguments in a form available to all—a form not dependent on our emotions or personal experience. Identity politics, in contrast, gives weight to immutable demographic characteristics in ongoing political conversations. It thus reverses centuries of progress in the intellectual march toward open, ecumenical inquiry, where personal characteristics do not trump rational argument.
"I want to call it a cry of the heart, but it's more like a cry of the brain, a calm and erudite one." -Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal
The former dean of Yale Law School argues that the feverish egalitarianism gripping college campuses today is a threat to our democracy.
College education is under attack from all sides these days. Most of the handwringing-over free speech, safe zones, trigger warnings, and the babying of students-has focused on the excesses of political correctness. That may be true, but as Anthony Kronman shows, it's not the real problem.
I’m a philosopher by training and professor of economics, ethics, and public policy at Georgetown University’s business school. My work often begins by noting that philosophy debates often take certain empirical claims for granted, claims which turn out to be false or mistaken. Once we realize this mistake, this clears the ground and helps us do better work. I focus on issues in immigration, resistance to state injustice, taboo markets, theories of ideal justice, and democratic theory. I’m also a native New Englander now living near DC, a husband and father, and the guitarist and vocalist in a 70s-80s hard rock cover band.
For seventy-five years, nearly every study on political knowledge finds that most voters are overwhelmingly ignorant of nearly anything you might reasonably think they should know to vote well.
Voters don’t know relevant statistics (even broadly), know what laws were passed, know who represents them, know what government can and can’t do, or know who is responsible for what. There are still some political scientists who, for ideological reasons deny this or deny that it’s important, but that’s like saying there are people who think the world is 6000 years old.
At any rate, Somin’s book is one of the most up-to-date and thorough summaries of all the relevant data and statistics. But it’s not just that. He also does a great job showing how many attempts to downplay ignorance—by saying that the crowd is wise even though most members of that crowd are wise—fail. Democratic ignorance matters.
One of the biggest problems with modern democracy is that most of the public is usually ignorant of politics and government. Many people understand that their votes are unlikely to change the outcome of an election and don't see the point in learning much about politics. This creates a nation of people with little political knowledge and little ability to objectively evaluate what they do know.
The second edition of Democracy and Political Ignorance fully updates its analysis to include new and vital discussions on the implications of the "Big Sort" for politics, the link between political ignorance and the…
Ilya Somin is a Professor of Law at George Mason University. He is the author of Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom, Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter, and The Grasping Hand: Kelo v. City of New London, and the Limits of Eminent Domain. Somin has also published articles in a variety of popular press outlets, including The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, CNN, The Atlantic, and USA Today. He is a regular contributor to the popular Volokh Conspiracy law and politics blog, affiliated with Reason.
I don’t agree with most of this book. But nonetheless it's a must-read for anyone who wants a great overview and defense of standard arguments to the effect that nation-state governments should enjoy broad power to exclude potential migrants. Miller puts the case well, and it’s easily grasped by experts and laypeople alike.
How should Western democracies respond to the many millions of people who want to settle in their societies? Economists and human rights advocates tend to downplay the considerable cultural and demographic impact of immigration on host societies. Seeking to balance the rights of immigrants with the legitimate concerns of citizens, Strangers in Our Midst brings a bracing dose of realism to this debate. David Miller defends the right of democratic states to control their borders and decide upon the future size, shape, and cultural make-up of their populations.
"A cool dissection of some of the main moral issues surrounding immigration…
I am an international political and critical theorist interested in the way that key events and experiences from the past continue to affect politics in the present. I was born in the US but moved back to Slovenia when I was in high school, before returning to the states to attend Dartmouth College as an undergraduate, and Yale University for my doctoral studies in political science. This international, bi-continental background – as well as my own family’s history of migration following World War II – has fueled my interest in twentieth-century European history, collective memory and European integration.
Hannah Arendt is the most important political thinker of the post-totalitarian moment. While her 1951 Origins of Totalitarianism is more well-known and became a bestseller again after the election of President Donald Trump, in this collection of essays she lays out her ideas about the way that the past helps us to locate ourselves in the present by imagining and reimagining our futures. This book was hugely influential for me during my graduate studies at Yale. Unlike so many political theorists, Arendt is also a wonderfully accessible and engaging writer.
From the author of Eichmann in Jerusalem and The Origins of Totalitarianism, “a book to think with through the political impasses and cultural confusions of our day” (Harper’s Magazine)
Hannah Arendt’s insightful observations of the modern world, based on a profound knowledge of the past, constitute an impassioned contribution to political philosophy. In Between Past and Future Arendt describes the perplexing crises modern society faces as a result of the loss of meaning of the traditional key words of politics: justice, reason, responsibility, virtue, and glory. Through a series of eight exercises, she shows how we can redistill the vital…
I have a certain degree of scientific expertise deriving from the education leading to my Ph.D. in mathematics and a deep interest in ethical issues, which led to my pursuing a second Ph.D. in philosophy. I am passionate about the issue of climate change, because (among other reasons) I have four grandchildren who will be living in the new world that is being created now. As I often said to my students during my last few years of teaching, “You are living at the time when the most momentous event in human history is unfolding. Historians of the future—if there are any remaining—will write extensively about this period, about what happened and why, about what those of us alive today did or did not do.”
This is a brilliant book by a professor of history holding an endowed chair at Duke University, a scholar who took a year off from her academic duties to tour the country, giving talks about this book. It is the other book that has most affected me since the publication of my last book, After Capitalism. It’s a very readable scholarly study, not explicitly focused on climate change, but which explains more compellingly than any other book I’ve read, as to why, given what we know about the causes of, and solutions to, climate change, we are not doing what needs to be done. This book goes well beyond my own long-held belief that we don’t really live in a democracy, focusing on specific elements I’d never thought about, but which are causally implicated in so much of the systemic disfunction that we observe today in our political and economic…
Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for the National Book Award The Nation's "Most Valuable Book"
"[A] vibrant intellectual history of the radical right."-The Atlantic
"This sixty-year campaign to make libertarianism mainstream and eventually take the government itself is at the heart of Democracy in Chains. . . . If you're worried about what all this means for America's future, you should be."-NPR
An explosive expose of the right's relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, stop action on climate change, and alter the Constitution.
