100 books like Greek and Roman Political Ideas

One of the defining accounts of the original political scandal, Watergate, ultimately brought down US President Richard Nixon; Bernstein and Woodward’s book (later superbly adapted as a film starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford) is partly so intriguing because it conveys the energy of a 1970s newsroom and the surprising level of access to the Nixon administration.

Ultimately, though, this book is still vital because it brings together several themes crucial in understanding the Official Record: secrecy and its corrosive impact on democracy, whistleblowers, perceived impunity, and the impact that determined and courageous journalists can exert on the powerful.

Written by perhaps the best journalist who has made it their business to explore and expose the more nefarious aspects of UK foreign policy in recent decades, this book should be read by all interested in UK foreign policy.

Written in an accessible style, this book provides details about the manipulation of the UK official record in places as diverse as Kenya, Yemen, Cyprus, and the UK itself.

The book illuminates key moments in history and explains slightly confounding terms such as D-Notices and the Official Secrets Act.

DARPA has been the gold standard for research and early-stage development since its inception in 1958. DARPA's accomplishments have included the development of the internet, stealth technology, global position system (GPS), night vision, and unmanned drones, to name a few.

The book lays out an extraordinary record of accomplishment—DARPA has developed a “secret sauce” that few have been able to emulate. I first picked up the book when I was leading the Department of Homeland Security’s equivalent organization, the Homeland Security Advanced Research Project Agency (HSARPA). 

Written by Mary Graham of the Harvard University-affiliated The Transparency Policy Project, this book explores how eight presidents stretching backward from Barack Obama to George Washington have dealt with the tensions inherent in government secrecy within a society that (at least in theory and often only for some) allows citizens to feed into the management of government affairs.

Graham illustrates that secrecy has been utilized as much to hide mistakes as it has been to protect national security, as well as exploring key moments in the history of secrecy in the US, such as the labyrinth inquiries that followed the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, and the Nixon administration.

I loved Bruce Ackerman’s recent book because he is also a professor of constitutional law reflecting on the state of democracy today but in an existential way, looking laterally at possible solutions to our political problems. Our starting points are similar, but proposed solutions different and complementary—I learned a tremendous amount from this book.

Even though it was written in the nineteenth century, few books have ever matched Alexis de Tocqueville’s description of the strengths and weaknesses of the American system of government.

Most interesting to me is his insistence that, for all its democratic precepts, there are few defenses against tyranny in the United States. Although people more often focus on his account of the tyranny of the majority or democratic despotism, he is equally clear on how racism creates kinds of tyranny and that the American emphasis on economics are also ways that tyranny can take root.

I learn something new each time I read it!

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… show more.

Downs does a great job of explaining how democratic decision-making links voter preferences to public policy outcomes. He looks at political preferences as existing on a left-to-right continuum and concludes that democratic elections tend to select the candidates whose preferences most closely reflect the median voter—the voter whose preferences fall in the middle of that left-right continuum. He offers a few caveats, one being that because one vote has a vanishingly small chance to affect an election outcome, voters tend to be rationally ignorant on political matters. There is no payoff to becoming informed because an election outcome will be the same regardless of how any individual voter votes.

Brennan and Lomasky build on the idea that voters know their one vote will not affect an election outcome, and conclude that therefore the utility people get from voting comes solely from the value they get from expressing their opinion. Because of this, they explain why voters may vote for alternatives they would not choose if the choice were theirs alone. They vote for options that make them feel good about casting their vote, so tend to vote more based on emotional reasons than based on what is best for themselves, or what is in the public interest. 

Countering a drifting away from an appreciation of the demos, the book encourages us to build a democratic constitutional political economy that renews traditions of egalitarianism and social rights rather than the recent neoliberalism’s imagined market-based orientation of freedom alone.

I like the way the book revives the American constitutional tradition of discourse emphasizing how constraint of the concentration of wealth is necessary to preserve a democratic republic.