100 books like Principles For A Free Society

The classic exposition of the idea that central governmental economic planning will inevitably be wasteful and tyrannical. Hayek today is caricatured by both right and left, but he is not the minimal state absolutist that both sides often take him to be. Hayek thinks that the way to attack poverty is not redistribution – there isn’t yet enough wealth in existence to give everyone a decent life – but the opportunities created by free markets. Another impetus for my own work was reading this book and discovering that I agreed with him much more than I had expected to. 

Can ideas change the world? How does belief in political equality—the idea that everyone deserves basic unbridgeable liberties—affect innovation and economic development?

Dierdre McCloskey—one of the most creative and interesting economists alive—takes on these topics and much more in her characteristically witty, fast-paced style. She loves describing and refuting bad ideas—or even ideas widely regarded as brilliant—in an effort to go deeper into the forces that lifted humans out of poverty and sustain innovation to this day.

Tomasi offers a new synthesis of Rawlsian high liberalism and market-oriented libertarianism, which he calls "market democracy." It treats capitalistic economic freedoms as crucial elements of liberty, but demands that institutions be designed so that their benefits are shared by the least fortunate citizens. His central focus is the value of entrepreneurial activity as a moral ideal. I have a lot of disagreements with this book, but without its smart provocations I might not have written my own.

This is the indispensable book if you want to know what libertarianism is and where it came from. It is filled with more entertaining eccentrics than a Dickens novel. My book focuses on philosophical arguments for a minimal state, but I couldn’t get very deep into the historical background: who was making those arguments and what moved them to do it. One of the pleasures of intellectual history is encountering minds that are weird and surprising (not necessarily in a bad way), and Doherty offers a lot of them.

This is the most obvious book on this list. If you do read one book about climate change, make it this one.

It’s mainly not about climate change at all, but about the difficult balance between protecting people and freedom of expression. If we want a society that makes life better for all, and I do want that, we need to get this balance right.

It’s hard, as Nelson shows, but also incredibly exciting to identify freedom, in art, in sex, in drugs and in climate. This list isn’t an accident. 

“There is no higher value than freedom in American politics and political thought,” political theorist Elisabeth Anker observes in her excellent book Ugly Freedoms.

Anker sifts art, poems, novels, speeches, and other forms of cultural expression to underscore how the idea of “freedom” in the US has served to advance institutions and “ugly” causes ranging from slavery to torture and racial domination.

The book gives you the context you need to understand how the far-right uses “freedom” to justify book bans, the war on transgender youth, and policing of school curriculum. I love the blend of history, theory, culture, and politics.  

I had a hard time choosing which book by Richards to include, as his earlier book, Intellectual Privacy, is a superb discussion about how privacy is essential for our expression and consumption of ideas. In Why Privacy Matters, Richards broadens his focus to discuss other reasons why privacy is important. He debunks common myths, such as privacy is dying or privacy is about creepiness. In an eloquent and clear way, Richards explains why privacy matters for our identity, freedom, and protection. This book powerfully shows that how we think about privacy is essential to effectively safeguarding it. Richards writes in an engaging and accessible way, but his book has tremendous depth and insight. 

The aims of economic development are often said to be higher incomes, industrialization, efficient investment, and poverty alleviation.

Amartya Sen argues for a broader goal: increasing the capability of all human beings to achieve those things that they most value.

Such an agenda implies more ambitious goals for empowering people, especially in poor countries, to begin a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy: education, health care, longevity, and the ability to influence political decisions.

Sen, a Nobel laureate in economics, draws on a lifetime of thought about human predicaments, famines, and poverty, how to define one’s capabilities, and the meaning of one’s ‘standard of living.’

Rather than offering specific recipes, this book provides a provocative framework for thought. 

Italian philosopher and historian Domenico Losurdo’s book Liberalism: A Counter-History represents one of the most ambitious attempts to conceptually and historically tie the liberal tradition to the politics of slavery, empire, and genocide. What I find to be most evocative about Losurdo’s “counter-history” is both his sweeping narrative of the liberal tradition balanced against a close reading of key figures in that tradition. Losurdo provides an important critique of liberalism, and provides us with the analytic and methodological tools to interrogate its legacy, its past, its future.

I was privileged to read Dr O’Brien’s book at his personal invitation before its formal launch. This arose from a shared interest in past/historical through to current threats to the achievements of inclusive, prejudice-free values, freedom of thought and expression, and respecting liberal values in parliamentary democracies.

Through ground-breaking research and masterly thought-provoking analysis of findings, this book evaluates the threats posed by totalitarian and authoritarian non-inclusive ideologies, political forces, and their justifiers and apologists.

It also examines the crucial role of supportive, disingenuous yet effective propaganda—from today's "fake news" (Trumpian, Brexit, anti-Trans, etc.) to state forces manipulating populist sentiments—enabling brutal and ethically unacceptable phenomena such as colonialism/neo-colonialism, 20th-century Nazism, Stalinism, and current menaces.