100 books like The Concept of the Political

Though Foucault’s book appeared at almost the same moment as Ignatieff’s, Foucault painted a far darker image of early penitentiaries. He cast them not as places of reform but as instruments of disciplinary control, rendering inmates docile and amenable to the monastic repression and routine of schools and factories.

Foucault’s book taught me decades ago that history is crafted, not discovered, and that skilled chroniclers can weave very different plotlines from similar facts.

There is something of a maverick lurking in the shadows of this enormously erudite and linguistically brilliant scholar who is widely respected within the China studies field. In writing this particular book, Schoenhals scoured endless Chinese book and junk markets, picking out diaries, files, and details that few before him had thought important enough to gather and examine carefully.

As a result, Schoenhals work breaks new ground without really trying, or without making a theoretical fuss about it. As the father of ‘garbology’ in Chinese studies, he has attracted some criticism, but, as the old saying goes, the proof is in the pudding, and few would doubt that in Schoenhals’s book, the proof is offered in remarkable empirical detail. 

Beautifully written and amazingly erudite, Wakeman’s book takes you back to pre-revolutionary Shanghai with its vivid account of gangs, prostitutes, and police.

The work offers a magisterial account of what Shanghai was like under non-communist rule, moving beyond the actual issues of police procedures and administration to offer an engrossing account that is more like a novel than the usual dry and sometimes staid academic works that populate the China studies field.

It might seem hard to believe, but scholars of contemporary Chinese studies know quite a bit about Chinese history and Confucian thought but little of the history and thought of Marxism-Leninism. I begin my research from a very different perspective.

I had always thought, perversely as it turned out, that anyone working on a subject related to Chinese communism and its policing methods needed a solid grounding not just in Chinese history and thought but also in Marxism-Leninism. Admittedly, much of the post-Stalin discussion of Marxist law has been stolid, uninteresting, and repetitive, but Pashukanis breaks that mold.

His ideas on the withering away of law as capitalism is eviscerated during socialism breathes new life into Marxist debates about the transition stage, thereby offering new insights into the mass line of Mao.

Hobbes’ attention to the meaning of words and his prose make this book well worth reading. If you find the beginning of Part I hard going, leaf through it and slow down as you come to last chapters of that first part of the book. Those and Part II are particularly engaging and make one think about the meaning of liberty, the nature of obedience, and the extent to which we are obliged to obey the state. Hobbes has interesting things to say about mercy and forgiveness, which might not be expected given the way he tends to be a caricatured. Another good book to read for oneself.

This book explores the expedients of political negotiations and compromises—when should we (not) negotiate with evil people or regimes or those we can’t trust? It explores some of the most controversial negotiations in history (Munich, Yalta, Arab-Israel peace negotiations) and provides both vivid stories and good philosophical standards for trying to do the best one can in problematic settings. How can we make things better when things are already bad? How can we distinguish good acts and bad acts and well-meaning actors in tough situations, and necessary, if painful, political compromises? Major historical events provide guidance even for everyday negotiations.

It’s impossible to understand the modern economy without grasping the importance of debt, and no one understands debt better than Ann Pettifor.

Pettifor spent more than a decade campaigning to cancel the unjust and unpayable debt of African, Asian, and Latin American countries – debt that was causing mass impoverishment and robbing people of their rights and livelihoods. Then she turned her attention to the damage that debt was doing in the West, predicting the financial crash of 2007-8.

For Pettifor, the problem started in the early 1970s, when the financial system was ‘freed’ by politicians from the constraints which had forced it to behave in a more reasonable way up to that point. Pettifor argues that we won’t be able to deal with our economic problems until we constrain our banks once more.          

If you want to know what motivated ordinary British colonists to pick up a musket, spear, or sword and take on the most powerful military in the world, read Thomas Paine’s essays Common Sense and The Crisis. Common Sense was the ideological underpinning of the movement toward independence. Paine’s experiences with the Continental Army during the dark days of late 1776 inspired The Crisis, and Washington ordered it read to the troops to encourage them to stay by the Colors for one last great gamble at Trenton. In my research, I found that the average American soldier truly believed in the cause of Independence; that belief has much to do with the writings of Thomas Paine.

This book challenges the notion that we should rely on the ideal as a guidepost. Set aside whether we could decide on an ideal; Gaus, a philosopher, makes a four-part argument against pursuing it. First, how could we contemplate the incomprehensible number of possible institutional, legal, and organizational configurations? We couldn’t. Second, the components of those configurations interact, resulting in a rugged landscape: the path to the ideal would not be entirely uphill, that is, it would require sacrifices. Hence, the book’s title. Third, owing to the interactions among choices, we cannot evaluate collective well-being in alternative configurations with any accuracy. What hubris to assume that we could. And finally, the landscape responds to our positioning, as we adapt our physical, organizational, and institutional (both formal and invisible) environments, we alter what we can achieve and what we desire.

John Rawls (or rather, his estate) hardly needs my recommendation. This is the most famous work of political philosophy of the twentieth century. However, it’s a challenging read. Its own publisher describes it as a “600-page work of abstract and uncompromising philosophy.”

Despite the difficulty, the effort is well worth it. Within its pages, you’ll find the most inspiring (and, I believe, realistic) vision of how our countries and our lives can become more just.