100 books like The Morality of Freedom

If there is a classic, great book in political philosophy that will be discussed and taught for many more years to come, alongside the iconic books of John Locke and JS Mill, then this is the one. When I studied at Oxford during the 1980s, it was near impossible to write about anything in political philosophy without referring to Rawls’ philosophy. Rawls convinced me that of all the values, justice is the most important value in life. And he provided a comprehensive answer to the intriguing question: What is justice? I engage with this book constantly, reread it and refer to its rationale in many of my writings. I keep copies of this seminal book at home and at my office. I was fortunate to meet Rawls at Tel Aviv University.

Of all my superb teachers at Oxford, one stood out: Ronald (Ronnie) Dworkin. He was the sharpest scholar I have ever met. I attended most of his seminars and some of his lectures during my four years at Oxford and deeply cherished my private talks with him. Ronnie was a master communicator of ideas, orally and in writing. He would come to class with an empty yellow pad and speak for one hour non-stop. In this book, Dworkin discusses truth in morals, moral skepticism, moral responsibility, dignity, free will, political rights and concepts. I could have chosen any one of his other great books – Taking Rights Seriously, A Matter of Principle, or Sovereign Virtue. I choose Justice for Hedgehogs because this book discusses themes that I also constantly engage with: Truth, social responsibility, dignity, democracy, equality, liberty, and justice. 

This is one of the very few books that tackle the neglected subject of offence, and does a great job in doing this. I have been teaching from this book for many years in my freedom of expression courses, and the book always stimulates interesting conversations as Feinberg utilizes many provocative examples to examine offence, what it is, and to what extent it should be tolerated. I recall a fascinating conversation I had with Feinberg about his thesis at Oxford, which helped me elucidate my own understanding of offence, for which I am most grateful.

Offense to Others is the second volume of Joel Feinberg's most impressive work on the moral limits of criminal law, a four-volume work that explores the kinds of conduct the state may make criminal without infringing on the moral autonomy of individual citizens. The other volumes are Harm to Others (1984), Harm to Self (1986),… show more.

The Second Sex, published in 1949, is a forerunner of numerous books about the female psyche and experience; de Beauvoir inspired the next generation of feminist authors.

As a young woman it made me sit up and learn about historical, cultural, psychological, and political attitudes toward girls and women, and how those had always moulded females to fit stereotypes, and meet the expectations of their emotional, social, and familial connections.

It is presented in a very understandable way, that manoeuvers diverse parts into a comprehensible whole.  It changed my personal construct of myself as a woman and guided me to interact differently with my immediate world.

People have not always agreed with some of what is written, but de Beauvoir ignites in-depth debate.

The granddaddy of literary autobiography and biography, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions was written in 1769 but published posthumously in 1782. Rousseau, whose pioneering Romantic political philosophy was by then already influential, was setting out to do something equally new when he decided to study human nature, taking as his experimental model the human he knew best – himself. The rollicking result, sometimes self-flagellating, occasionally exhibitionist, deviates from its own model, St Augustine’s fourth-century religious-philosophical Confessions, in being chock-full of what nowadays we call emotional intelligence.

There are lots of excellent modern translations of Thucydides (I tend to recommend either the Oxford World Classics edition by Martin Hammond or the CUP one by Jeremy Mynott), and Hobbes’ version, the first proper translation into English, is not the easiest place to start, not least because at times you effectively have to translate it out of seventeenth-century English. It is powerfully and elegantly written, and above all it offers the spectacle of one great thinker on matters of politics and war engaging with another – you can almost feel Hobbes developing his own ideas (some of which later appeared in works of original philosophy like Leviathan) as he works to make sense of Thucydides’ ideas. If you read nothing else, the introduction To the Readers and the sketch of Thucydides’ life and work are short and brilliantly insightful, capturing the particular nature of Thucydides’ text –… show more.

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.

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.

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.

Machiavelli is often despised as the man who promoted both authoritarian leaders and the notion that the ends justify the means, but this is to misunderstand the importance of the context within which he was writing: 16th century Florence – which was besieged by enemies on every side who proclaimed adherence to the Christian faith but acted as monsters. Machiavelli’s writing made two things clear to me. First, leaders and leadership cannot be understood if you abstract them from their context – when political morality is a contradiction in terms then leaders must be wary of sacrificing their followers for the sake of that same fallacious morality. Second, he lays out how dictators obtain and retain power – and in doing so establishes what we need to do to stop them or remove them.