The most recommended political philosophy books

Who picked these books? Meet our 33 experts.

33 authors created a book list connected to political philosophy, and here are their favorite political philosophy books.
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Book cover of Strangers in Our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Immigration

Ilya Somin Author Of Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom

From my list on migration rights and democracy.

Why am I passionate about this?

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.

Ilya's book list on migration rights and democracy

Ilya Somin Why did Ilya love this book?

I donā€™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 itā€™s easily grasped by experts and laypeople alike.

By David Miller,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Strangers in Our Midst as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

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 immigrationā€¦


Book cover of The Just Economy: Principles of Political Economy Volume IV

Mark R. Reiff Author Of On Unemployment: A Micro-Theory of Economic Justice: Volume 1

From my list on what causes economic injustice.

Why am I passionate about this?

F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed, ā€œthere are no second acts in American lives.ā€ But I am on my third. I started out in the theatre, then became a lawyer, and then a political philosopher. What drove each move is that I was always outraged by injustice and wanted to find a better way to fight against it. For me, reading, writing, and teaching political philosophy turned out to be that way. The books on this list provide important lessons on how certain economic policies can cause injustice while others can cure it. Each has been around for a long time, but they are as relevant today as when they were first written. 

Mark's book list on what causes economic injustice

Mark R. Reiff Why did Mark love this book?

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1977, Meade was on the moderate left.

He wanted a more just economy but did not advocate jettisoning capitalism. Here he gives his analysis of various economic problems, what causes economic injustice, and how to make this right.

The book can get technical at times, but his analyses and proposed solutions are as relevant today as they were when they were first presented.

Meadeā€™s work was one of the inspirations for John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, the most important work of liberal political philosophy of the twentieth century. 

By James E. Meade,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Just Economy as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

First published in 1979, this fourth part of Principles of Political Economy applies the tools of economic analysis to the distribution of income and property. Professor Meade considers the problems of making interpersonal comparisons of welfare and of distinguishing between the efficiency and distributional aspects of changes in social welfare. He analyses the possible criteria for redistribution as between rich and poor members of the same generation, as between present and future generations, and - in the context of demographic policies - as between the born and the unborn. Special attention is given to the social factors (such as assortativeā€¦


Book cover of A Theory of Justice

Paul Guyer Author Of Virtues of Freedom

From my list on freedom in theory and practice.

Why am I passionate about this?

I discovered philosophy while still in high school and was lucky to study with some of the most exciting philosophers of the twentieth century in college and graduate school. I then taught philosophy in several of Americaā€™s great universities for fifty years myself. I have been fascinated by the philosophy of Kant since my first year of college and I gradually came to see Kantā€™s theory of the value of freedom as the core of his philosophy and a reason to devote a lifetime to studying it. I hope you will find these books as illuminating and rewarding as I have.

Paul's book list on freedom in theory and practice

Paul Guyer Why did Paul love this book?

This is the greatest work of modern political philosophy. Building on Kant and Mill, Rawls argues that we best express our nature as free and equal beings in a society that maximizes personal and political rights and equal access to public offices and opportunities more generally.

Although liberalism is now under pressure in many places, I believe that Rawlsā€™s defense of its core principles remains as powerful as ever.

By John Rawls,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked A Theory of Justice as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Since it appeared in 1971, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice has become a classic. The author has now revised the original edition to clear up a number of difficulties he and others have found in the original book.

Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition--justice as fairness--and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equalā€¦


Book cover of The Tyranny of the Ideal: Justice in a Diverse Society

Scott E. Page Author Of The Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You

From my list on for aspiring or inspiring social scientist.

Why am I passionate about this?

Iā€™m a professor at The University of Michigan, external faculty at The Santa Fe Institute, and an editor of Collective Intelligence. As a theorist, I build mathematical and computational models and frameworks. My research explores the functional contributions of diversity ā€“ different ways of thinking and seeing ā€“ on group performance, a topic I explore in my book The Difference. Recently, Iā€™ve become interested in how to build ensembles of markets, democracies, hierarchies, self-organized communities, or algorithms so that societies prosper. That agenda drives the books I have chosen for this list.

Scott's book list on for aspiring or inspiring social scientist

Scott E. Page Why did Scott love this book?

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 couldnā€™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 bookā€™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.

By Gerald Gaus,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Tyranny of the Ideal as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In his provocative new book, The Tyranny of the Ideal, Gerald Gaus lays out a vision for how we should theorize about justice in a diverse society. Gaus shows how free and equal people, faced with intractable struggles and irreconcilable conflicts, might share a common moral life shaped by a just framework. He argues that if we are to take diversity seriously and if moral inquiry is sincere about shaping the world, then the pursuit of idealized and perfect theories of justice-essentially, the entire production of theories of justice that has dominated political philosophy for the past forty years-needs toā€¦


Book cover of Transnational Cosmopolitanism: Kant, Du Bois, and Justice as a Political Craft

Lucia M. Rafanelli Author Of Promoting Justice Across Borders: The Ethics of Reform Intervention

From my list on Political theory books on what makes a just world.

Why am I passionate about this?

To me, political and moral questions have always seemed intertwined. My career as a political theorist is dedicated to using philosophical argument to untangle the moral questions surrounding real-world politics. I am especially interested in ethics and international affairs, including the ethics of intervention, what a just world order would look like, and how our understandings of familiar idealsā€”like justice, democracy, and equalityā€”would change if we thought they were not only meant to be pursued within each nation-state, but also globally, by humanity as a whole. As faculty in Political Science and International Affairs at The George Washington University, I explore these issues with colleagues and students alike.

Lucia's book list on Political theory books on what makes a just world

Lucia M. Rafanelli Why did Lucia love this book?

The first half of this book offers a rich, careful textual engagement with the works of Immanuel Kant and his intellectual descendants. It is sure to be rewarding to those interested in Kantā€™s cosmopolitanism and its present-day variants.

But, to me, the real beauty of Valdezā€™s book lies in its second half, where she discusses W.E.B. Du Boisā€™s political thought and the history of his transnational activism against racism and empire.

Drawing on Du Bois, Valdez presents a radical vision of what democracy and political community can look like beyond the nation-state. She also offers an excellent model of how to discuss oppressed people not as helpless victims, but as political agents in their own right with lessons to teach the world about how best to struggle for justice.

By InƩs Valdez,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Transnational Cosmopolitanism as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Based on the theoretical reconstruction of neglected post-WWI writings and political action of W. E. B. Du Bois, this volume offers a normative account of transnational cosmopolitanism. Pointing out the limitations of Kant's cosmopolitanism through a novel contextual account of Perpetual Peace, Transnational Cosmopolitanism shows how these limits remain in neo-Kantian scholarship. Ines Valdez's framework overcomes these limitations in a methodologically unique way, taking Du Bois's writings and his coalitional political action both as text that should inform our theorization and normative insights. The cosmopolitanism proposed in this work is an original contribution that questions the contemporary currency of Kant'sā€¦


Book cover of The Second Sex

Soma Mei Sheng Frazier Author Of Off the Books

From my list on leave you shook and questioning.

Why am I passionate about this?

At age thirteen, sprawled on our shag-carpeted living room floor, I watched Poltergeistā€™s scariest scenes reflected in the glass doors of an old-school encyclopedia case. The blur made the film less scaryā€”and aftewards, I noticed two smaller books leaned against Volumes 15-16: Italy to Lord. Reading Bachā€™s Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Baldwinā€™s The Fire Next Time back-to-back that night rattled me harder than seeing Carol Anne sucked into the netherworld. I woke up with my worldview rearranged, and I hope youā€™ll find these books every bit as pleasantly unsettling.

Soma's book list on leave you shook and questioning

Soma Mei Sheng Frazier Why did Soma love this book?

What? Another book written in the 1900s? But bear with me, friends. Thereā€™s a reason de Beauvoirā€™s known as the ā€œMother of Modern Feminismā€ (and life partner of ā€œFather of Existentialismā€ Jean-Paul Sartre, whom sheā€™s buried alongside though they never actually had kids together or even shared a home).

Just as a film can shock us to tears when we recognize ourselves or those we love in it, de Beauvoirā€™s classic showed me some unsavory parts of myself. 

By Simone de Beauvoir, Constance Borde (translator), Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (translator)

Why should I read it?

4 authors picked The Second Sex as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The essential masterwork that has provoked and inspired generations of men and women. ā€œFrom Eveā€™s apple to Virginia Woolfā€™s room of her own, Beauvoirā€™s treatise remains an essential rallying point, urging self-sufficiency and offering the fruit of knowledge.ā€ ā€”Vogue

This unabridged edition reinstates significant portions of the original French text that were cut in the first English translation. Vital and groundbreaking, Beauvoirā€™s pioneering and impressive text remains as pertinent today as when it was first published, and will continue to provoke and inspire generations of men and women to come.


Book cover of The American Language of Rights

Nat Rubner Author Of The African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights Volume 1: Political, Intellectual & Cultural Origins

From my list on the intelligent personā€™s guide to human rights.

Why am I passionate about this?

Following my PhD at Kingā€™s College, Cambridge I was invited by the School of History at Queen Mary, University of London to serve as an Honorary Research Fellow. This enabled me to focus fully on 15 years of research into previously untapped archives and interviews with more than twenty-five politicians and jurists active in the process of the African human rights charter. By coincidence, thirty-five years or so ago, in an earlier incarnation, I was also responsible for editing the first public debt prospectus for the African Development Bank in Abidjan.

Nat's book list on the intelligent personā€™s guide to human rights

Nat Rubner Why did Nat love this book?

A really interesting book that focuses on three periods in US history to demonstrate that conceptions of rights are determined by time and place.

That conceptions and uses of rights language are responses to specific political questions of the day, questions looking for a political answer, rather than, as human rights advocates are inclined to assume, a manifestation of a continuum of a single human rights tradition stretching back several thousand years.

By Richard A. Primus,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The American Language of Rights as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Richard A. Primus examines three crucial periods in American history (the late eighteenth century, the civil war and the 1950s and 1960s) in order to demonstrate how the conceptions of rights prevailing at each of these times grew out of reactions to contemporary social and political crises. His innovative approach sees rights language as grounded more in opposition to concrete social and political practices, than in the universalistic paradigms presented by many political philosophers. This study demonstrates the potency of the language of rights throughout American history, and looks for the first time at the impact of modern totalitarianism (inā€¦


Book cover of The Morality of Freedom

Raphael Cohen-Almagor Author Of The Boundaries of Liberty and Tolerance: The Struggle against Kahanism in Israel

From my list on political philosophy justice, liberty, and equality.

Why am I passionate about this?

Raphael Cohen-Almagor, DPhil, St. Catherineā€™s College, University of Oxford, is Professor of Politics, Founding Director of the Middle East Study Centre, University of Hull, and Global Fellow, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Raphael taught, inter alia, at Oxford (UK), Jerusalem, Haifa (Israel), UCLA, Johns Hopkins (USA) and Nirma University (India). A prolific author with more than 300 publications to his name, Raphael has published extensively in the field of political philosophy, including Liberal Democracy and the Limits of Tolerance; Challenges to Democracy; The Right to Die with Dignity; The Scope of Tolerance; Confronting the Internet's Dark Side; Just, Reasonable Multiculturalism, and The Republic, Secularism and Security: France versus the Burqa and the Niqab.

Raphael's book list on political philosophy justice, liberty, and equality

Raphael Cohen-Almagor Why did Raphael love this book?

This brilliant book was published one year before my arrival at Oxford and it made a strong, immediate impression. Joseph (Joe) Raz was one of my teachers and his scholarship influenced my thinking greatly. Raz weaves together discussions on law, morals, politics, the nature of autonomy, self-realization, deliberative choice, freedom, and authority. He places the idea of neutrality within the broader concept of antiperfectionism. Raz brought me to think that the conduct of policies can be evaluated on a continuous scale between the two extremes of strict perfectionism and liberal complete neutrality. The policy to be adopted does not have to be either one or the other. It could well take the middle ground, allowing plurality and diversity without resorting to complete neutrality, and involving some form of perfectionism without resorting to coercion. For perfectionism does not necessarily imply governmental exercise of force, nor does it strive to ensure uniformity,ā€¦

By Joseph Raz,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Morality of Freedom as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'as significant a new statement of liberal principles as anything since Mill's 'On Liberty'.' The Times Literary Suplement . Winner of the W.G.M. Mackenzie Prize for 1987 of the Political Studies Association.


Book cover of Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson

Dennis C. Rasmussen Author Of Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America's Founders

From my list on American founders from a political theorist.

Why am I passionate about this?

Iā€™m a political theorist at Syracuse Universityā€™s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. I spent the first fifteen years or so of my career working on the Scottish and French Enlightenments (Adam Smith, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire), but in recent years Iā€™ve been drawn more and more to the American founding. In addition to Fears of a Setting Sun, Iā€™m also the author of The Constitutionā€™s Penman: Gouverneur Morris and the Creation of Americaā€™s Basic Charter, which explores the constitutional vision of the immensely colorful individual whoā€”unbeknownst to most Americansā€”wrote the US Constitution.

Dennis' book list on American founders from a political theorist

Dennis C. Rasmussen Why did Dennis love this book?

Gordon Wood is often described as the dean of historians of the American founding, and all of his books are eminently worth reading. I was lucky enough, as a postdoc at Brown University, to sit in on the last course that he taught on the American Revolution before his retirement. Of the many volumes that Wood has written, I picked this dual biography of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson not only because itā€™s a delightful read, but also because itā€™s the book that I was reading when the idea for my book struck me.

By Gordon S. Wood,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Friends Divided as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017

From the great historian of the American Revolution, New York Times-bestselling and Pulitzer-winning Gordon Wood, comes a majestic dual biography of two of America's most enduringly fascinating figures, whose partnership helped birth a nation, and whose subsequent falling out did much to fix its course.

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams could scarcely have come from more different worlds, or been more different in temperament. Jefferson, the optimist with enough faith in the innate goodness of his fellow man to be democracy's champion, was an aristocratic Southern slaveowner, while Adams, theā€¦


Book cover of Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality

Joseph D'Agnese Author Of Signing Their Lives Away: The Fame and Misfortune of the Men Who Signed the Declaration of Independence

From my list on the Declaration of Independence that bring the signers to life.

Why am I passionate about this?

Joseph Dā€™Agnese grew up in the Bicentennial-fueled excitement of the 1970s, and spent 1976 fake-playing a fife and sporting a tricorn hat in various school events. Besides teaching him how to get in and out of Revolutionary-period knickers, this experience awakened in him a love for the Founding Era of American history. He has since authored three history titles with his wife, The New York Times bestselling author Denise Kiernan. 

Joseph's book list on the Declaration of Independence that bring the signers to life

Joseph D'Agnese Why did Joseph love this book?

Harvard professor and MacArthur fellow Allen dissects the Declaration word by word to help us understand its importance.

Her central thesis: we cannot have an American republic devoted to liberty without equality. And if that is so, then isnā€™t our job to somehow live up to the promise of the Declaration? In some ways, this is a very personal book. In unfussy prose, she tells us how she teaches the Declaration to her students and how they are often transformed by these 1,337 words that they would never have bothered to read if they didnā€™t take her class.

I would argue most Americans have never read them either (nor the U.S. Constitution, for that matter), but I think after hearing Allenā€™s arguments, you will be moved to do so.

By Danielle Allen,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Our Declaration as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Featured on the front page of the New York Times, Our Declaration is already regarded as a seminal work that reinterprets the promise of American democracy through our founding text. Combining a personal account of teaching the Declaration with a vivid evocation of the colonial world between 1774 and 1777, Allen, a political philosopher renowned for her work on justice and citizenship reveals our nation's founding text to be an animating force that not only changed the world more than two-hundred years ago, but also still can. Challenging conventional wisdom, she boldly makes the case that the Declaration is aā€¦


Book cover of Strangers in Our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Immigration
Book cover of The Just Economy: Principles of Political Economy Volume IV
Book cover of A Theory of Justice

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