The most recommended political philosophy books

This book illuminates the wrenching moral problems humanitarian international NGOs (like Oxfam and Save the Children) face.

How should NGOs balance their responsibilities to aid those who depend on them with their responsibilities to avoid entrenching that dependency? How should they react when the resources they provide are siphoned off by malicious third parties and used to fuel conflict? Given that NGOs are not democratically elected, can their power over aid recipients be justified?

Rubenstein addresses questions like these, drawing on her expertise as an ethicist and several months of fieldwork. I left this book thinking there were no easy answers to the questions Rubenstein raised—but with a much clearer understanding of the moral considerations I would need to account for if I wanted to answer them for myself.

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 Rawls’s defense of its core principles remains as powerful as ever.

Another forgotten book, Where’s the Rest of Me? covered Reagan’s early life and set him up for his post-Hollywood pivot. Reagan was always more literary than his opponents understood, and in this book he managed to define his sunny political image several years before his famous political aides showed up to help. I discovered this after finding a set of letters no other Reagan biographer had seen, but you could also see it just by reading his book’s opening, which is far too strange and memorable to get past a good flack:

The story begins with the close-up of a bottom in a small town called Tampico in Illinois, on February 6, 1911. My face was blue from screaming, my bottom was red from whacking, and my father claimed afterward that he was white.

The punch line: “Ever since my birth,” Reagan wrote, “I have been particularly fond of the… show more.

Every so often, I encounter a piece of writing that is so good—so clear, so well-argued, so thought-provoking, such a needed response to what came before—that it is simply a joy to read. To me, this book is one of those pieces. (If you plan to read it, some prior familiarity with John Rawls’ Original Position thought experiment would be helpful.)

Many think that our participation in shared institutions means justice requires us to safeguard the welfare of our country’s most disadvantaged people. Beitz makes a compelling case that, if this is true, our shared participation in an interconnected global economy means justice also requires us to safeguard the welfare of the most disadvantaged people in the world, no matter their country of origin.

My final choice is a scintillating work of scholarship by Lyndsey Stonebridge, Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham. Entitled Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees, it draws upon a range of reportage, political theory, poetry, and other texts to ask challenging questions about the stance that modern states and citizens in Western societies adopt towards refugees who are sometimes described as distant strangers. By engaging with authors who are relatively well known, such as George Orwell, W.H. Auden, Simone Weil, Samuel Beckett, and the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, and with those who may be less familiar, such as the American journalist Dorothy Thompson (1893-1961) and the contemporary Palestinian Lebanese-born poet Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, Stonebridge insists that it is essential to portray refugees as deserving and demanding something other than charity or humanitarian concern no matter how well-intentioned. Instead, the appropriate response is to demand… show more.

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. 

For seventy-five years, nearly every study on political knowledge finds that most voters are overwhelmingly ignorant of nearly anything you might reasonably think they should know to vote well.

Voters don’t know relevant statistics (even broadly), know what laws were passed, know who represents them, know what government can and can’t do, or know who is responsible for what. There are still some political scientists who, for ideological reasons deny this or deny that it’s important, but that’s like saying there are people who think the world is 6000 years old.

At any rate, Somin’s book is one of the most up-to-date and thorough summaries of all the relevant data and statistics. But it’s not just that. He also does a great job showing how many attempts to downplay ignorance—by saying that the crowd is wise even though most members of that crowd are wise—fail. Democratic ignorance matters.

Lea Ypi is a political philosopher and she has, in effect, written a sly and subtle piece of political philosophy, but you only realise that when you close the book at the end.

It’s a memoir of her early life in Albania: under the ersatz Stalinism of Enver Hoxha’s regime as a small child; the sudden realisations when the regime fell that she had been surrounded by lies, not least the lies of her dissident family who could not take the risk of their child learning the truth about them; and the sickening stories of how ‘free’ Albania in the 1990s was overtaken by crooks and dangerous idealists.

She is unsparing on the evils of both the communist and post-communist worlds, without succumbing to any kind of cheap moral equivalence between them. But the story itself is also hugely compelling: you will remember her father in particular. The kind of… show more.

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.

Although it is more academic than the others I’ve recommended, this book is both practical and urgent: it asks how we’re responsible for facing up to the structures of injustice in which we are implicated—the legacies of colonialism and slavery, the ongoing catastrophe of climate change. Young’s answer is that responsibility here is not about guilt or shame but the obligation to work for change, an obligation we can only meet through collective action, working with others to transform the systems around us. Young’s argument is rich, provocative, and inspiring.