This aggression will not stand, Man.
The Dude
We started our own Moser Seminar on Political Philosophy & Economics by reading and discussing together:
- Jonathan Wolff (2016). An Introduction to Political Philosophy.
As the author claims, the book gives a good overview of the main problems and questions of political philosophy, particularly “Who gets what?” and “Says who?”.
After that we covered the following writings:
- Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels (1848). Das Kommunistische Manifest.
- John Stuart Mill (1859). On Liberty.
- Jonathan Wolff (2003). Why read Marx today?
- Francis Fukuyama (2022). Liberalism and Its Discontents.
Other books we put on our list are:
- Francis Fukuyama (2012). The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (still working on it)
- Gregory Claeys (2018). Marx and Marxism.
- Milton Friedman (1962). Capitalism and Freedom.
- Robert Nozick (2013). Anarchy, State, and Utopia.
- Deirdre McCloskey (2019). Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All.
Thomas: Two books I read as a student that had a great impact on my thinking about politics were:
- James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock (1962). The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy.
- John Rawls (1971). A Theory of Justice.
More recently, I have been quite impressed by:
- James C. Scott (2017). Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.