PHILOSOPHY & POLITICAL THEORY

Justice and the Politics of Difference — Iris Young
Probably the most underrated work of political philosophy I can remember. A wonderful declamation against the tendency to reduce social justice to distributive justice.

Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality — Iris Young
A brilliant phenomenological account of how feminine norms of movement are rooted in perception. Her concept of self-reference is central in feminist theory. She also offers a strong critique of Beauvoir’s concepts of Immanence and Transcendence.

“This paper seeks to begin to fill a gap that thus exists both in existential phenomenology and feminist theory... It brings intelligibility and significance to certain observable and rather ordinary ways in which women in our society typically comport themselves and move differently from the ways that men do.”

Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature — Iris Murdoch
One of the most incisive disciples of Plato to walk this earth, she alternates between moments of intellectual brilliance and confounding reasoning. She is one of the rare writers to work—at least in as much as these disciplines are separate—across both literature and philosophy. This collection, in particular, is a wonderful stand against moral relativism.
Check out "The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists".

The Concept of the Political — Carl Schmitt
Probably the only Nazi you’ll ever see on a political philosophy syllabus. A brilliant thinker whose diagnosis of the Weimar Republic was correct, but whose solution was disastrous. He famously introduces the argument that politics is nothing but 'friend vs. enemy.' Pay attention to his definition of the sovereign as "he who decides the exception." You will find him instructive in understanding the sudden surge of "Us vs. Them" within contemporary conservatism.

Ordinary Vices / The Liberalism of Fear — Judith Shklar
Is cruelty the worst of the vices? Is hypocrisy dangerous or necessary in a republic? A brilliant commentary on Bentham and Nietzsche that urges us to be more tolerant of human failings. It's especially helpful to read in our current censorious and morally perfectionist times.
In her essay The Liberalism of Fear, she argues for a liberalism motivated by a fear of authoritarian alternatives.

Towards a Feminist Theory of the State — Catharine MacKinnon
It’s very likely you have read this one, but just in case you haven’t, MacKinnon offers an excellent critique of liberalism and Marxism, arguing that neither will liberate women because both are permeated with patriarchal power.

“Feminism exposes desire as socially relational, internally necessary to unequal social orders but historically contingent.”

Thoughts on Machiavelli — Leo Strauss
Strauss argues that great writers engage in writing that can reveal esoteric meanings—not Dan Brown nonsense, but careful textual construction born of necessity. Plato could not say all he believed, so he wrote in a way that veiled his true thoughts.
This is the tradition that I suspect Dietz is engaging with when she claims that Machiavelli seeks to undermine the prince in "Trapping the Prince".

“We are in sympathy with the simple opinion about Machiavelli [namely, the wickedness of his teaching], not only because it is wholesome, but above all because a failure to take that opinion seriously prevents one from doing justice to what is truly admirable in Machiavelli: the intrepidity of his thought, the grandeur of his vision, and the graceful subtlety of his speech.”

Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy — Joseph Schumpeter
He famously defines democracy as elites advertising to the masses, dismissing the nobler definition of democracy as an idealistic manifestation of the polity’s interests. He is very popular among both critics and defenders of democracy.

“We need not believe that a great achievement must necessarily be a source of light... we may believe it to be a power of darkness.”

The Roman Revolution — Ronald Syme
Very well written, if a self-consciously literary work, but easily the most illuminating and aggravating account of the last days/years of the Roman Republic I have read. Syme writes as though you are already familiar with all the details about Rome, but offers extraordinary insight into when and why a republic can justifiably be transformed into a monarchy.

The Russian Revolution — Rosa Luxemburg
A brilliant account of why the Bolshevik Revolution was consequential—and astonishingly accurate in its predictive diagnosis of how it was going wrong and would go wrong. Come for Luxemburg, stay for Rosa.

Private Truths, Public Lies — Timur Kuran
A terribly, terribly dry book. Aesthetically speaking, I hate myself for putting you through this. However, its insights on preference falsification are essential for understanding politics, public opinion, and public discourse.

Rationalism in Politics (especially “On Being Conservative” and “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind”) — Michael Oakeshott
The greatest defense of conservatism ever written. A rare philosopher who takes poetry seriously. I doubt you’ve read much conservative philosophy, but Oakeshott is, in my view, the best—and conservatives, despite our disagreements with them, should be understood thoroughly.

“Everybody’s young days are a dream, a delightful insanity... The allure of violent emotions is irresistible... But how remote they are from the disposition appropriate for participating in the style of government I have been describing.”

The Idea of a University — Michael Oakeshott
The best defense of the modern university ever written. Why should we go to university? What is the purpose of a liberal education? Oakeshott introduces the university as providing the gift of an interval.

“Here is a break in the tyrannical course of irreparable events; a moment in which to taste the mystery without the necessity of at once seeking a solution... combined with the discipline of studying a recognized branch of learning.”

Hobbes on Civil Association — Michael Oakeshott
An excellent analysis of Hobbes and his reception. Oakeshott views Hobbes not as a moralist but as a methodological rationalist.

Lectures on Aesthetics — G.W.F. Hegel
I assume you’ve probably read most of Hegel, but (hopefully) not this. His assessment of tragedy as a clash between multiple conceptions of the good is the best way to understand all of Shakespearean tragedy.

The Right to Sex — Amia Srinivasan
(Read the LRB essay first, then get the book collection of essays.)
Srinivasan is a truly gifted and lucid philosopher. Maybe the best feminist theorist active right now.
This was written in the aftermath of the multiple incel attacks, which were quite startling in the last decade or so.
A wonderful exploration of moral philosophy on desire. Our desires are not innocent, and they ought to be placed on trial. How can we do so in a manner that is just?
What does it mean that Black women and Asian men appear to be the least desired in this brave new, degrading world?

“In her shrewd essay ‘Men Explain Lolita to Me’, Rebecca Solnit reminds us that ‘you don’t get to have sex with someone unless they want to have sex with you,’ just as ‘you don’t get to share someone’s sandwich unless they want to share their sandwich with you.’ Not getting a bite of someone’s sandwich is ‘not a form of oppression, either’, Solnit says.

But the analogy complicates as much as it elucidates. Suppose your child came home from primary school and told you that the other children share their sandwiches with each other, but not with her. And suppose further that your child is brown, or fat, or disabled, or doesn’t speak English very well, and that you suspect that this is the reason for her exclusion from the sandwich-sharing. Suddenly it hardly seems sufficient to say that none of the other children is obligated to share with your child, true as that might be.

Sex is not a sandwich... But a state that made analogous interventions in the sexual preference and practices of its citizens—that encouraged us to ‘share’ sex equally—would probably be thought grossly authoritarian.”

LITERARY FICTION

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell — Susanna Clarke
You mentioned that you love the classics. Well, this novel, published about two decades ago, is the closest thing in the last 100 years to a nineteenth-century novel. It also falls within the speculative fiction genre, which is often overlooked, but the author successfully reinvents it.
It’s the closest thing to Jane Austen this century!
P.S. If you love this, you'll also enjoy her other books: Piranesi and The Ladies of Grace Adieu.
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The Waves — Virginia Woolf
Her least-read work and her most experimental, but possibly the most beautiful text in English outside of Nabokov’s (Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada or Ardor) and Morrison’s (Beloved, Bluest Eye, Jazz). It’s the very best prose poem ever written—simply sumptuous, absolutely sumptuous. Every single page is quotable.

“I am not so gifted as at one time seemed likely. Certain things lie beyond my scope. I shall never understand the harder problems of philosophy. Rome is the limit of my travelling. As I drop asleep at night it strikes me sometimes with a pang that I shall never see savages in Tahiti spearing fish by the light of a blazing cresset, or a lion spring in the jungle, or a naked man eating raw flesh. Nor shall I learn Russian or read the Vedas. I shall never again walk bang into the pillar-box. (But still a few stars fall through my night, beautifully, from the violence of that concussion.) But as I think, truth has come nearer. For many years I crooned complacently, “My children…my wife…my house…my dog”. As I let myself in with my latch-key I would go through that familiar ritual and wrap myself in those warm coverings. Now that lovely veil has fallen. I do not want possessions now.”

The Sea, The Sea — Iris Murdoch
A very strange novel—brilliant and laughable in equal measure, I think. A wonderful and evocative account of how terrible self-deceit can be (one is reminded of the depths of Brutus' self-deceit in Julius Caesar).
It’s also very funny, (several laugh-out-loud moments.)
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A Fairly Honourable Defeat — Iris Murdoch
A grand villain in the tradition of Shakespeare’s Iago and Milton’s Satan—absolutely charismatic evil.
The work addresses the fairly urgent question of the gap between moral theory and practice. I imagine that, like me, you often have moments when you recognize the right thing to do intellectually and morally, yet still proceed to do the selfish or self-serving thing. Murdoch clarifies these stakes for us.

“You are preserving your dignity by refusing to show your feelings. But there are moments when love ought to be undignified, extravagant, even violent.”

Gilead — Marilynne Robinson
It is hard to write a religious and spiritual book that neither bastardizes the doctrine nor withers away on the vine due to its didacticism. Marilynne Robinson has succeeded.
A wonderful monument to the enduring bond between fathers and sons.

“I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing. I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.”

Pale Fire — Vladimir Nabokov
I have always believed that one must be born to a language to speak it perfectly and to write in such a manner that the language lifts its voice and sings.
This thesis is severely challenged by the existence of Nabokov. Pale Fire is surely one of the great achievements of the human spirit.
Read it once and twice and thrice and then again and again and again!
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Blood Meridian — Cormac McCarthy
Terribly difficult to get through (took me two tries), but perhaps the most accurate and frightening account of violence ever written.
It brings Hobbes' state of nature to life and makes Hobbes look like a happy camper. A brilliant account of war, murder, and death as inescapable aspects of humanity, nature, and the universe.
I had waking nightmares for days afterward.

“Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent. He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he’d collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men’s knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.”

The Road — Cormac McCarthy
The Road is easily the most moving fictionalization of the father-son bond ever written. McCarthy’s most accessible novel, and surprisingly, the most effective anti-nuclear weapons novel I have ever read.
I cried like a child again and again throughout the text. There's a bit of a deus ex machina at the end, but honestly, I needed it.
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Cleanness / What Belongs to You — Garth Greenwell
Garth Greenwell is the best prose stylist alive. I genuinely believe that if he were not writing mostly about queer love, he would be regarded as a future Nobel laureate!

“We had agreed to meet at the fountain in front of the McDonald’s in Slaveykov Square. By my American standards G. was late, and as I waited for him I browsed the book stalls the square is famous for, their wares piled high under awnings in front of the city library. Really it wasn’t a fountain anymore, it had been shuttered for years, since faulty wiring stopped a man’s heart one summer as he dipped his fingers into the cool water there. It was December now, though winter hadn’t yet really taken hold; the sun was out and the weather was mild, it wasn’t unpleasant to stand for a bit and browse the books on display. From the beginning of the year G. had caught my attention, at first simply because he was beautiful, and then for the special quality of friendship I thought I saw between him and another boy in my class, the intensity with which G. sought him out and the privacy he drew about them. It was familiar to me, that intensity, a story from my own adolescence, as was the basking ambivalence with which the other boy received it, how he both invited it and held it off. I had some idea, then, what we would talk about, and why school didn’t offer enough secrecy for us to talk about it there, but I was still curious: he wasn’t a student I was particularly close to, he didn’t stop by my room outside of class, he had never confided in me or sought me out, and I wondered what crisis was bringing him to me now.”

Even If You Beat Me — Sally Rooney
Rooney could win a Nobel Prize if only she had enough discipline!
That said, she is a wonderful writer, and this is her account of her time as the best debater in Europe. Equal parts clever, quotable, precise, mawkish, and swashbuckling.

“But I did it. I got everything I set out to get. I was the one delivering the offhanded refutation. It was me sipping water while I waited for the end of the applause. I still occasionally feel an impulse to attribute all my achievements that year to my perfect teammate, or worse, to good luck. But I’m not nineteen anymore; I don’t need to make people feel comfortable. In the end, it was me. It may not mean anything to anyone else, but it doesn’t have to – that’s the point. I was number one. Like Fast Eddie, I’m the best there is. And even if you beat me, I’m still the best.”

Jesus’s Son — Denis Johnson
An underrated author, with the best work on the impulsiveness and theory of power behind the pull of ‘addiction.’
An excellent short story writer— the entire collection is a gem. Very elegant writing, at turns elegiac, funny, and graceful.

Letters of Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf — Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf (Introduction by Alison Bechdel)
Just read it ok? Just read it.

“Yes yes yes I do like you. I am afraid to write the stronger word.””

POETRY

Nobel Lecture — Toni Morrison
This is perhaps the finest defense of the magic of language, and the privilege we have as humans in partaking in the oldest and most consequential activity of all: doing language.
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“Language alone is meditation.
‘Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.

Tell us about ships turned away from shorelines at Easter, placenta in a field. Tell us about a wagonload of slaves, how they sang so softly their breath was indistinguishable from the falling snow. How they knew from the hunch of the nearest shoulder that the next stop would be their last. How, with hands prayered in their sex, they thought of heat, then sun. Lifting their faces as though it was there for the taking. Turning as though there for the taking. They stop at an inn. The driver and his mate go in with the lamp leaving them humming in the dark. The horse’s void steams into the snow beneath its hooves and its hiss and melt are the envy of the freezing slaves.

The inn door opens: a girl and a boy step away from its light. They climb into the wagon bed. The boy will have a gun in three years, but now he carries a lamp and a jug of warm cider. They pass it from mouth to mouth. The girl offers bread, pieces of meat and something more: a glance into the eyes of the one she serves. One helping for each man, two for each woman. And a look. They look back. The next stop will be their last. But not this one. This one is warmed.’”

C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems, Revised Edition — C. P. Cavafy
E. M. Forster described him as "standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe." His poems fall into three categories: the erotic, the philosophical, and the historical, often drawing on classical history for his themes.

The God Abandons Antony

“When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.

As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.

Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.

As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who proved worthy of this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen—your final delectation—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.”

Diving into the Wreck — Adrienne Rich
A rather short poem, but a remarkably tender one. It consistently brings me to tears.
Supposedly an account of female self-discovery, but I’ve found it to have a much broader carrying capacity.

“I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.

I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.

I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth

the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty

the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.”

Sin: Selected Poems — Forugh Farrokhzad (translated by Sholeh Wolpé)
You might have guessed that I am a big believer in the capacity of poetry to convey deep philosophical analysis of the human condition…
There is something about Forugh that I find very comforting. She has a strong feminine perspective that you might be even more moved by than I have been, but she was a very gifted writer and an excellent theorist of desire.

Check out the anguished 1957 Poem For You, written to her son:

“You will search for me in my words / and tell yourself: My mother, that is who she was.”
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HISTORY & POLITICAL COMMENTARY

History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – Chapter 15 — Edward Gibbon
Frankly, all of Gibbon's Decline and Fall should be read—his work is a literary monument.
But if you must start somewhere, begin with Chapter 15, where he presents his account of “The Progress of the Christian Religion, and the Sentiments, Manners, Numbers, and Condition of the Primitive Christians.” This chapter is essential reading for any student of the history of ideas, as it reveals the operationalisation of Enlightenment reasoning. Here, you can observe its strengths and limitations, as well as how secular reasoning can easily slip into religious bigotry.

“But this inquiry, however useful or entertaining, is attended with two peculiar difficulties. The scanty and suspicious materials of ecclesiastical history seldom enable us to dispel the dark cloud that hangs over the first age of the church. The great law of impartiality too often obliges us to reveal the imperfections of the uninspired teachers and believers of the Gospel; and, to a careless observer, their faults may seem to cast a shade on the faith which they professed. But the scandal of the pious Christian, and the fallacious triumph of the Infidel, should cease as soon as they recollect not only by whom, but likewise to whom, the Divine Revelation was given. The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in long residence upon earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.”

The Power Broker — Robert Caro
The best book ever written about any city, anywhere. The best book ever written about urban planning. The best book ever written about New York City. The best standalone book ever written about power in America.
In technical terms, it probably could have been edited, but personally, I can’t wait to read the parts that were cut out.
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“In the five years after he became Park Commissioner, in a city in which the parks had been barren for decades, he made the parks bloom. In a city in which not a mile of new arterial highway had been built in fifteen years, he built fifty miles of arterial highway. In a city in which a new bridge had not been built in a quarter of a century, he built not only three new big bridges—Triborough, Henry Hudson, and the Marine Parkway—but 110 smaller ones to carry local streets across the parkways. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice reads the tomb of Sir Christopher Wren. ‘If you want to see his monument, look around’. By 1939, the same advice could have been given to a New Yorker asking to see the monuments of Robert Moses. They were everywhere in the great city.”

The World of Yesterday — Stefan Zweig
The greatest account of the Habsburg Empire. The most moving suicide note ever written (he took his own life right after completing the manuscript).
Beautifully written and forever poignant.

“For I have indeed been torn from all my roots, even from the earth that nourished them, more entirely than most in our times. I was born in 1881 in the great and mighty empire of the Habsburg Monarchy, but you would look for it in vain on the map today; it has vanished without trace. I grew up in Vienna, an international metropolis for two thousand years, and had to steal away from it like a thief in the night before it was demoted to the status of a provincial German town. My literary work, in the language in which I wrote it, has been burnt to ashes in the country where my books made millions of readers their friends. So I belong nowhere now, I am a stranger or at the most a guest everywhere. Even the true home of my heart’s desire, Europe, is lost to me after twice tearing itself suicidally to pieces in fratricidal wars. Against my will, I have witnessed the most terrible defeat of reason and the most savage triumph of brutality in the chronicles of time. Never—and I say so not with pride but with shame—has a generation fallen from such intellectual heights as ours to such moral depths... My today is so different from all my yesterdays; I have risen and fallen so often, that I sometimes feel as if I had lived not just one but several completely different lives.”

Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century — Fernand Braudel
Besides Hume (whom I consider one of the few geniuses in the canon), Braudel is the only thinker whose entire oeuvre should be read. Not even Shakespeare achieves this position (Timon of Athens is beneath him).
A masterful account of the origins of capitalism.
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