So Matt Yglesias and Josh Chafetz are listing some ‘core books’ for we wannabe political theorists.
Looking at the selections, it’s hard to find fault (except in myself, in my having missed a few of the books!); I’ll suggest that my bias is toward Josh, simply because I don’t think you can do a good job of understanding Enlightenment thinkers without having read at least Aristotle, Aquinas, and Machievelli.
Plus Josh references Schumpeter and Berlin, two of my touchstone writers.
I’ll throw a few more books onto the pile, then tomorrow or so try and boil the list down to one of my own, plus list the ones new to me that I now feel compelled to read.
Here are some additions:
De Toqueville: The Ancien Regieme and the French Revolution. The roots of revolution are the same now as they were then; read a more-or-less contemporary account by a brilliant political thinker.
Jurgen Habermas: The Legitimation Crisis. The self-consuming nature of legitimacy in modern society. Almost unreadable, but worth the grudging effort.
Ortega y Gasset: The Revolt of the Masses. Massification…and the dissolution of intermediate social structures…is one of the key social movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. Here’s a (florid, somewhat overblown, politically out there) seminal work in the area.
Berlin: The Roots of Romanticism. I’ve already beaten this one almost to death.
[Update for visitors from Oxblog: I added
I can’t believe I forgot this one:
Sartre’s play: Dirty Hands. An excellent examination of ideology, purity and praxis.]