Reading List

These primary texts form the philosophical backbone of the Politics and Religion section. Reading them in full is ambitious; reading the indicated chapters is not.

  • Plato, The Republic, Books VI–IX — The philosopher-king argument, the allegory of the cave, and the critique of democracy. Plato’s most systematic attempt to link knowledge to political authority. Book VIII on the degeneration of democracy into tyranny remains one of the most unsettling pieces of political philosophy ever written.
  • Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Parts I–II (1651) — The state of nature, the social contract, and the argument for absolute sovereignty. Hobbes writes with brutal clarity. Part I, Chapter 13 (“Of the Natural Condition of Mankind”) is the essential starting point.
  • John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1689) — Chapters 2, 7, 8, 9, and 19. The liberal counter to Hobbes: government by consent, the right to revolution, natural rights. The philosophical foundation of most modern liberal democracies.
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762) — Books I and II. The general will, the problem of representing the people, the paradox of legitimate authority. Rousseau is harder than he looks.
  • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1846, published 1932) — Part I on ideology and consciousness. The foundational text for understanding how material conditions shape what counts as knowledge, and whose knowledge counts.
  • William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), lectures I, III, and XX — James’ empirical-pragmatist study of religious experience as a species of human experience open to investigation. The classic alternative to both reductive naturalism (religion as mere psychology) and dogmatic theology (religion as exclusive doctrine). Lecture XX (“Conclusions”) is the indispensable summary of his position.
  • B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste (1936) — The full text is freely available online. Ambedkar’s argument that caste is an epistemological system as much as a social hierarchy — and that it cannot be reformed from within the framework that produced it — anticipates and radicalises contemporary debates about epistemic injustice.
  • Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Parts Two and Three — The most philosophically rigorous analysis of how totalitarian ideology works: not simply as lying but as the destruction of the shared factual reality within which political argument is possible. Essential context for lessons 4, 5, and 6.
  • Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958), Chapters 1–2 and 5 — Arendt’s distinction between labour, work, and action — and her account of the public realm as the space in which political life becomes possible — is the philosophical foundation for her later political thought. Chapter 5 on action is essential for understanding what is distinctive about politics as a form of human activity.
  • Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) — Arendt’s account of the Eichmann trial introduces the concept of the “banality of evil”: great political crimes are committed by bureaucrats following orders, not monsters driven by ideology. A book about how political systems can make ordinary thought impossible — and the limits of moral responsibility under such systems.
  • Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963) — Eight pages, available in full online. The most philosophically rigorous application of political philosophy to a concrete political situation in the English language: Aquinas’s natural law, Rawls’s sense of justice, and the long tradition of civil disobedience, applied under conditions of imprisonment to interlocutors who claimed to agree with King’s goals but opposed his methods.
  • John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, §§1–4, 11–14, 24 (1971) — The original position, the veil of ignorance, the difference principle. The most influential work of political philosophy of the 20th century.
  • Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics” (1971) — Originally a review of the Pentagon Papers. Arendt’s distinction between factual truth, opinion, and political lies is more precise — and more urgent — than most contemporary writing on “post-truth.”
  • Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, Part Three (1975) — “Panopticism.” Whether or not you accept Foucault’s genealogical method, the argument that power produces knowledge (and knowledge produces power) is one of the most productive ideas in 20th-century thought.
  • Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Chapters 1–4, 7 (2007) — Testimonial injustice (Chs. 1–4) and hermeneutical injustice (Ch. 7): how power determines who gets believed and whose experiences get names. Directly applicable to political epistemology.
  • Karen Armstrong, The Case for God (2009), Chapter 1 — A historical-comparative argument that pre-modern religious traditions did not understand “belief in God” as the propositional claim that modern atheism and modern fundamentalism alike now treat it as. Useful as a corrective to the assumption that religious epistemology starts from creedal assent.
  • David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules (2015), Chapter 1 — Graeber’s argument that bureaucracy is not the opposite of utopian thinking but its preferred modern form. The “iron law of liberalism” — that every market reform produces more rules, not fewer — is essential for any politically literate engagement with how modern institutions actually work.