Western Canon reading list
Political Thought
A guided argument about authority, liberty, equality, rights, and democratic life.
How to use this reading path
These works disagree at the roots. Read them in sequence to see how later writers inherit, revise, and reject earlier accounts of political order.
- Books
- 10
- Estimated hours
- 180
- Suggested pace
- 8 months
- Difficulty
- Advanced
The reading order
- The Republic by Plato
- Politics by Aristotle
- Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
- Two Treatises of Government by John Locke
- The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
- Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
- On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
- The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois
- The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir