Great stuff! I’ve skipped Rousseau and haven’t hunted down Oakeshott, yet, and a couple others have been skimmed or are on the shelf unread, but . . . that about covers it for me.
Thanks for the note about Locke being quite distinct from Hobbes in his use of “state of nature.” I think a lot of critics often miss this one.
Cheers!
PGE

You might also want to include Hugo Grotius on that list, particularly The Rights of War and Peace. He has been called “father of the law of nations” for a reason…

QD,
Nietzsche wasn’t missed, Mr Forster suggested On the Genealogy of Morals.

1) MBA programs. I think your comment, in context, is a reference to previous discussions on this board. Don’t rely on those. I have noticed an increasing tendency on liberal arts oriented boards (this is not a reference to your comment so much as an absolutely inane series of posts I caught on Matthew Yglesias’s blog) to downplay both the intelligence of those in corporate leadership and high finance and the usefulness of MBA programs. Don’t be fooled. Having been in a variety of public and private sector situations, I can say that liberal arts folks would do well to learn from those in the business world.
2) If you are going to read the Trial and Death of Socrates series, Aristophanes’s “The Clouds” should be required, as well. “The Clouds” is a criticism of the historical figure Socrates from one of his friends and contemporaries (Aristophanes plays a central role in the “Symposium”). It is useful because the comic poet points out a lot about the character of “natural philosophy” and the philosopher that is obfuscated in Plato.
3) Where is Leo Strauss!? After reading the ancients I would suggest reading the works “Socrates and Aristophanes” and “Natural Right and History”. The latter is hard to get through and Strauss references much that will be new to the reader (I didn’t understand at least a third of it), but it is worth it. Strauss’s connection with neo-conservatism has given him a bum rap in the liberal world. His interpretation of great philosophic works, however, is breathtaking and wildly insightful.
4) You briefly drop Nietzche and Tocqueville in at the end. Reemphasize those. Despite his popularity , Nietzche is still underrated. There are several wonderful essays in Tom Wolfe’s “Hooking Up” that make wonderful use of Nietzche’s uncanny prophetic prowess. Tocqueville is the simply the greatest social critic of the last two hundred years, anywhere. Pierre Manent and Peter Lawler have a few excellent books on Tocqueville that are worth a read, particulalarly for Americans.
5) Argh! Chesterton’s “the Everlasting man”?! Why does everyone love that book?! I really, really, think “Orthodoxy” is a lot better:) It absolutely changed my vision of Christianity (though is serves a different purpose than the one sited above). Also good is “The Napoleon of Notting Hill”.
6) A great translation of the Marcus Aurelius book mentioned above is “The Emperor’s Handbook” by David Hicks and Scot Hicks. I think they nailed the essence of what Marcus was trying to accomplish (it is a translation, not a commentary).
7) Ok…I don’t like him, but you cannot possibly leave off John Rawls–particularly if you want to be credible in liberal academic circles. “A Theory of Justice”.
8) St. Thomas More’s Utopia
9) Heidegger.
10) Hegel.
11) Nozick. “Anarchy, State & Utopia”.
Neat list!

Thanks for your kind words. I’m glad to have been of service. A few responses:
PGE: I think the famous Locke scholar John Dunn put it best: for Hobbes the single most fundamental fact of the state of nature is that it has no enforceable moral law, while for Locke the single most fundamental fact about the state of nature is precisely the *presence* of an enforceable moral law. As for Rousseau: do not, I implore you, skip him entirely. Too much of subsequent history and political thought derives from him. If you find the explicitly political works unbearable, give Emile a try; it’s a very different sort of book. I should also add that the real content of Rousseau’s work is very different from what you may have heard.
J. Hagglund: Happy to have helped. Feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions once you get started.
David Marcoe: Thank you – Grotius is well worth mentioning, particularly since he applies medieval natural-law thought to the emergence of the nation-state in modernity. So he’s an important transition figure; reading him shows you how natural-law thought adapted to changing political conditions in modernity. If I were to add a few more books, Grotius would probably be one of them.
JDM: Some context is necessary for my MBA comment. I was referring to an earlier discussion here on EO in which it was claimed that an MBA program is less valuable than two years of work experience combined with the careful reading of about 30 books. That claim was the origin of this essay, since EO invited do-it-yourself Master’s programs in other fields. So the claim was not that the subject matter of an MBA was useless, but that the programs themselves added nothing that one could not get from studying the subject on one’s own. My day job is at a pro-market think tank and I put a big dose of Adam Smith in my reading list, so I think my credentials are well established in terms of giving practical economic knowledge its proper dignity. I would like to be able to add that I did not intend to endorse EO’s negative view of MBA programs, but I can’t say that, because my brother did an MBA at a famous and highly-regarded business school just a few years ago and he reported exactly the same thing about its usefulness, as have others of my aquaintence.

OK, OK, I spoke to hastily when I said that hardly anyone outside history departments reads Hegel and Heidegger (I do think you can say that about More, however). That was too strong. But you get my point – their presence in political thought curricula is vestigal, like the appendix.

Someone once asked William F. Buckley why he delighted in exposing the hypocrisy of leftists. He replied, “I delight in that which is delightful.” Similarly, I don’t accord much significance to A Theory of Justice simply because A Theory of Justice is not very significant. Even Rawls himself eventually realized how futile the whole project of that book was; if I were going to assign anything of Rawls, it would be Political Liberalism, a book for which I have much more respect.
I do not understand what you can mean by the statement “every serious student of justice eventually cites Rawls,” unless by “serious” you mean “Rawlsian.” Even among the political left there is a large population of theorists who do not take Rawls seriously. And of course outside the left Rawls is held in even lower esteem.
I agree that Hegel is indispensible if you want to know where Marxism came from historically. But you will notice that I included very little Marx in my list, and if Marxism is not worth in-depth study then you can’t justify reading Hegel on grounds that it paved the way for Marx.
Fukuyama is greatly underrated; in fact, I think you yourself are underrating him – calling him a “polemicist” is unfair. If I were to round out the readings with more from the 20th century I would add his The End of History and the Last Man. But that book does not assume prior knowledge of Hegelian thought, and lays out for the reader basically everything he needs to know about it. Indeed, the book is useful as a basic introduction to the Hegelian view of history even independent of its merits as an analysis of democracy’s role in history.
Rorty is also a good suggestion; I don’t expect his view of things to go on being very influential for much longer, but his stuff is still a cogent statement of the case against transcendant morality. It’s the modern American parallel to Nietzsche’s Geneaology of Morals. The book Irony, Contingency, and Solidarity is a good starting point.
I think you and I are aiming at different purposes – you want to convey the history of ideas, but I’m trying to give the reader what I think is of the most enduring importance. Rawls and Heidegger are certainly very important if your goal is to understand what was being written about political thought by academics in the 20th century, but if what you’re looking for is enlightenment on the lasting questions of man’s political situation, I don’t see much of that stuff as relevant.

Nah, I could do this all day. What’s the point of a comment thread if not to keep it going?
(I see that I said above that I didn’t want to be sitting here all day. Well, since I brought up Emerson before, how about “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”? Anybody here seen Next Stop Wonderland?)
And really I doubt that I know more than you do. I just think we have two different kinds of lists in mind.

– As for Rawls, when I drew up this list credibility in academia was not one of my concerns – in a do-it-yourself education you don’t want to waste your time with stuff that isn’t really helpful simply because it’s what everyone in academia has read. Allan Bloom’s review of A Theory of Justice, which is in the essay collection Giants and Dwarfs, exposes just a few of Rawls’s major deficiencies. –
That should be coming in the mail, hopefully today.

Jon Rowe: You know, it’s been a while since I read anything from Giants and Dwarfs. I’ll have to pull that back out and remind myself what’s in it. I do remember that the Harvard speech (“My fellow elitists…”) is very good.
JDM: I must admit that it is a failing of mine that I have difficulty taking critiques of liberal economics with adequate seriousness. To my mind, the only one that has any real power is the one Smith himself presents in Book V of The Wealth of Nations – namely, the danger that in a commercial society people will cease to think. That’s the purpose of his discussion of schools and churches, to which I alluded in my list.

Sorry to miss the Nietzsche reference. Blogging is bad for reading comprehension, I guess.
I would say that Hegel is important, but it’s not so clear that it’s so easy to get. I often find it bewildering, and I’m supposed to be an expert in those sorts of things.
If you were going to round out the 20th century, you’d also have to include MacIntyre’s _After Virtue_ and Taylor’s _Sources of the Self_.

Did I say Hegel was easy to get? If so, I certainly didn’t mean that! Like you, I find much of his stuff incomprehensible.
If it was my remark about Fukuyama that prompted your comment, what I meant was that Fukuyama gives you just enough information about Hegel’s theory of history so you can understand his (Fukuyama’s) argument. In other words, it is not necessary to read Hegel before you can read Fukuyama. And let’s all give thanks for that!
One thing that has helped me grasp some of Hegel’s ideas is the section of C.S. Lewis’s book The Pilgrim’s Regress where John and Virtue are in the house of Wisdom. Remember, in Lewis’s intellectual circle in the 1920s Hegelianism was the major antagonist to Christianity, so Lewis’s “allegorical defense of Christianity” culminates with Hegeliansim.

I do intend to go back for Rousseau, but in my teenage years of avid political-theory reading I downed my Locke and Bastiat and Tocqueville in huge gobbets, and found Rousseau seemed kinda thin and pale and unappealling by comparison. His influence makes it worth having read him, rather than knowing him only from secondaries, as I currently do, though.
Thanks for interacting profitably in the comments! I have learned as much again from that as from the list above.
I enjoyed the Lewis-Hegelian interaction quite a bit in my reading of Lewis. There’s something of the quaint about it, these days, but as the Fukuyama connection (and I haven’t read Fukuyama, probably should) makes clear, it ain’t dead yet.
As for Heidegger et al, well, over here on the lit scholar side of things we’re still having to take those guys more seriously. You’re right that a “history of ideas” approach and a “touchstones” approach will come up with different lists.
What happened to, say, Hayek and von Mises?
Cheers,
PGE

Great post Greg, Joe. I think I’ll keep this around as a good reference for what I should be reading.
I’m hoping to be able to start a MS-IS and MS-ISA at GMU in about a year or so if my employer will let me and then maybe a few years later go for a poly sci MA just for fun.

Thanks, John. I’m a Walker Percy reader and I have the publications from the Bioethics council, as well as an occasional interest in Hegel, so Aliens in America has just jumped into the “No, REALLY, you gotta read this” category, for me.
Again, Joe, Greg et al, thanks for a first-rate profitable talk on this!
Cheers,
PGE

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PGE: Rousseau, thin and pale? When I first read Rousseau it was like getting struck by lightning! Of course, I wasn’t a Christian then; I didn’t catch a lot of the blind spots in his discussion of religion because I shared those blind spots myself. For someone who knows what being in Christ is really like, Rousseau might not be so thrilling.
John: Fukuyama a teacher of evil? He’s not Christian, but I don’t think he merits that label. And if we’re going to call Fukuyama a teacher of evil, what will we say about Hayek (see below)?
PGE and John: Actually, most political thought programs don’t contain even as much economic theory as I’ve included in my list, because they don’t have you read 3/5ths of Smith. So I was kind of pushing to include economics as it is. If you want even more, Hayek’s book The Mirage of Social Justice (which is vol. 2 of a three-volume set that has a different title, I forget what it is) is definitely worth reading. Although the main reason I would assign it would not be as a guard against big government (I already have Locke, Smith, and Madison to do that) but to illustrate how the libertarianism of our time grew not out of Christian natural-law thinkers like Locke, as many people think, but rather out of the secularists, especially Hobbes and Mill. For Hayek, freedom is good because (and only because) people find it useful; it maximizes preference satisfaction.
And, for the record, I think everyone should read Milton Friedman, because he’s my boss!
MikeT: If GMU is George Mason University, say hello to my friend Colleen Shogan, who teaches the presidency there. Her dissertation was on moral rhetoric and the presidency.
FC: From what I can tell based on a few mintues on the web, it looks like Girard’s theory is an attempt to explain religion as the psychological legacy of prehistoric social processes – like evolutionary biology, but in this case with a different set of concerns. Now, I don’t object to this on grounds that religion is true, because religion could be both a legacy of prehistoric social processes and true. However, I’m with Chesterton in The Everlasting Man: our only serious evidence about prehistory is what we know from early history; any attempt to reconstruct it on other grounds is only speculation, and is totally non-falsifiable. And what we know from early history does not suggest that religion is the result of social processes – just the reverse, in fact.

Oh. I didn’t catch that it was a joke – that makes a lot more sense.
But you can hardly blame me for missing an inside joke made by *Straussians*. I mean, imagine what their inside jokes must be like!
Leo: “Hey, Allan, did you see Harvey’s review of Harry’s new book? Talk about a picke telephone screaming ice-cream oxygen station-wagon blue chicken!”
Allan: “Ha, ha! Good one!”
Speaking of which, the Weekly Standard had the best spoof of Straussianism I’ve ever seen. It’s the Straussian Weight Loss Plan: “We teach you how to create the impression that you’ve lost weight!”
Since I’ve criticized Straussians above, I should say that I like Straussians – one of them was my dissertation advisor – and this is all meant in the spirit of good humor.

Leo Strauss opens his Thoughts on Machiavelli by calling him a “teacher of evil,” so that’s the joke.
CS Lewis’ The Abolition of Man remains my personal touchstone and is available free in its entirety here.
Thanks so much for this post, Greg. I’m autodidacting on philosophy meself, and it seems I’m in the ballpark. Have enjoyed Strauss’ Platonism tremendously, but Aquinas is next. Just have to put up with Thomas’ love of the USA Today (lists, piecharts) of philosophy, Aristotle.
Will get to Oakeshott someday, I promise.
(Enjoyed tremendously Adam Smith’s other book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which is also free
here.)
Again, thanks.