Books like Greek and Roman Political Ideas — picked by fans

This is the story that made me want to be either a reporter or a whistleblower. The trail of this episode from the moments the break-in occurred at Watergate to the resignation of President Nixon show how complex corruption often is. “Getting to the bottom of it” is often never fully achieved in conspiracies, not only as large and sweeping as this one, but of countless others that are much smaller in scale.

Additionally, this is a great example of how the original decision to commit the first corrupt act leads to more and more of it until corruption defines the existence of men and women who started out with good intentions. 

Written by perhaps the best journalist who has made it their business to explore and expose the more nefarious aspects of UK foreign policy in recent decades, this book should be read by all interested in UK foreign policy.

Written in an accessible style, this book provides details about the manipulation of the UK official record in places as diverse as Kenya, Yemen, Cyprus, and the UK itself.

The book illuminates key moments in history and explains slightly confounding terms such as D-Notices and the Official Secrets Act.

Somewhere between wide-eyed optimism about the potential of human ingenuity and skepticism about technology’s ability to save us from ourselves lies Annie Jacobsen’s book. It covers DARPA’s founding and the first fifty years before reporting on projects active at the time of the book’s writing (it came out in 2015).

The result is a balanced mix of history, analysis, and you-are-there reporting in a highly readable narrative. The book contains the best explanation I’ve seen of DARPA’s controversial, post-911 Total Information Awareness program and raises important questions about when, how, and why governments should conduct research and development in secret.

Written by Mary Graham of the Harvard University-affiliated The Transparency Policy Project, this book explores how eight presidents stretching backward from Barack Obama to George Washington have dealt with the tensions inherent in government secrecy within a society that (at least in theory and often only for some) allows citizens to feed into the management of government affairs.

Graham illustrates that secrecy has been utilized as much to hide mistakes as it has been to protect national security, as well as exploring key moments in the history of secrecy in the US, such as the labyrinth inquiries that followed the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, and the Nixon administration.

Downs does a great job of explaining how democratic decision-making links voter preferences to public policy outcomes. He looks at political preferences as existing on a left-to-right continuum and concludes that democratic elections tend to select the candidates whose preferences most closely reflect the median voter—the voter whose preferences fall in the middle of that left-right continuum. He offers a few caveats, one being that because one vote has a vanishingly small chance to affect an election outcome, voters tend to be rationally ignorant on political matters. There is no payoff to becoming informed because an election outcome will be the same regardless of how any individual voter votes.

De Tocqueville’s book is the first and probably still the best examination of the genius of America. At times like these, it's good to be reminded of what makes America work. Frankl would firmly understand and concur. The essence of America is our responsibility. Frankl would break it up into two words: “response-ability.”

I first read this book when I was in college. I have read it at least once in every subsequent year. It’s nice to be reminded of who we are. Ultimately, De Tocqueville teaches that this country will be whatever we make it. If we don’t like what’s going on, it’s our responsibility to change it.  

This is a brilliant book by a professor of history holding an endowed chair at Duke University, a scholar who took a year off from her academic duties to tour the country, giving talks about this book. It is the other book that has most affected me since the publication of my last book, After Capitalism. It’s a very readable scholarly study, not explicitly focused on climate change, but which explains more compellingly than any other book I’ve read, as to why, given what we know about the causes of, and solutions to, climate change, we are not doing what needs to be done. This book goes well beyond my own long-held belief that we don’t really live in a democracy, focusing on specific elements I’d never thought about, but which are causally implicated in so much of the systemic disfunction that we observe today in our political and economic… show more.

I loved Bruce Ackerman’s recent book because he is also a professor of constitutional law reflecting on the state of democracy today but in an existential way, looking laterally at possible solutions to our political problems. Our starting points are similar, but proposed solutions different and complementary—I learned a tremendous amount from this book.

Rob Reich, a professor at Stanford University – in observing that we are living in a second gilded age – directly addresses whether the philosophy of philanthropy is in opposition to democracy. 

He answers, with several qualifications, that it very well could be. He sets it up in the following way: Is philanthropy – the support of privately funded causes that affect society, often in profound ways – an individual act or a social policy? 

He views the question through that prism, of social policy, and concludes that philanthropy “is not just a matter of private morality,” but is “a matter of public morality.”  Just Giving appeals to me because of its comprehensive approach to an issue – the private support of our nation’s charitable organizations – that, while ubiquitous in society, has received too little attention. 

This book is a gem. It stretches across thousands of years and explores the question of what makes a stable state—state-building, rule of law, and accountable government.

I love this book for its comprehensiveness, scathing criticism of tribalism, and scrutiny of corruption. I promise you will find it a great read.