100 Books Like Responsibility for Justice

Alphonse Daudet’s notebooks on pain are among the most explicit, honest, and consoling treatments of chronic illness ever written. Daudet was a contemporary of Flaubert, admired as a novelist of provincial France by such luminaries as Charles Dickens and Henry James. Like Flaubert, Daudet suffered from syphilis and he planned to write a book about his experience. He died before he could do that, but his notebooks survive. As someone who lives with chronic pain, I cherish Daudet’s frank but never saccharine advice and his commitment to compassion for others in the teeth of his own suffering.

Wittgenstein’s Mistress is a novel by David Markson that takes the form of a journal written by a woman living on a beach who believes she is the only person left on earth. It is made up of short paragraphs—often no more than a sentence—that record her lonely travels, like a surrealist Robinson Crusoe. At the risk of spoiling a conceptual twist, what begins as a metaphysical examination of language and the self turns out to be a study of grief and betrayal. If you are lonely, Wittgenstein’s Mistress is wonderful company: captivating, playful, intellectually rich, and unexpectedly moving.

I don’t know if misery loves company but I’m convinced that failure does. When their projects fall flat, my kid likes nothing better than to hear about the wreckage of mine: romantic fiascos, flunked tests, athletic defeats. Joe Moran’s “book of solace,” If You Should Fail, is in part a compendium of stories like these, in part an effort to dislodge our tendency to think of human beings as winners or losers at all. “To call any life a failure, or a success, is to miss the infinite granularity, the inexhaustible miscellany of all lives,” Moran writes. “A life can’t really succeed or fail at all; it can only be lived.” 

One of the most profound attempts to capture grief in prose is due to the British experimental novelist B. S. Johnson. Published in 1969, The Unfortunates is a book in a box: twenty-seven booklets to be read in any order, except for “First” and “Last.” Its narrator is a journalist returning to a city he last knew seven years ago, visiting an old friend, Tony, who later died of metastatic cancer. The visit triggers memories that arrive in random order, scattered through the day’s events as chance dictates. Grief has no narrative order, the book in a box seems to warn; and any closure is temporary. Grief can be opened and reshuffled again and again. 

Robin loves the way that this book displays how even a Kantian basis (not home territory for him) shows why poverty should not be tolerated.

It underlines how extreme poverty undermines the exercise of rational agency, and thus the proper functioning of human beings.

Onora O’Neill argues cogently that morality precludes the employment of force or fraud, and gives rise to universal principles applicable both within and between societies. Population policies, for example, should depend on the informed consent of those affected.

Neoliberal political economy assumes either a strategic rational actor or an irrational actor who needs to be “nudged” to act rationally. This theory endorses a theory of individualist agency which holds that ultimately all agents must compete against each other. This system of thought emphasizes a lack of alternatives and recommends institutions that accept that actors are narrowly self-interested: people evolved to be machines that survive and propagate. Against this view of human agency, alternative theorists construct theories of action in which individuals can reason together, act in concert, and together be morally accountable. Schwenkenbecher effectively builds this alternative perspective affording possibilities of intentional cooperation and collective moral action.

There’s a common prejudice that philosophy has nothing to do with the world in which non-philosophers live. I read Practical Ethics as an undergraduate and it came as a revelation. In crystal-clear prose, and with compelling logic, Singer addresses many issues in applied morality – abortion, capital punishment, charity, animal rights. Although some of his conclusions are radical, they’re hard to dissent from. Not long after reading the book I became a vegetarian. I haven’t eaten meat since.

This was George Lakoff’s groundbreaking early book linking morality and politics.

Here the renowned cognitive psychologist, draws from his expertise as a linguist to uncover the unconscious worldviews of liberals and conservatives. More specifically, he argues that distinct conceptual metaphors, each associated with the family, underlie the politics of the left and right, specifically the strict father for conservatives and the nurturant parent for liberals.  

This book turned me into an activist. Mary Daly walked me through a riveting cultural history of various forms of misogyny and talked me through how they are all connected to the patriarchy. She managed to link up Suttee, Chinese Foot Binding, Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting, Witch Burnings, and American obstetrical practices in one theme- the patriarchy acting out its misogyny, and deconstructed language, mythology, and Christianity in the process.

This book was the most important book I have ever read (and re-read) for sorting out thinking about why women are subjected to things, globally, and clearly indicated no culture is left out, and no culture is much better than any other on this count. Challenging is an understatement. A brilliant, complex book.

At once Jewish, French, and Christian, an ex-factory worker and field laborer, and political thinker whose short life was tragically ended by a hunger strike against Nazism, Simone Weil should today be remembered as the first thoughtful defender of our need for social and ecological roots.

Published posthumously, this extraordinary book is a withering protest against deracination: the forcible uprooting of peoples’ lives by unbridled capitalism, state socialism, nationalism, and war. Anticipating the recent celebration of the ideals of civil society, Weil stood against violence and every form of institutional standardization, bossing, and bullying. Felt obligations toward others, freedom from arbitrary power, and self-government based on citizens’ grounded consent are, for her, the mark of a good society.