Books like The One Best System — picked by fans

I love this book because it is such a groundbreaking, insightful, and comprehensive examination of the development of Southern public education systems and the fight over whether they would be instruments of domination or liberation. Every time I read it, I learn new things.

This book shows how Black Southerners' activism and support helped build public education in the South and how they tried to use education to claim and give meaning to freedom after the Civil War. At the same time, White Southerners fought (and in many ways) succeeded in using those systems for control and hierarchy.

I think the book explores this tension in education and offers profound insights about the history and ongoing effects of this history of discrimination and segregation.

I love how this book shows us how we can’t understand the failures of recent education reforms to fix educational inequality without putting them into a longer and wider context, namely the history of school desegregation.

This book explores how the failure of courts and policymakers to go far enough in school desegregation—especially to challenge the city-suburban boundary as a primary axis of racial and socioeconomic inequality—has doomed all subsequent reforms, including school finance reform, school choice, and standards and accountability.

This book has shaped my thinking about educational reform and inequality today, especially the importance of boundaries and funding. It helps us look at our current education policy landscape with a much more critical eye and see some of the things that are missing from this discussion today.

I love how this book asks big and fundamental questions about the relationship between work and education and grounds them in such careful and extensive historical research. It challenges some of the things we think we know about the relationship between the economy and education and makes a powerful case that we fall into a “trap” when we ask education to fix inequalities that are rooted in and best addressed in our economic system.

I love how this book looks broadly and deeply across sectors of the economy, public and private schools, higher education, and K-12 schools at a critical moment of transformation to ask important questions about the sources of inequality and the best ways to address it.

I love this book because it takes what we largely take for granted—local property tax and the educational inequality it produces—and shows how and why this developed over time and whose interests it has served. While we have tended to assume that funding inequality is the unfortunate byproduct of a long attachment to localism, this book explores how, in California, the state moved from centralized and more equitable funding to more localized and unequal funding through the political lobbying of the elites who benefited.

Taking unequal funding seriously as a deliberate project and a cornerstone for other kinds of social and economic inequalities makes us rethink many aspects of educational inequality we live with today. This book consequently says profound things about the history of American education and educational inequality, past and present.

First published in 1958, this is one of Hannah Arendt’s most influential books and in it she attempts to define the human condition in the aftermath of World War II, developing her concept “natality.” 

It’s a challenging book that I’ve wrestled with and argued with and never forgotten. It includes some of her most powerful and frequently cited passages about birth. Lately, I’ve been returning to its opening pages, in which she discusses the launch of Sputnik into space. 

She saw this launch not as an exciting technological breakthrough, but as a fateful repudiation of our earthly existence, an existence that was defined by birth with possibilities and limitations.

This volume provides the first global survey of taxation in the premodern world.

The book demonstrates how dispersed societies across the globe adopted a great diversity of fiscal institutions and instruments, such depending on local geographic conditions, political ambitions, and distinct historical settings.

With a coverage including Europe, the Near East, East Asia, and the Americas, this is arguably the most global survey of fiscal states formation that currently exists on the market.

This book also makes an admirable effort in interdisciplinarity approaches to fiscal history, with authors contributing from a wide range of fields including history, anthropology, economics, political science, and sociology.

“Where are the women?” So goes this 1989 classic’s opening gambit.

We think politics is the domain of men, Enloe points out, but women have long been out there doing vital and often invisible work, whether as diplomats’ wives, sex workers recruited around US army bases, farmers, or labor leaders.

Bringing this gendered labor to the forefront of international relations is Enloe’s strength. She discusses how images of women “work,” as in the Chiquita Banana ads that introduced American housewives to this unusual fruit and helped expand United Fruit’s bloody empire, but also studies women’s transnational labor organizing.

Reading this book in graduate school guaranteed I would never think of those little stickers on bananas in the same way. Like many other historians of US foreign policy, I still assign sections from Enloe regularly, particularly in my “Transnational America” class. 

This book challenges the notion that we should rely on the ideal as a guidepost. Set aside whether we could decide on an ideal; Gaus, a philosopher, makes a four-part argument against pursuing it. First, how could we contemplate the incomprehensible number of possible institutional, legal, and organizational configurations? We couldn’t. Second, the components of those configurations interact, resulting in a rugged landscape: the path to the ideal would not be entirely uphill, that is, it would require sacrifices. Hence, the book’s title. Third, owing to the interactions among choices, we cannot evaluate collective well-being in alternative configurations with any accuracy. What hubris to assume that we could. And finally, the landscape responds to our positioning, as we adapt our physical, organizational, and institutional (both formal and invisible) environments, we alter what we can achieve and what we desire.

Immanuel Kant is often seen as a pure philosopher, one who was interested in abstract principles. He was that, but his essays on "Perpetual Peace" and especially his essay "Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective" are literally the best things I have ever read, and have so much resonance for us today.

Democracies tend not to go to war as much as dictatorships because the people are likely to be the ones who are killed on the battlefield. In Kant’s time Frederick the Great was able to go to war whenever he wanted. Today, Vladimir Putin can go to war without asking anyone – and the people, and Russian conscripts too – suffer the consequences. Kant’s experience of living in a militarised state governed by a single man is eerily relevant today. Reading this thinker tells as much about contemporary politics as it teaches us about 18th… show more.

It is impossible to read Spinoza and not think often of Thomas Hobbes. Spinoza read Hobbes’s works and was clearly influenced by the English philosopher both in his account of human nature and, especially, in his political thinking. This is, as far as I know, the first book devoted explicitly to the two thinkers together. Field’s focus is on the political, and she does a beautiful job of analyzing and distinguishing different conceptions of ‘power’ (both in the individual and in the group), as well as illuminating similarities and contrasts between these two of the most important early modern thinkers on politics and the state.