100 Books Like Towards the Light

Helena Rosenblatt correctly finds liberalism’s origins in the French Revolution, but she emphasizes its much longer prehistory, going back to the ancient Romans. She conveys a wide range of ideas in the liberal tradition of political thought and practice and especially draws attention to the values of generosity, civic-mindedness, and love of freedom.

Rosenblatt does not stint from describing the less attractive sides of some liberal thinkers and theories, especially in Europe during the nineteenth century. This is a beautifully written work of scholarship showing mastery of historical detail.

Liberalism values reasonable arguments, incremental reforms, and resistance to cruelty. These values receive plenty of support, but they can also sound a bit tame and boring. Enter Adam Gopnik – to his credit, he acknowledges all this, yet he manages to give liberalism his passionate advocacy. He conveys the joyous side of communities based on reasonableness and toleration.

Gopnik paints liberalism with a human face–or multiple faces–by telling stories about great liberal thinkers from history, such as John Stuart Mill and his friend, lover, collaborator, and (eventually) wife, the remarkable Harriet Taylor.

Edmund Fawcett has given us a comprehensive history of liberalism, perhaps the nearest thing available to its definitive history. He traces the life of liberalism as a distinct political outlook from its emergence in the early nineteenth century all the way to the opening decades of the new millennium.

This book is especially strong in its case studies of liberal theorists, statesmen, and movements across many countries (with particular attention to the US, UK, France, and Germany). This is an objective and entertaining work of historical scholarship from one of the world’s great political journalists.

Despite its subtitle, this is one of the most comprehensive histories of liberal thought and practice ever written and is up to date with many recent developments, having been published in late 2023. It should be read alongside Edmund Fawcett’s similarly grand-scale history of liberalism.

Where it differs is in a somewhat more polemical or argumentative tone from Alan S. Kahan, who has a distinctive interpretation of liberalism, its essence, and its many challenges (particularly current challenges from populist politics). Kahan’s arguments won’t convince everybody, but they’ll dominate discussions of liberalism as a political outlook for years to come. If you don’t agree with Kahan’s interpretation of his topic, you’ll at least need to explain why–his book is that important.

Geographer Tim Cresswell’s work has helped me convince architectural historians that examining how we move through spaces is vital to understanding the full range of the built environment’s cultural meanings. He states the obvious: we all live in physical bodies. And yet historians emphasize the written word and architects emphasize visualization. What about the other senses? Cresswell argues that mobility is a socially-constructed movement much like place is a socially-constructed space. We can learn so much by paying attention to the ways society controls movement: Who is allowed to occupy which spaces? When? With whom? And how has that changed over time? Cresswell’s ideas helped me analyze the lived experiences of multiple people in the same domestic spaces, and ultimately connect the manipulation of architecture and landscape to modernity’s regulation of bodies and ideas. 

This book is great because Norberg is calm, methodical, rational, and optimistic: we have come a long way, we live in the best of times, and let’s get on with it. I love the modern as I’ve said, and appreciate historians who understand that, from a material perspective at least (health, wealth, freedom, and security), most people today are in the top 99.999999 percentile of all the humans who have ever lived.

I so admire (and share) Norberg’s belief in our brilliance and problem-solving skills and admire, too, his arguments which are complex but easy to follow. Modernity gives us plenty to celebrate, and Norberg, I feel, makes this eminently clear.

It is a book that serves as the perfect balance to Barrat’s and to Kurzweil’s. Although the three together will lead to cognitive dissonance, which, in my view, is as healthy as having one’s mind blown periodically.

Lisa Lowe and I were in sustained conversation as we were composing our respective books. I read earlier drafts of hers as I was writing mine. Her analysis of settler-colonialism, the African slave trade, and trade in Asian goods and peoples in the Caribbean and Americas illustrated for me ways of thinking about the global relations and interactive impacts of the movements of people, culture, and thought. Her focus on how liberal thought shaped and is shaped by these relations helped to surface the coercive and discriminatory practices that made liberal thought possible. This “history of the present” by extension was enormously generative for thinking about the history of the neoliberal present too. 

Hannah Arendt is the most important political thinker of the post-totalitarian moment. While her 1951 Origins of Totalitarianism is more well-known and became a bestseller again after the election of President Donald Trump, in this collection of essays she lays out her ideas about the way that the past helps us to locate ourselves in the present by imagining and reimagining our futures. This book was hugely influential for me during my graduate studies at Yale. Unlike so many political theorists, Arendt is also a wonderfully accessible and engaging writer.

I remember first reading Future Shock after buying a battered, orange-coloured paperback edition at a bargain price from one of the second-hand bookshops that once saturated London’s Charing Cross Road.

It hadn’t really occurred to me before how much the increasingly rapid technological changes around us might create a sense of shock—‘future shock’— for some people. It changed my thinking about the influence of technology on our world and the impact it has on people, society, economics, and politics.

Even after all these years, many of Alvin Toffler’s insights and ideas remain just as topical today.

The great fact of economic history is that we all used to be poor, and now most of us are not. 200 years ago, almost 90 percent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, today around 9 percent does. This is the story of that remarkable transformation and what made it possible. Of course, there are many good books on this, and I have greatly enjoyed for example Joel Mokyr, Deirdre McCloskey, and David Landes, but this is a powerful, short book by a great historian, that manages to weave together economic, political, technological and intellectual factors into a very compelling narrative of progress and its preconditions over the past one thousand years.