Top 10 Books I Read in 2025

My 10 favorite books of the year, alongside many honorable mentions

Those who have been following me for a good while know that every year, I share my top 10 favorite books I read that year (in no particular order), along with some honorable mentions. I do this partly as a public reading list, partly as a way to figure out what actually happened to my brain over the last twelve months. The last two years, I have posted these lists, in which I go over each of the 10 books in great detail on Patreon only, but for this year, I have decided to put them out here now that I have a Substack.

In the article below, I’ll go over my top ten books of 2025 along with some honorable mentions. They are not ranked in order. They are simply the ones that left the biggest mark, and ones I recommend the most.

I’m also going to refrain from “summarizing” these books. Book summaries can be weirdly deceptive. They can leave you with the impression that you understand a book you have never actually read. Instead, I’ll give a brief synopsis of what each book is about, then focus on what mattered more to me anyway, namely, how each one influenced my thinking this year.

1. Discourses on Livy by Niccolò Machiavelli

Most people know Machiavelli through The Prince, but that’s only half the story, and not even a fraction of the scale of the Discourses. The Discourses on Livy is enormous, split into three books, and for most readers the first two are the real core. The third shifts much more into military strategy and matters less unless you’re especially interested in war.

I’m deliberately not going to “summarize” Machiavelli here, because I already have a Machiavelli script I started all the way back last March, inspired directly by reading the Discourses and some secondary literature. I want to eventually turn that into a full video, and if anything I might publish the essay version on Substack first. One secondary text worth flagging as an honorable mention is Machiavellian Democracy by John P. McCormick, which helped me think through how radical Machiavelli’s republicanism actually is.

Part of why I’ve been reluctant to finish the Machiavelli video is honestly practical and cultural. After my “Marxism Explained” video, I got a lot of backlash for using AI-generated historical footage, even from people who admitted it looked good. There’s a moral panic around AI that often lacks nuance, and Machiavelli is an even harder case because there’s obviously no footage of him or his world. At some point I either have to lean into AI visuals or go film on location in Italy, ideally Florence, which I genuinely want to do anyway. If anyone is in Italy and wants to tour Florence with me, I’m all ears.

What made the Discourses so important to me this year is that Machiavelli is a republican who makes an unexpectedly compelling case for a democratic politics, not democracy in the ancient Athenian sense, but something closer to a democratic republic. He’s unusually radical for his genre because he thinks the lower classes must be able to curb the ruling classes inside a balanced regime. His skepticism about human nature ends up making him trust the common people more than elites, because in his view the people desire less and are therefore, in a certain sense, more reliable. Consent and popular sovereignty are not decorative ideals for him, they’re part of what keeps a regime from collapsing into domination.

Machiavelli’s treatment of religion and ethics is also more complicated than the caricature. There is a moral seriousnessin him, even when he’s being cold-eyed. He recognizes that struggles for power generate real evil, and that power always brings responsibility, temptation, and corruption. He’s critical of the Catholic Church’s corruption in his time, but he also sees Christianity as historically potent, capable of reshaping society. He reads figures like Moses in a political register, as founders trying to impose order on earth, and he’s willing to say that actions that look evil in isolation can be justified by the larger goods they secure. That’s part of what he means by “effectual truth,” judging actions by their effects rather than their intentions. On that point, another honorable mention is Harvey Mansfield’s work on Machiavelli and effectual truth.

By the end, I came away thinking of the Discourses as one of the great books on statecraft, easily in the same tier as Tocqueville for understanding regimes and the realities of governance. In fact, I almost included Democracy in America on this year’s list, but I’d read it earlier. I mostly returned to it this year with a more appreciative lens. The Discourses is also going to be a cornerstone text when I start building out on 1Dime Academy, because it’s essential for anyone interested in the design of regimes and the art of governance from a realist perspective. Machiavelli studies Rome to learn what actually worked in the Roman Republic, and how those lessons might be applied to Florence, and ultimately to the long-term project of a unified Italy. That patriotic motive matters, because it’s tied to the book’s deepest theme, how to prevent tyranny and keep power constrained by institutions and the people.

2. The Agony of the American Left by Christopher Lasch

I’ve been on a Lasch streak for the last few years. In my Top 10 list for 2023, I included The Culture of Narcissism, and it genuinely changed how I think. It clarified for me that a lot of what I find grating about left-liberal culture is not just a “left problem.” It’s a deeper civilizational problem that’s bound up with capitalism itself. Then for my top 10 books of 2024, I put The Revolt of the Elites on my list, and I still think those two are probably Lasch’s best and most influential books overall.

What I respect about Lasch is that he’s not just a cultural scold. He’s trained in Marxian economics, which gives his critiques a seriousness that most culture-war commentary doesn’t have. He starts on the Left, stays committed to socialist economics, becomes culturally conservative, but never “converts” to "the Right.” Up until his death he remained sharply critical of Reaganite conservatism, neoconservatism, and paleo-libertarianism, just as he remained deeply critical of the Left. That combination, socialist in economics but unsentimental about left-liberal culture, is exactly why he keeps landing for me.

This year I worked through several Lasch books, and I could have chosen between The Minimal Self or Haven in a Heartless World, or The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics. In some ways, The Minimal Self is the more sophisticated elaboration of what The Culture of Narcissism is getting at. But for my audience, and for what I’m trying to diagnose politically right now, The Agony of the American Left felt like the most urgent and direct out of the four to put in the top 1-.

The core of the book is Lasch’s critique of the American Left’s failure to develop a homegrown, grassroots political tradition. He’s skeptical of the Left’s impulse to continually import ideas and postures from abroad, especially from Europe. In practice that meant American Marxists trying to transplant Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, and various Trotskyist projects into a society with totally different conditions and traditions. He also points to the way certain Black nationalist currents flirted with Maoism, or how the broader Left fetishized guerrilla movements and figures like Che Guevara or Ho Chi Minh, often with disastrous results when those fantasies collided with American realities.

Lasch’s argument also punctures the romance people attach to the 1960s. The mainstream Left of that era was, in many ways, compatible with capitalism, and while the counterculture had its own pathologies, the radical Left’s attempts at cultural revolution didn’t end in political success. Movements like SDS and other militant currents didn’t translate into durable mass power. If anything, the period helped set the stage for backlash and reaction. The vibe of revolt is not the same thing as winning power.

The deeper lesson I took from The Agony of the American Left is a trap the Left keeps falling into: relying on students and hyper-politicized subcultures that are loud, energetic, and symbolically dramatic, but not representative of the broader population. That kind of politics can feel radical while remaining socially marginal, which then invites backlash and strengthens the very forces it claims to oppose.

Lasch’s alternative is blunt: successful movements have to be organic and rooted. They have to work with the existing cultures and people of a country instead of treating those cultures as embarrassing obstacles. “Indigenous” here doesn’t mean ethnic, it means homegrown: populist traditions, trade unionism, working-class institutions, and forms of solidarity that actually exist in the society. Lasch is essentially saying that internationalism can become a lazy excuse to ignore local realities. Every country and region has its own tasks. If a Left refuses that, it ends up talking to itself. That’s why I think people should read this book. It’s not just a history of a failed era. It’s a diagnosis of a recurring left failure, and it’s uncomfortably relevant right now.

3. Main Currents of Marxism (Vol. 2 and 3) by Leszek Kołakowski

For this slot I’m kind of cheating, because it’s really two books, volumes two and three of Leszek Kołakowski’s Three Volume Main Currents of Marxism trilogy. He wrote three volumes that basically chronicle the full history of Marxist thought and Marxist movements, and as far as I’m concerned it’s the most scholarly, in-depth work that exists on the subject.

Kołakowski is also interesting because he didn’t come to Marxism as a detached academic. He started as a genuine believer, shaped by the experience of fascism as a Polish man. As an up-and-coming intellectual, Kołakowski lived in communist Poland and initially wanted to work within that system, but he quickly became a dissident because of what he was seeing and criticizing, all while continuing to do his scholarship. He was eventually exiled from communist Poland and moved to England, which is part of why the project feels so serious. Kolakowski didn’t just devote a lifetime to studying Marxism through books alone; he lived it.

I only skimmed parts of volume one, mostly the sections on Marx, Engels, and Hegel. What really mattered for me this year were volumes two and three. Volume two is especially important because it’s centered on Marxism as a movement and tradition that develops after Marx, which is a point I made in my “Marxism Explained” video. Marxism does not become “Marxism” in the familiar sense until after Marx, through figures like Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Bernstein, and the debates and fractures that follow.

This work was hugely useful while I was building that giant, almost three-hour YouTube video explaining every type of Marxism aimed at a mainstream audience and done in a memeified way. I was trying to cover everything without skipping anything essential, and Kołakowski is one of the best guides for that because the chapters are structured around thinkers. You get whole sections devoted to people like Luxemburg and Lukács, which makes it easy to track the tradition’s internal evolution.

I especially liked volume three, The Breakdown. It digs into Soviet Marxism and its currents, and then moves into New Left Marxism and the Frankfurt School. Kołakowski also delivers one of the sharpest critiques of Herbert Marcuse I’ve ever read. It’s a very penetrating critique, exposing the flaws in Western Marxism, not just the more obviously catastrophic Soviet Marxism. Throughout his lifetime, Kolakowski went from being a true believer in Marxist communism to eventually coming to the conclusion that Marxism was “the greatest fantasy of our century.” The reason Kołakowski matters is that he studies Marxism in good faith. But precisely because he understands it from the inside, his conclusions end up revealing the limits of that way of thinking. He’s the rare combination: an indispensable guide to Marxism and one of its sharpest critics.

If you’re a nerd about Marxist history, and you’re trying to seriously understand the tradition at a high level, I absolutely recommend it. If you’re not, you probably don’t need to read thousands of pages. You can safely move on to the next books on this list.

4. Towards a Conservative Left by Jean-Claude Michéa

One of the most important books for me this year was Towards a Conservative Left by Jean-Claude Michéa. This is a collection of Michéa’s major writings, translated into English and organized into a coherent sequence by Michael Behrent, with Michéa’s consent. I actually had Behrent on my podcast to talk about Michéa’s ideas. That episode isn’t out yet only because I pre-recorded a ton of interviews, but it will be coming in a few months.

I’ve also discussed Michéa in a separate podcast conversation with Daniel Tutt titled “The Unity of Liberalism,” because that phrase basically captures the core of what makes Michéa so useful right now. He represents a political orientation that sounds counterintuitive in 2025: culturally conservative, sharply critical of liberalism, and convinced that cultural progressivism is not a break from capitalism but one of capitalism’s most reliable companions. In Michéa’s view, the modern Left often ends up functioning as a superstructure for capitalism’s cultural logic, while the modern Right plays its own parallel role as a superstructure too.

Michéa also leans somewhat libertarian when it comes to state power, and he’s deeply aligned with Orwell, especially Orwell’s “common decency” sensibility. He became a major figure in France partly through his writing on Orwell, and I think he’s one of the clearest articulators of why Orwell still matters politically.

If you want a simple way to understand my political orientation this year, Michéa is one of the best clues. He ended up being one of my favorite thinkers, and he resonates with me in the same way Lasch does. It’s not an accident that people often describe Michéa as the French Christopher Lasch.

5. Citizen Marx by Bruno Leipold

I had to include at least one book on republicanism, given how much I’ve been talking about it this year on the podcast and across different interviews. The one I want to shout out is Citizen Marx by Bruno Leipold. It’s about the republican influence on Marx, and more broadly the political philosophy of Marx and Engels.

This matters because a lot of Marxists have a tendency to flatten politics into economics. Institutions become an afterthought. Everything gets treated as if it’s reducible to class and production, and the political dimension of freedom, law, and constitutional structure gets lost. Leipold’s book is a corrective to that, and it’s useful from two directions at once.

On the one hand, it’s great for non-Marxists who still associate Marx with being inherently undemocratic. Marx, in reality, was intensely committed to democracy. If anything, his vision was so hyper-democratic that it can feel implausible in today’s context. But it is fundamentally different from the one-party state that later traditions treated as “Marxism.” On the other hand, it’s also essential for Marxists who treat democracy as basically irrelevant in Marxist thought, or who read Marx as if politics is just window dressing for economics. This book makes it hard to maintain that view.

At the same time, Citizen Marx works as an introduction to republicanism itself: how it shaped Marx, and how Marx tried to push beyond it. Two honorable mentions fit naturally here. First, Liberty Before Liberalism by Quentin Skinner. Second, Philip Pettit’s Republicanism, which I still think is the cleanest and most accessible explanation of what republican freedom is, and how it differs from liberalism.

Because the point is not just “reject liberalism.” Liberalism has real strengths that people ignore, like constitutional rights and a serious emphasis on liberty. What I’m drawn to is a political philosophy that preserves some of those strengths while dropping the individualism and the thin, limited conception of freedom. That’s where republicanism clicks for me. It’s a tradition that takes democracy and liberty seriously, but understands freedom not merely as freedom from interference, but as freedom as non-domination.

Historically, republicans used that idea to argue against monarchy and slavery. Radical republicans extend it into the economic domain, arguing that domination doesn’t disappear just because you can vote. If you live in a system where you must work or starve, purely political freedom can become hollow for anyone without real economic freedom. That’s the point where republicanism becomes more than a history lesson. It becomes a framework for expanding economic liberty, not just political rights.

I’ve talked about this distinction between republicanism and liberalism in a separate podcast interview, which is worth checking out.

6. The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

This is one of the best books I’ve read on the art of statecraft, and on the delicate balance between order, liberty, tyranny, and anarchy. It’s a big book, nearly 600 pages, packed with political and economic history. But its central idea is simple and powerful: liberty lives in a narrow corridor between two nightmares. On one side is the despotic state. On the other side is a weak state that can’t enforce peace or rights, which means rule by private power, gangs, oligarchs, or local tyrants. Real freedom requires both state capacity and a strong society capable of checking the state.

This is also why I think so many people in left-wing spaces get trapped in a few tired dogmas. There’s the social democratic or democratic socialist posture that uncritically inherits a liberal framework. There’s the tankie posture that shrugs at constitutional rights and democratic legitimacy. And there’s the anarchist posture that becomes maximalist against the state altogether. What this book shows is that the real question is not “state versus no state.” The state is often necessary for freedom, because it creates the stability that prevents society from collapsing into disorder. But without strong institutions and a powerful society capable of constraining it, the state tends to centralize power and slide toward domination. That’s the corridor. The hard work is staying inside it.

Where this really matters is the institutional lesson. You need democratic institutions and counterpowers so that nobody gets a monopoly over the state’s coercive machinery. The point is not utopia. The point is preventing tyranny while avoiding anarchy, and understanding that both extremes destroy liberty in different ways.

The book is so full of case studies that it’s hard to compress into a neat takeaway, but it’s absolutely worth reading. And if you haven’t read the authors’ earlier work, I’d recommend starting there first. Why Nations Fail is the best entry point, because it drills the basic framework into your head: prosperity is not mainly about resources, it’s about institutions and government.

A simple way to put it is this: good government produces prosperity. If you have money but bad government, you don’t get a prosperous society. Zimbabwe is a textbook example of how quickly a country can collapse when institutions rot, regardless of potential.

7. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism by Daniel Bell

One book that really helped me put words to a connection I’ve been circling for a while is The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism by Daniel Bell. Just to avoid confusion, this is not the Daniel Bell who wrote The China Model. This is the mid-20th century Daniel Bell, the author of The End of Ideology.

I read The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism because I wanted to know whether other thinkers had noticed what Lasch noticed, a connection that, once you see it, you can’t unsee. It’s the relationship between progressivism, left-wing social politics, and the acceleration of capitalism. A lot of what we instinctively file under “cultural left” or “social progressivism” can function, in practice, as an ideology that lubricates capitalism, not one that threatens it.

Bell’s core insight is that capitalism doesn’t simply rest on tradition and family for social reproduction. Over time it undermines them. As the economy shifts from a producer society to a consumer society, capitalism increasingly depends on new cultural logics to rationalize its own expansion. Family, tradition, and the thick moral worlds that once shaped people are not just “old fashioned.” They are obstacles to a consumer order built on appetite, mobility, and constant reinvention, so they get steadily eroded.

That’s why I honestly think this is a great book to give to conservatives. If you have a conservative father, especially one who’s socially conservative, this book is a strong gift. But it’s also useful for leftists who uncritically accept all of the developments and narratives of social progressivism without realizing how often that posture ends up serving capital. In a lot of left-wing activism, what actually gets implemented is not economic socialism, but social progressivism, which conveniently appeases the professional-managerial strata while leaving the underlying economic order intact.

And once you recognize the pattern, you start noticing it everywhere. The decline of the family, of third places, of religion, means the moral fabric that formed people’s worldview gets replaced, not by “liberation,” but by the market. The vacuum doesn’t stay empty. It gets filled by consumer identity, commodified desire, and a thin managerial morality that is perfectly compatible with the needs of capital. This is something the Left needs to confront if it wants to be serious about social reproduction and solidarity.

Bell’s own self-description is striking: politically liberal, culturally conservative, and economically socialist. And over time, I’ve come to see that combination, mild cultural conservatism, political liberalism in the constitutional sense, and economic socialism, as more morally and ideologically coherent than people assume. In a weird way, it maps onto a broader truth: capitalism often behaves as economically right-wing and socially left-wing (“fiscally conservative but socially liberal”). So if you’re trying to imagine a post-capitalist politics, it makes sense to me that it would be economically socialist and culturally conservative, not in a reactionary way, but in a communitarian way.

8. We Have Never Been Woke by Musa al-Gharbi

Next up is We Have Never Been Woke by the American sociologist Musa al-Gharbi. I don’t need to spend too long on this one here, because I already did a full interview with Musa on my podcast, 1Dime Radio, where we get into the core arguments of the book. I also draw on some of its insights in my upcoming “Genealogy of Wokeism” essay, which you’ll see soon.

But I’ll put it bluntly: there’s only one book I’ve come across that really captures what wokeism is, what drives it, and where it came from, and this is it. Al-Gharbi offers a materialist, social-scientific theory of wokeism. He’s working in a tradition closer to people like Pierre Bourdieu, grounding his argument in hard data and looking seriously at what happened after roughly 2010, what it means, and what forces are actually moving beneath the surface.

One of the most useful frames in the book is his history of what he calls the four “great awokenings” and the class dynamics that formed after the managerial revolution. His basic point is that modern woke politics is not just an ideology floating above society. It’s rooted in the rise of a new class, what he calls the symbolic capitalists, a layer within the broader professional-managerial world. These are people concentrated in fields like media, entertainment, art, academia, law, and similar institutions, and they end up forming the social core of what we think of as the woke community.

What made the book so important to me is that it reframes the whole phenomenon as a kind of class conflict, not only between the poor and the rich, but between the upper-middle professional strata and other classes in a way that confuses everyone. You get people from the upper-middle class claiming to represent underclasses while speaking a completely different language and often having totally different material incentives. And if you don’t understand that dynamic, you end up shocked by outcomes that, in hindsight, shouldn’t shock you at all.

A lot of leftists struggle to make sense of the working class. They don’t know how to talk to them, and they don’t always even know how to see them. Al-Gharbi’s book is one of the clearest explanations I’ve found for why that disconnect exists and why it matters. This isn’t something you can just shrug off as annoying. It’s a serious social and political problem, and this book is one of the best starting points for understanding it.

9. Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton

This one will change your life.

Chesterton is someone I’d wanted to read for a long time, mostly because I kept running into that line people love to throw at the Left: don’t tear down the fence until you’ve asked why it’s there. And the older I’ve gotten, and the more I’ve watched the limitations of certain left instincts up close, the more I’ve started to understand the wisdom in that. So I finally picked up Orthodoxy, and I immediately understood the hype.

Part of it is the ideas, but honestly, part of it is just the writing. Chesterton is a spectacular writer, truly one of the best. Some of the best lines I’ve ever read are in Orthodoxy. I’ve already cited a few in my recent work, including one of his most famous: “tradition is the democracy of the dead,” which I elaborated on in a recent conversation I did with Theory Underground. Chesterton has that rare ability to express a complex idea with a kind of clarity and elegance that makes you feel like he’s pulling a curtain back.

What also surprised me is that Chesterton isn’t just a cranky old conservative. In fact, in his defense of Christianity and tradition, he explicitly distinguishes himself from political conservatism. He makes the point that being a socially conservative traditionalist doesn’t necessarily mean being politically conservative in the “preserve the status quo” sense. Sometimes you need radical change to preserve what actually matters. If you take Christianity seriously as a philosophy, it’s not a doctrine of elite power. It’s closer to a doctrine of distributing power away from political and economic elites, which means change, sometimes major change. That’s why Chesterton is actually critical of a conservatism that simply defends the existing order.

So when he warns you not to tear down the fence, he’s not saying “never change anything.” He’s saying: be careful about worshiping change as such. Not all progress is good. He’s reacting against a modern progressive reflex that treats everything old as inherently obsolete and everything new as automatically necessary. Chesterton refuses that superstition.

And the truth is, I don’t even want to pretend I can summarize Chesterton. There are some thinkers whose ideas get buried under their own verbosity. Chesterton is the opposite. He articulates his ideas so brilliantly that any paraphrase feels like a downgrade. No summary is going to do justice to his writing, or to the force of his best lines. If you’ve never read him, just pick up Orthodoxy and you’ll see what I mean.

10. Christian Socialism: An Informal History by John C. Cort

This one felt especially timely for me, coming right off the release of my “Christian Case for Socialism” manuscript on Christmas. John C. Cort’s book is long, and what makes it valuable is that it’s less about Cort himself and more about the history, breadth, and diversity of Christian socialist movements across the West.

A lot of people on the Left, if they think about Christianity at all, jump straight to liberation theology. And liberation theology is genuinely fascinating, I even talked about it in my Types of Marxism video. But it was mainly a Latin American phenomenon, and in the United States it really only manifested in a limited way, especially within certain Black communities. What Cort does is widen the frame. He shows that there’s a much broader Christian socialist tradition than the one most modern leftists have in mind.

More broadly, Cort traces Christian socialism far beyond modern party politics. He goes back through earlier forms of Christian social organization, the guild tradition, and a whole spectrum of movements that range from relatively moderate Christian social reform to far more radical experiments, including commune-building and visions that aspired toward stateless, classless societies. There isn’t one single “Christian socialism.” There’s a real tradition with internal diversity, tensions, and competing models of what Christian social transformation is supposed to look like.

He also covers the ways some of these movements came into conflict with the papacy in the 19th and 20th centuries, which is important if you want the story to be honest rather than sentimental.

One of the most interesting parts for me was learning more about Christian socialist movements in Canada. Cort discusses organizations and movements that weren’t always explicitly branded “Christian socialist parties,” but were still deeply shaped by Christian moral commitments. A major example is the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, the CCF, which later evolved into the NDP. The CCF was started by two Baptists in the early 1900s. And then you get Tommy Douglas, who becomes the superstar of the party and, crucially, the first person to implement universal health care in Canada when he was elected Premier of Saskatchewan. That policy proved so popular and successful that it pressured the rest of the country to adopt it.

Canadians, even liberals, love to brag about their health care system, and until fairly recently even Conservatives used to brag about it too. But Cort’s history is a reminder that this wasn’t some automatic expression of Canadian heritage. It was a political battle fought by socialists, and not just socialists, but socialists who were Christians. That’s something worth remembering.

Towards A New Political Synthesis: The Path Not Taken

If there’s a single thread tying a lot of these books together, it’s a political disposition that also describes where I’m at right now. The best label I’ve found for it comes from Kołakowski himself. In one essay, he called himself a “liberal conservative socialist.” Daniel Bell, another author on this list, also described himself as “politically liberal, culturally conservative, economically socialist.” Years ago, in an old Patreon Backroom episode on Christopher Lasch, I used the same basic descriptor for Lasch too. And it’s striking how many of the thinkers I’m drawn to orbit something like this, even when they use different words. What is this political synthesis about?

By liberal, I don’t mean progressive as a lifestyle or a moral posture. I mean liberal in the older political sense: guardrails against concentrated power, a commitment to civil liberties, and an appreciation for constitutional rights and restraints. In a pluralistic society, those protections matter, and they also keep politics from becoming a crusade.

By conservative, I don’t mean reaction or nostalgia. I mean skepticism toward the modern habit of treating progress as automatically good and automatically inevitable. Conservatism, in this sense, is the willingness to ask what older norms and institutions were doing before we discard them. It’s the instinct behind Chesterton’s fence. It’s not “no change.” It’s “not all change is improvement.” Progress is a gas pedal. Conservatism is the brakes.

And by socialist, I mean the economic core: a conviction that society should not be ruled by capital, that extreme concentrations of wealth and power corrupt public life, and that democracy becomes thin when large parts of the population lack meaningful economic independence. I don’t mean abolishing every hierarchy or fantasizing about a frictionless utopia. I mean building a political economy that restrains domination, widens the distribution of power, and makes real self-government possible.

That’s why this reading list feels coherent to me. Lasch, Bell, Kołakowski, Michéa, Chesterton, even Machiavelli to a large extent, all in their own registers are wrestling with variations of the same problem: how to build a society where power is constrained, where moral formation and community aren’t dissolved by the market, and where democracy is more than a slogan. That’s the synthesis I’ve been moving toward, and it’s why these ten books, taken together, feel less like a random list and more like one long argument.

Honorable Mentions (not ranked)

Other books I read this year that deserve a shout-out:

Democracy, Elites, and Class Conflict

• Legitimacy in Liberal Democracies by Benjamin Studebaker

• The Higher Circles by G. William Domhoff

• Selling Social Justice: Why the Ruling Class Loves Antiracism by Jennifer C. Pan

• The Rise and Fall of the Elites by Vilfredo Pareto

• Technique du coup d’État by Curzio Malaparte

Republicanism, liberalism, democracy, statecraft

• Machiavellian Democracy by John P. McCormick

• Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth by Harvey C. Mansfield

• Republicanism by Philip Pettit

• Liberty Before Liberalism by Quentin Skinner

• Why Bother with Elections? by Adam Przeworski

• Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville by Alan S. Kahan

Israel, Zionism, and modern Jewish history debates

• 1949: The First Israelis by Tom Segev

• The Founding Myths of Israel by Zeev Sternhell

• The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand

Marxism and The History of Communism

• The Origin of the Communist Autocracy by Leonard Schapiro

• 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder by Arthur Herman

• The True Believer by Eric Hoffer

• Marxism and Christianity Alasdair MacIntyre

Political economy

• Debunking Economics by Steve Keen

• Why We’re Getting Poorer: A Realist’s Guide to the Economy and How We Can Fix It by Cahal Moran

• The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

Culture, belief, ideology, modernity

• The Minimal Self by Christopher Lasch

• Haven in a Heartless World by Christopher Lasch

• The True and Only Heaven by Christopher Lasch

• Left Is Not Woke by Susan Neiman

• The Darkest Timeline by Bram E. Gieben

• Suicide of the West by James Burnham

China

• The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy by Daniel A. Bell

• On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism is Shaping China and the World by Kevin Rudd

• The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism by Keyu Jin

Sex, Gender, and Social Issues

• Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality by Gail Dines

• The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry

• Marriage Markets: How Inequality is Remaking the American Family by June Carbone and Naomi Cahn

• Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson

• The Genetic Lottery by Kathryn Paige Harden

North American politics and history

• Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men by Eric Foner

• Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution by James M. McPherson

• The Founding of New Societies by Louis Hartz

Other Game Changers that I don’t know how to categorize

• Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism by Touré F. Reed

• The Big Shift by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson

• Migration as Economic Imperialism by Immanuel Ness