The best things I read, 2018–2021
As the standard understanding goes, an undergraduate degree is for broadening your horizons (finding new ways of thinking and exploring new ideas), and a postgraduate degree is for narrowing those horizons again (focussing in on a field to specialise in). And so, in the year I finished my undergraduate degree and just as I start a postgraduate degree, I have been looking back at how my horizons have been broadened over the last three years.
I have two reasons for doing this, beyond pure narcissism. The first reason is to create a repository for my book recommendations. I find myself recommending these works incredibly often. Typically, this is in response to people asking where I got a particular argument or set of ideas: this will now serve as the masterpost for responding to these kinds of questions. But more importantly, I have a purely personal reason: I want to be able to track my own intellectual progress, and mark out where I am in a way that allows me to look back on it in a few years and update where I’ve got to.
I’ll be picking ten books and ten shorter-form pieces. Some of these picks will be famous, some slightly less so (and obviously it will depend on the audience). Most are nonfiction, though just because I’ve read more nonfiction and not out of any intrinsic preference; the fact that I studied philosophy will probably be fairly obvious from my choices, although hopefully the combination of philosophical and non-philosophical texts I pick will be sufficiently weird as to be interesting. I’ve set three Captain Barbarossa–style guidelines for myself, that I will try to stick by but with no promises.
Guideline 1: books I reread are only allowed if the rereading changed my perspective
I am tempted to include Paul’s epistle to the Romans on this list, which I read many times throughout my undergraduate degree and which is both a massive influence and a personal favourite. But I read it for the first time before 2018, and the subsequent rereadings have not massively changed how I feel about the text. Contrast this with Hobbes’ Leviathan, which is not on the list but which I was tempted to include: while I first read it in secondary school, the experience of reading it then and the experience the last time I read it were radically different, because I had a new appreciation of Hobbes’ intellectual project, his historical context, and the impact of his ideas. Including a book like Leviathan on the list actually would make sense, because it would track real intellectual development during my degree. Not so with Romans.
Guideline 2: no ladders
Philosophers will be familiar with this metaphor: Ludwig Wittgenstein famously described his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as a ladder that the reader must throw away after he has climbed up it. One of the most fantastic experiences is reading something that opens your eyes to a whole new set of ideas, a new of thinking, feeling, or seeing the world. But very often, we don’t revisit these: in Wittgenstein’s phrase, they’re ladders, that allow us to see from a new perspective but which we can discard once we’re there. (Think of a brief throwaway line that changed the way you see an issue; hardly likely to be counted as one of the best things you read, but still important.)
While these don’t usefully stand as a marker of where my thinking has got to, I will give a few of them an honourable mention: some important ladders for me during the last three years include Duncan Bell’s ‘What Is Liberalism?’, Benjamin Constant’s ‘The Liberty of the Ancients Compared With that of the Moderns’, Daniel Dennett’s ‘Reflections on Free Will’, Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, Raymond Geuss’ History and Illusion in Politics, Amia Srinivasan’s ‘Genealogy, Epistemology and Worldmaking’, and many things written by the Effective Altruist movement.
Guideline 3: one work per author
I bend this one, as you will see, but it’s very clear to me that certain authors have had a disproportionate influence on the development of my thought, and if I was willy-nilly about allowing the same author to appear more than once, this list couldn’t work to record my intellectual journey at all: it would just be a Bernard Williams bibliography. More diversity is good, so I am including as large a range of authors as I can.
Books
Ta-Nehisi Coates – We Were Eight Years in Power
In mid-2020, in the brief period after lots of people had started recommending books to read to understand racism but before lots of other people began attacking such “anti-racist reading lists”, Coates’ Between the World and Me came to be read by a large audience who were new to his work. I understand why Between the World was recommended so much—it’s a very personal and literary work that wears its connections to the tradition of black American writing on its sleeve, and it is certainly a much better book than a lot of the other ones that got recommended (cf. White Fragility)—but for anyone interested in understanding the role of race in the US and specifically in American politics, I think We Were Eight Years in Power is a much better choice.
If you want to understand Trump, for example, I still know of no better account than that given in the introduction and epilogue to this book. The eight chapters that come between these two, in turn, are mostly taken from articles Coates contributed to the Atlantic during Obama’s presidency, but combined with ‘notes’ written in 2017 reflecting on Coates’ political and intellectual journey. Perhaps uniquely among liberal commentators on the Obama presidency, Coates’ ideas were not undermined by what came next; on the contrary, they were only strengthened, as reading this book as a whole demonstrates.
Coates’ best work for the Atlantic was written before I was old enough to appreciate it, but I wish I had been there for his readalong of Hobbes’ Leviathan (what other commentator could possibly have proposed something like that?), and I’m incomparably glad I still have access to beautiful posts like ‘Virginia’, ‘The Myth of Western Civilization’, and ‘These Are the Last Days of U. S. Grant’. We Were Eight Years in Power is incredibly valuable in the first instance just as a Ta-Nehisi Coates greatest hits collection. That it also changed my views of American politics completely is, in a certain sense, a bonus.
Michel Foucault – The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge
It’s magnificent. I really can’t say much more than that about this book, because I do not fully understand it. Then again, I don’t think most other people who have read it understand it, and I would encourage anyone who has been turned off Foucault to think about adopting the attitude: “love Foucault, hate Foucaultians.” Foucault himself embraced intellectual ‘masks’, and approached his work with a playful lack of commitment that has annoyed historians but makes it possible to appreciate his output even if you struggle to really grasp what he’s trying to do.
If I can tentatively offer a (deliberately vague) summary, I think this book is about how we think about ourselves and others. The example of sex—and Foucault’s biting mockery of the idea that there exists some fundamental truth about our own sexuality that, if we could only discover it, would unlock new frontiers of pleasure for us—is used to really drive home that our thinking about ourselves is often less reflective of any deep truth about our character or self than of the demands of others and of society as a whole.
But there’s no way to capture the magnificence of this book with such a (necessarily incomplete) summary. You probably have heard of The History of Sexuality already, so take this as less a recommendation or review than as a prompt to read it if you haven’t already. I don’t think you’ll regret it.
Henry George – Progress and Poverty1
George, in Isaiah Berlin’s terminology, is a hedgehog rather than a fox: he knows one big thing, and that is that the rent is too damn high. Progress and Poverty’s central contention is that landlords siphon wealth from the rest of the economy and create “misery amidst plenty”, simply by staking a claim to land that they was there before them and that has a value that represents the opportunities created by the entire community. The culprit, at root, is private property in land itself. This might make George sound like a radical, and radicals have at times embraced his work; but his extraordinary set of solutions have also endeared him to many libertarians. In a way, both groups have a right to claim his legacy.
As I’ve learned more about George’s historical context and about our current economic situation, my admiration for this book has shifted in focus but has never diminished. I now appreciate much more the variety of background influences that fed into this work. But not only was George a master synthesiser of these sources, he also had a crucial insight: land and landlordism are just as important in the industrialised city as in the pre-industrial countryside, and that the same rules apply in both cases. My thinking about Western economies has undergone some major shifts since 2018 (see below), and George’s big book has guided it every step of the way.
István Hont – Jealousy of Trade
A long book, not only in pages (to steal a famous description of a different book), Jealousy of Trade is a pretty technical work of history that requires both patience and imagination from its readers in order to get the most out of it. But if you can sit with it, and have the imaginative capacity and knowledge to make the connections that the book leaves implicit, you will be rewarded in spades.
The heart of Jealousy of Trade is the 150-page ‘introduction’, a narrative of the development of early modern political thought that culminates in David Hume and Adam Smith’s famous declaration that it was commerce, not Renaissance or Whiggish ideology, that had created European liberty. Hont is adept at tracing how cut-throat international economic competition both shaped and was shaped by political ideas that have come to dominate the modern world; reading Jealousy of Trade, you can really feel the truth of Hont’s conclusion that “liberalism can never be understood simply in political and moral terms”.
The connections between the essays that follow the introduction are not obvious, but even taken individually they are wonderful demonstrations of Hont’s approach to the history of political thought; and together with the introduction, they form a work that ranges over the entire early modern period and can entirely transform the way you think about the ideas we have inherited from it.
Friedrich Nietzsche – On the Genealogy of Morality
The philosopher Hilary Putnam had a line about reading the great thinkers of the past: “As I get smarter, Kant, Aristotle, etc. all get smarter as well.” This description is a good first approximation of my relationship with Nietzsche, but I think Sahanika Ratnayake put it much better (in conversation): the first time you read Nietzsche you think you get it and that you knew much of it already, only to discover when you return that he’s been laughing at you the whole time.
Nietzsche’s books don’t just get smarter as you return to them: they get more biting and destructive, as you realise that what you’re reading is not just reading a work of philosophy but is rather a full-blown attack on everything you hold sacred. Nietzsche knows the workings of your mind better than you yourself know them; he is smarter and more insightful and better at drawing connections; and he doesn’t just think you’re wrong—he thinks you’re pathetic.
I’m not sure if it anyone could completely absorb Nietzsche’s thinking—there’s every chance that his worldview is just too alien to us for that to even be possible—but at the very least, reading the Genealogy will force you to think incredibly deeply about what you care about, give you new insights and concepts for thinking about the human mind and human values, and beyond anything else it’s just fabulously well-written. If you haven’t read it yet, do. If you have, read it again. He’s still laughing.
Judea Pearl – Causality
In the late eighteenth century, David Hume made a profound philosophical discovery: he identified the serious problem that cause and effect posed for both philosophy and science. This problem has been with us for centuries; but I would say, with no hyperbole, that Judea Pearl has now solved it.
Causality unites disparate philosophical theories (from counterfactual to regularity) and scientific methods (from epidemiological to econometric) into a beautifully unified framework, that allows for the generation of new insights and concepts and which can be integrated into nearly any scientific research paradigm you want. Philosophers will find herein a way to recast the research programme associated with causation, to leave behind dead ends and move onto new, more fruitful areas of research. And scientists will find solutions to all the conceptual and methodological problems created for their work by causation; the empirical questions remain difficult, but at least now you know what to look for.
This is an immensely rare occurrence: we can now declare a philosophical problem to have been solved. Soon, every time causation is mentioned you will want to weep that so few people have heard the good news.
Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Every year, this old book finds new admirers, and not for no reason. Really, it’s at least three books in one. On the surface level, it’s a wealth of insight into the human mind, a great book of moral psychology avant la lettre—inside you will find a treasure-trove of observations about and explanations for human behaviour that still retain their power.
More recent readers have noticed a second level: this is a work of moral philosophy as systematic and subtle as those written by Smith’s contemporaries Hume and Kant. Here, you’ll find ideas about justice and punishment that still have the possibility to transform our thinking today; views on self-judgment and self-evaluation that feel more alive than much contemporary writing on the subject; and an account of the relationship between morality and ‘sympathy’ that moves the latter concept towards what we today would call ‘empathy’, and feels almost downright modern.
And third and finally, this is the same Adam Smith who wrote The Wealth of Nations, and the same concerns that motivated that book are present in The Theory of Moral Sentiments too. The question of how commercial capitalism (as we would now call it) works, and of how its immense power affects the things we care about in morality and politics, are always bubbling away under the surface in Smith’s book, and his answers to these questions are still some of the most subtle and worth reading ever provided.
If any or all of these three topics sound interesting to you, you should buy The Theory of Moral Sentiments: it’s still one of best, if not the best, book written about them.
Max Weber – The Vocation Lectures
An observant reader (here I engage in a little literary fiction—nobody is actually going to observantly read this post) may have noticed a unifying theme among some of the works I’ve mentioned, especially Nietzsche, Foucault, Anscombe (below), and—perhaps surprisingly—Coates. This is a growing sense of opposition to my teenage cringing at New Atheism, and an increasing conviction that atheism is an important standpoint with substantive moral content, not just a kind of default position, and that modern ethics must grapple with the implications of Western secularisation.
The Vocation Lectures are perhaps the most direct, most insightful, and most honest attempt at the kind of atheist ethics that I think needs to be done (although see also Shame and Necessity below): reading through these lectures, it is impossible to avoid the visceral sense of a man trying to make sense of the problem of living, in the wake of the “disenchantment” that has transformed his world.
If, as I claimed above, it’s not possible for any one person to fully absorb Nietzsche’s thinking, Weber probably came closer than anyone else ever will; and he was also an absurdly insightful analyst of religion, politics, and society in his own right. His concluding imperative, that “each person finds and obeys the daemon that holds the threads of his life”, does not take the form of a universally applicable principle; but perhaps it couldn’t, and that is exactly the struggle we atheists must face.
Bernard Williams – Shame and Necessity
It was tough to pick just one Williams book: nearly all of them have significantly shaped my thinking inside of philosophy and my approach to life outside of it. (For a general audience, I might instead recommend his Essays and Reviews 1959–2002 as a gentler introduction to Williams’ writing.) But Shame and Necessity has everything that made his work transformative for me, and that justifies his status as a crucially important thinker:
For those who are new to Williams’ attack on modern morality, it’s on full display here.
For those who think of him primarily as a critical and negative thinker, this book clearly shows the transformative and positive elements of his philosophy.
For those interested in his understanding of modernity, his subtle contrasts between modern thought and ancient Greek ideas are informative.
And for those who want to learn more about Williams’ ideal of a more humanistic form of ethics, which moves closer towards literature and history, Shame and Necessity is a wonderful example of how to put it into practice.
If you care about free will, the relationship between philosophy and literature, human agency, fate, ancient philosophy, or ethics of any kind, Shame and Necessity won’t be able to simply give you the answers you want. But better than that, it has the ability to critique and shift your perspective so that you can begin to ask different questions. Williams was one of the 20th century’s greatest philosophers, and here he’s at the peak of his powers.
Virginia Woolf – Orlando
My encounter with Orlando is maybe the purest example of what the student experience is supposed to be. In my first year, I went to an am-dram adaptation for stage that I loved. This was closely followed by a museum exhibition inspired by Woolf’s work; while I have forgotten most of the artworks on display, I have never forgotten the quote from Orlando that had been printed on one wall and that I stared at, blown away. (For those who know the book, it was from Orlando’s drive home along the Old Kent Road.) So I bought it, I read it, and I adored it.
Orlando is sometimes taken to be less worthy of serious consideration than the rest of Woolf’s oeuvre, and almost nobody thinks it is her best novel. In my less charitable moments, I think this is pure and simple homophobia; but being more charitable, I can see why its more playful nature and its relative approachability might prejudice fans of ‘serious’ literature. But it is precisely its playfulness—Woolf’s incredible play with literary form, with time, with sex, and with the self—that makes it a great work, more than worthy of your time. And ultimately, the value of fun cannot and should not be ignored: this book is just fun, and you should read it.
Essays, articles, chapters, and blog posts
Scott Alexander – ‘I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup’
Like is the case with Bernard Williams, if I weren’t trying to stick to one work per author this list would be about 50% Scott Alexander; a fellow blogger once wrote that “for SSC [Alexander’s original blog] to be permanently deleted would be an intellectual loss on the scale of, let’s say, John Stuart Mill or Mark Twain burning their collected works”, and I have over time come to believe that this is probably accurate. But ‘Except The Outgroup’ was my first encounter, and it still holds a special place in my heart as one of the best things I’ve ever seen written about toleration, polarisation, and American politics. The description of in-group dynamics given here is not only immediately intuitive, but allowed me to begin thinking with these ideas across a much broader set of contexts.
G. E. M. Anscombe – ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’
To call this “the Catholic counterpart to Nietzsche’s Genealogy” is to radically undersell it along multiple dimensions at once, but for those who don’t know it that description might pique your interest enough to get past the boring and undescriptive title and read the intellectual tour de force underneath. Really, this is less about what’s wrong with modern moral philosophy than with what’s wrong with modern morality generally: what we lost with secularisation, and what we still haven’t figured out about its consequences. Informed readers have surmised that Anscombe’s intention was to convince her audience to try to roll back secularisation; but even for those of us who think this task is both hopeless and undesirable, there is an immense amount of value here.
Sam Bowman, John Myers, and Ben Southwood – ‘The housing theory of everything’
This one is a bit of a cheat, as I only read it a few weeks ago. But it’s on the list because I think it distills the end-result of some ideas that I (and many others) have been thinking through in the last few years. (See also The Economist – ‘Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems’, or my own rough-and-ready attempt to write up some of my thoughts in ‘Don’t hate the NIMBY player, hate the homeownership game’.) More than the YIMBY idea that supply restrictions on housing are the cause of Western housing crises—which really should be uncontroversial by now—the claim is that these restrictions are the underlying cause of low growth, rising inequality, poorer quality of life, rising costs, and all the other depressing phenomena that commentators across the political spectrum have been noticing more and more. Being turned onto this housing-first line of thinking may have been the biggest evolution in my ideas about first-order politics and economics since 2018 (helped along by reading Henry George, above); Bowman, Myers, and Southwood do an admirable job of arguing the case.
G. A. Cohen – ‘Back to Socialist Basics’ and Bernard Williams – ‘Forward to Basics’2
This entry is doubly cheating: first, it’s actually two essays, and second, one is by an author who’s already appeared on my list. But I include these because I think that one could become immediately more insightful than everything that has been written about the Labour Party since 2015 simply by reading them. The debate Cohen and Williams are having (explicitly over philosophy, implicitly over New Labour) is interesting on its face, but also clearly sets out the problems that Labour has been facing since the 1970s; Williams’ endorsement of Blair may have delayed the reckoning by a few years, but the problems that the pair fought over still remain. Even if you don’t care much about the Labour Party, if you are an imaginative enough reader you can find in these essays a transformation of tired questions about the relationship between pragmatism and principles into a new way of interpreting party politics more broadly.
Cora Diamond – ‘The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy’
This essay is about … a Ted Hughes poem? Stanley Cavell? J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals? Philosophy itself? I’m not sure if asking what it is ‘about’ is helpful; there’s too much going on here to distill it into even a couple of lines. But like the Foucault book mentioned above—and this is maybe the only thing these two works share—you can appreciate Diamond’s paper even if fully grasping what’s going on in it takes time. I’ve relied on ‘The Difficulty of Reality’ when thinking about topics as disparate as the nature of morality, philosophical scepticism, and animal ethics; I highly recommend it to anyone willing to take a chance on philosophy that is a little bit weird or outside the mainstream.
Paul Dixon – ‘In Defence of Politics’
To be quite honest, my thinking about Irish and Northern Irish politics has hardly evolved at all since 2018, since I was lucky enough to have already had a set of views that could accommodate all the evidence that was thrown at them. (I describe this as ‘luck’ intentionally: I don’t think I was a political genius at 18, I just think I stumbled across a perspective that has held up pretty well in the years since.) But if I didn’t include something about Northern Ireland, it would misrepresent the extent to which I’ve been engaging with the politics of my home, which has been quite a lot. I could have chosen Trimble’s ‘Misunderstanding Ulster’, but while it’s a wonderful primary source I think Dixon’s article is probably the better pick: it gave me a great framework for thinking about responses to the NI peace process, and I return to it regularly.
Friedrich Hayek – ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’
If you’ve read it, you know why I’ve included it. If you haven’t, then you should read it just in order to have the experience—a completely unique experience—of feeling a sense of mystical wonder at a description of a tin shortage. Hayek has offered us more than just some new ideas about human knowledge and society; he provides a brand new way of experiencing the world. Wallace Shawn described his experience of reading Das Kapital as follows: “For two days I could see the fetishism of commodities everywhere around me. It was a strange feeling. Then on the third day I lost it, it was gone, I couldn't see it anymore.” Commodity fetishism is not something I care much about, but I had a similar experience with this essay: I could see knowledge everywhere around me, in shops and at work and in restaurants and at home, for only a few days before I lost it. But the experience was immeasurably valuable, and has changed my thinking for good.
Huw Price – ‘Truth as Convenient Friction’
Truth was always an area of philosophy I had no interest in: the analytic stuff seemed sterile, boring, and full of fake rigour wrapped up in surface-level connections to human concerns (paradigmatically, even parodically, analytic), while the continental stuff seemed self-indulgent, obtuse, and full of fake depth wrapped up in surface-level connections to human concerns (paradigmatically, even parodically, continental). Price’s essay made me interested. He begins from the minimalist theory of truth, which argues that truth does not have any metaphysical importance but is just a word we use to repeat ourselves—“X is true” just means X. Price agrees, but rather than taking this to exhaust the interesting questions, he shifts his focus: rather than asking about the meaning of the concept ‘truth’, we should think about the norms we associate with truth. And whether you agree with the (pragmatist) conclusions he reaches, this framework can open your eyes to a new way of thinking about maybe the oldest philosophical problem.
P. Kyle Stanford – ‘Pyrrhic Victories for Scientific Realism’
This article fucking depressed me. I, like (I would guess) many of you, want to be a scientific realist: that is, I want to believe that science actually gives us knowledge about the world, allows us to understand what the world is actually like. Really, I think this is the foundation of the scientific worldview. And of the many things I have read about science, Stanford’s article is the first that seriously threw this very foundational idea into question. He builds on the standard argument from theory change, and shows that great scientists in the past had no idea what the key parts of their theory were: while scientific progress typically preserves earlier theories in part, we can never know which parts will be preserved and so can never actually know which bits of science are accurate. (For example: Maxwell was completely convinced that his equations simply could not make coherent sense without a mechanical aether; he simply had no idea about which parts of his theory described the world more or less accurately, which were central and which were likely to be replaced.) Whether or not a successful counterargument is available, this is a subtle and detailed argument that cast a fundamental assumption of mine into doubt. That is philosophy at its best.
Rajesh Venugopal – ‘Neoliberalism as concept’
When I first read this, I wanted to shout: “Where has this been all my life?” For years, I had felt a deep discomfort with the word ‘neoliberalism’, both when used pejoratively and (more recently) as a badge of honour. But I struggled to say what my problem with the term was, and I had many conversations which just amounted to me repeating “I don’t really buy that claim” over and over without much progress. But now, when I want to criticise the use of the term, I can simply gesture towards this article, and Venugopal’s careful, incisive, and rigourous demonstration that it is nothing more than “a problematic rhetorical device that bundles together a proliferation of eclectic and contradictory concepts”. If you’re still of the mindset that the word usefully describes anything, read this article and be freed from a paradigm that should have died decades ago.
It is unfortunately difficult to find a high-quality edition of Progress and Poverty; I have not provided an Amazon link because the editions for sale seemed pretty uniformly poor. I would recommend checking your library, or else looking for an ebook or pdf version.
The latter essay is, as far as I am aware, only available in the IPPR publication Equality (edited by Jane Franklin), and I am not sure if it is still in print. Again, I would recommend checking your library, or else looking for an ebook or pdf version.