Twenty-three short chapters on why Rome grew and why it fell, written in 1734 by a judge who thought a country's dissensions were a sign of life.
Political philosophy
Books that argue about how power should be arranged — who holds it, what stops them, and what happens to a country when nothing does.
Political philosophy asks a small set of questions and keeps asking them. Who is entitled to give orders. What makes an order worth obeying. What a person may keep for themselves whatever the government wants. How a country stops the people running it from running it for themselves. The books on this shelf answer those questions by argument rather than by telling a story.
The method varies more than the subject. Montesquieu's Considerations on the Romans takes one country over two thousand years and asks what made it strong and what killed it. His Spirit of the Laws sets the laws of dozens of societies beside each other and looks for the causes — climate, terrain, trade, religion, and the character a nation picks up from all of them together. Both books reason from cases, which is why they read more like history than like philosophy, and why readers who dislike abstraction can get through them.
The Spirit of the Laws is also the place to see what a book of this kind can do to the world outside it. Its Book XI argues that a state's power to make laws, its power to carry them out and its power to judge must sit in different hands. The men who wrote the United States Constitution took the argument seriously enough to argue with it in public: James Madison opened Federalist 47 by calling Montesquieu the oracle always consulted on the subject, and then spent the essay explaining what he thought Montesquieu had actually meant.
The political philosophy we recommend
Twenty years of comparing the laws of every country Montesquieu could find out about, and the Book XI argument that split power three ways in the United States Constitution.
George Breitman's second Malcolm X collection, named after the motto he announced in Harlem in June 1964. The book prints his meeting in Paris that November and his statement on being barred from France.
The speeches of Malcolm X's last year, gathered by George Breitman and published within months of the assassination. "The Ballot or the Bullet" is here, and so is his answer to a question in Paris.
Six speeches and interviews, first printed in 1989, ending with the talk Malcolm X gave in Rochester five days before he was killed. He opened it with the week France turned him away.
Four speeches from Malcolm X's years as a minister of the Nation of Islam, edited by the man who introduced him at the Audubon Ballroom on the day he was killed.
Frederick Douglass's Independence Day speech of 1852: praise for the men who signed the Declaration, then a charge that the country had betrayed it.
Twenty-four letters praising English Quakers, merchants, scientists and playwrights. Paris answered by burning the book in the courtyard of its high court.
Dante's case, in Latin prose, that the world needs one emperor and that the pope has no power to make him.
Rousseau's essay on how people who were born roughly equal ended up rich and poor, masters and servants, starting with the first man to fence off a field.
Rousseau raises an imaginary boy from birth to marriage, by nature instead of books, and the Parlement de Paris orders the result burned.
Rousseau's short book on when anyone has the right to rule, which opens with people born free and everywhere in chains.
Other styles on the shelf
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