Ten Books That Will Change The Way You Think

As an academic in addition to being a writer, one of my greatest pleasures is sharing books that I’ve found interesting with others. Here, I want to share ten of those with you. I don’t follow any one theme or genre, but here are some works that have been influential in how I see the world today.

Ellsberg was one of the folks who worked with the RAND Corporation and the Department of Defense to plan for the possibility of an all-out nuclear war. This book is an autobiographical account of that work.

The book walks through some of the more harrowing incidents in human history in minute detail, and it has sent chills down my spine for some time. Even if you’re not a pacifist, the work will have you second-guessing whether or not any government should have nuclear weapons in the first place.

Aristotle picks up one of the biggest problems of Plato: if we have to have perfect people to make society run in an orderly fashion, how do we ever get there, or can we get there at all?

In this work, Aristotle comes up with his solution, which seeks the constant moral improvement of people and communities to attempt to make the world better. Some of his specific commentaries on how human beings out to judge one another make this a work that I think is as relevant now as when it was published first in ancient Athens, about 2500 years ago.

Democracy is a difficult thing to get right. After seeing the world nearly rip itself apart in the Second World War, Rawls spent the rest of his days trying to figure out how to bring about a just and stable political order.

This work focuses on his notions of justice, namely an attempt to define principles of fairness that would be tolerable to a wide segment of the population and encourage people to make society a fairer place in which we would all want to actually live. It’s tough reading at times, but really powerful stuff if you’re willing to put in the time.

This one is more of a pamphlet but is well worth your time. Written by one of the Founding Fathers, Paine, in this work outlines his idea for the kind of America he would want to live in once they settle the small matter of the revolution.

For Paine, like many of the founders, his vision for America was one where everyone had a fair chance to make the life that they wanted to live. This would include some proposals that would seem radical today, such as giving young people without an inheritance a piece of land upon which to start their own homesteads. Although it’s coming up on 300 years old, this piece has aged like fine wine in an age of growing inequality in the US.

It seems to be nearly impossible for a nation-state to win an asymmetrical war against guerrilla forces and tactics. Small, relatively unorganized forces have beaten: Rome, Russia, France, China, Japan, the UK, and more. So, why is that? And why on earth do nations keep picking fights they can’t win?

Boot tries to answer those questions in his historically rich volume, which certainly is worth a read now, in the wake of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. If we’re going to learn how to win the next war, that means learning from the past. We might just

It might be an odd choice for this site, but give Plato a chance here. In this dialogue, which is more than occasionally hilarious, he tries to work out what love actually is. And, in so doing, he makes some of his best commentary on how to treat people.

For real Platonic Love, there’s a lot more to the story than the rejection of the primacy of physical love, and a lot about the development of people as full thinking, moral beings. That makes this short book one of my favorites

It’s really important in my field, political theory, to get perspectives different from our own. That’s why I go to Fanon.

Many Americans have a tendency of seeing the projects of empires as nations trying to remake the world over in their own image, and we frame the conflicts in places like Africa in those terms. Fanon challenges our notions and invites us to see the colonial enterprise from a widely different perspective that will likely challenge much of what you think you know. That makes this a winner.

I am not a man of faith. With that said, this is the work that has informed several billion people’s worldviews for about 2,000 years, starting and ending wars, empires, and a lot of thinking in between.

With that said, whether or not you’re a person of faith if you’re a thinking person in the 21st century who cares about how people think, getting your own reading and understanding of this foundational work is, I think, a must.

Foucault is an intellectual giant who takes years to understand, and this work is part of his major historical studies that go on to inform his philosophies. In it, he seeks to make a history of what is, and is not, normal in the modern age. In so doing, we might get a better understanding of how modern power works, and who it works for.

When this came out, it shook the foundations of the sciences, especially social sciences. Kuhn outlines the way that knowledge has been contested over time, and makes us question if we ever truly know anything. Instead, he proposes a search for better mistakes and science that learns to learn better.

These ten books are some of the ones that I most often recommend to students. I hope that you get some awesome value from them as well. If you have some that you want to suggest, I do always keep an eye on the comments sections he