Reading List

“The Great Books Of The Aristocracy”

There have been a number of ‘Great Books’ lists, in an effort to develop a western, or even world canon¹ . But these lists share a desire for freedom, and at some point, democracy, and finally, for communism. They are sentimental and inarticulate political propaganda and little more than efforts to seize political power, or seize assets by promoting redistribution, collectivism and democracy, using derivatives of christian arguments. Despite the fact that the rise of the west had little to do with these values, and everything to do with the more formal institutions that these others opposed.

The ruling classes under the great monarchies never produced a canon of it’s own: a collection of works whose purpose is politically scientific and rational. The rulers simply did their job with pragmatism and familial wisdom. But a causally rich, fully articulated analysis of the western social and political system has been unavailable until recently. Under this “Machiavellian” (i.e.: Scientific) analysis, a large number of these books can be eliminated, and others of greater value added.

This list is my attempt to cover the body of ‘scientific’ political thought: writing that is based upon the record of what humans actually do, rather than what we fantasize that they should do. I’ve tried to select books that the inquiring reader can wade through, and avoided the most abstract texts wherever possible. (The distraction of Bohm Bahwerk for example.) And I have tried to provide selections from a breadth of fields which serves to prevent the errors inherent in selective specialization. I believe that practical wisdom is the result of accumulated general knowledge and the synthesis of common principles regardless of their field of origin, not the result of specialization.

IF YOU HAD TO PICK ONE RECENT BOOK TO READ
Jonathan Haidt: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

IF YOU HAD TO PICK 5 RECENT BOOKS

1. Jonathan Haidt: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
2. Karen Armstrong: The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions
3. Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson: Why Nations Fail The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
4. Nial Ferguson: Civilization The West and the Rest
5. Gregory Cochran: The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution

IF YOU WANT TO READ THE PROPERTARIANS

• Mises: Human Action (Jewish Middle Class classical liberalism)
• Hayek: The Constitution Of Liberty. “The Use of Knowledge in Society”. Individualism and Economic Order. (Christian Aristocratic classical liberalism)
• Rothbard: Man Economy And State. The Ethics Of Liberty. “The Libertarian Manifesto”. (Jewish Anarchism)
• Hoppe: “A Theory of Socialism & Capitalism”. Democracy The God That Failed. The Economics and Ethics Of Private Property. (German Nationalism)
• Doolittle: “Propertarianism”. “A Manifesto For Conservatives”. (Anglo Aristocratic Empiricism)

The Reading List Of The Aristocracy

POLITICS
Despite the volume of works produced on political theory, very few works are worthy of the reader’s attention. Most are appeals for a change in human nature, rather than the record of the observations of it, and the prescriptive advice that can be drawn from that understanding. These books represent a path through intellectual history whose purpose is to understand what men actually do, and how we may govern our economic order.

Aristotle: Ethics, Politics
Machiavelli: The Prince, Discourses
Burke: Reflections On The Revolution In France
Hamilton: The Federalist Papers
Bastiat: The Law
Sorel: Reflections On Violence
Mosca: Ruling Class
Michels: Political Parties
Burnham: The Machiavellians
Hayek: The Road To Serfdom, The Constitution Of Liberty
Jonathan Haidt: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY
David Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature, Essays Moral and Political, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Locke: Two Treatise on Government
Adam Smith: The Theory of Moral Sentiments, The Wealth of Nations
Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
Weber: Economy And Society, Essays in Sociology
Pareto: Mind And Society
Hayek: Individualism And Economic Order
Veblen: The Theory of the Leisure Class
Schumpeter: Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
Durkhiem: Division Of Labor In Society
Hoppe: The Economics And Ethics Of Private Property, Democracy The God That Failed
Jonathan Haidt: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

HISTORICAL ANALYSIS AND CRITICISM
Durant: Lessons Of History
Toynbee: A Study Of History
Gibbon: The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire
Braudel: A History of Civilizations
Spengler: The Death Of the West
Yockey: The enemy Of Europe, The Enemy Of Our Enemies, Imperium
Burnham: Suicide Of The West
Buchannan: The Decline Of The West
Carrol: The Evolution Of Civilizations
McNeil: The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community
McNeil: Plagues and Peoples
Banfield: The Unheavenly City
Diamond: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Pomeranz: The Great Divergence (Anything he has written.)
Strauss and Howe: Generations, The Fourth Turning
Armstrong: The Great Transformation
Huntington: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
Mokyr: The Gifts Of Athena, The Lever Of Riches (Anything he has written)
Niall Ferguson: (Everything he has written)
Murray: Human Accomplishment
Axelrod: The Evolution Of Cooperation
Keegan: A History Of Warfare (Anything he has written.)
Sun Tzu: The Art Of War
Liddell-Hart: Strategy
Victor Davis Hanson’s “The Other Greeks” (Anything he has written)

INEQUALITY AND ANTHROPOLOGY
Henry: In Defense Of Elitism
Gobineau; The Inequality of Human Races
Levin: Why Race Matters
Cavalli-Svorza; The Great Human Diasporas
Kotkin: Tribes
Diamond: The Third Chimpanzee
Becker: The Economic Approach To Human Behavior
Harrison and Huntington: Culture Matters
Huntington: The Clash Of Civilizations
Dawkins: The Selfish Gene
Fussell: Class

ENTRY LEVEL ECONOMICS
Mandelville: The Fable Of The Bees: Private Vice Public Benefit
Hazlitt: Economics In One Lesson
(UNDONE)

ECONOMICS AND POLICY
Aristotle: Topics
Xenophon: Economics
Cantillon: Essai Sur la Nature du Commerce en Général.
David Hume
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834),
David Ricardo (1772–1823),
Adam Smith (1723–1790).
Frédéric Bastiat (1801–1850);
William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882).
(undone)

THE KNOWLEDGE AND CALCULATION PROBLEMS
Popper: Sources of Knowledge And Ignorance
Popper: The Open Universe
Taleb: The Black Swan, Fooled By Randomness
Mandelbrot: ??
(undone)
(undone: the essays on the socialist calculation debate, the essay on the incentive priority)

THE PROBLEM OF ABSTRACTIONS
Religions:
States:
– Nock: Our Enemy, The State
– Rothbard: Man, Economy and State
Corporations:
Abstract Property Types (Options)
(UNDONE_

LEGAL CODES
The Code Of Hammurabi
(UNDONE: list the other early laws here)
The Athenian Constitution
Roman Law
The Anglo Saxon Codes
Magna Carta
The Articles Of Confederation
The US Declaration Of Independence, Constitution, and Original Bill of Rights.

PERSONAL PHILOSOPHY
Montaigne: Essays
Hazlitt: Foundations Of Morality
(undone)

MYTHOLOGY
Anon: Gilgamesh
Euripides:Cyclops, Heracles, Alcestis, Hecuba, Bacchae, Orestes, Andromache, Medea, Ion, Hippolytus, Helen, Iphigenia at Aulis
Aristophanes : The Birds, The Clouds, The Frogs, Lysistrata, The Knights, The Wasps, The Assemblywomen
Aesop’s Fables
Homer: The Illiad and the Odyssey
Virgil: The Aneid
??: Alexander
??: Julius Caesar
Anon: Beowulf
Mallory: Le Morte De Arthur (England)
The Carolingian Cycle (The Matter Of France)
The Nibelungenlied (Germany)
The Norse Sagas (Norse)
Grimm: Grimm’s Fairy Tales
Spenser: Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
Scott: Ivanhoe (Scott)
Tolkein: The Hobbit, The Lord Of The Rings (English)
Heinlein: Starship Troopers (American)
Herbert: Dune (American)

NARRATIVE ANALYSIS
Bullfinch: Mythology
Campbell: The Hero’s Journey, The Hero With A Thousand Faces
Frazer: The Golden Bough
(undone)

HISTORY
Herodotus
Livy
Plutarch
Tacitus
Kagan: The Peleponnesian War
(undone)

THE WAR OF STATES
Sun Tzu: The Art Of War
The History of the Peloponnesian War: Revised Edition (Penguin Classics)
Julius Ceasar: Caesar’s Commentaries: On the Gallic War And on the Civil War
Julius Ceasar: The Conquest of Gaul
Machiavelli: The Prince
Machiavelli: The Art Of War
Carl Van Clausewitz: On War (2G Second Generation Warfare)
Antoine De Jomini: The Art Of War
Moltke: The Art Of War
Mao Tse-Tung: The Art of War (4G Fourth Generation Warfare)
B. H. Liddell Hart: Strategy: Second Revised Edition (Meridian)
Michael Handel: Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought
????: Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton (Paperback)
Robert Leonhard: The Art of Maneuver: Maneuver Warfare Theory and Airland Battle (3G Third Generation Warfare)
John Keegan: The Price of Admiralty: The Evolution of Naval Warfare

IDEALOGICAL GUERILLA WAR
Martin van Creveld: The Rise and Decline of the State
Martin van Creveld: Transformation of War
Martin van Creveld: The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century

ADDITIONAL WORKS OF GENERAL THEORY
Michael Handel: Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought
Bevin Alexander: How Wars Are Won: The 13 Rules of War from Ancient Greece to the War on Terror
Bevin Alexander: How Great Generals Win (Paperback)
John Keegan: The Mask of Command
Martin van Creveld: Command in War (everything he has written)
John Keegan: The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme
Donald Kagan: On the Origins of War: And the Preservation of Peace (everything he has written)

ADDITIONAL WORKS OF HISTORY
Donald W. Engels: Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army
The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century A.D. to the Third
John Keegan: A History of Warfare (Everything he has written.)
Archer Jones: The Art of War in Western World
Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age
Donald Kagan: (everything he has written)

NOTE: you might notice that I don’t include Steven Ozment and other great romantic historians. If you want to read them, then that’s fine. I agree with their rapture. On the other hand, I’m a POLITICAL ECONOMIST which means I care only about the necessary institutions needed to produce the greek and british miracles. It is an emotionless pursuit. And the romantics do not help me in that regard. I have the same problem with much of the conservative reading list produced by the National Review, which I view as, like that of Kirk, romantic and inspirational, but not helpful to an analytical intellectual looking to define institutions to create romantic attachments rather than assuming that those attachments create those institutions if such feelings could be instilled somehow. From my view this is simply illogical: it’s putting the cart before the horse. People feel romantic attachments to their institutions. But it is the institutions that created that sentiment.

ANALYTICAL METHODS
Two-Person Game Theory
Differential Games: A Mathematical Theory with Applications to Warfare and Pursuit, Control and Optimization
Numbers, prediction, and war: Using history to evaluate combat factors and predict the outcome of battles
Attrition: Forecasting Battle Casualties and Equipment Losses in Modern War

RELATED PHILOSOPHY
Robert Greene: The 48 Laws Of Power
Dale Carnegie: How to Win Friends & Influence People (Mass Market Paperback)

FAILURES
Plato: The Republic
Hume: (induction)
Kant: (the problem of categories)
Marx: Das Kapital; The Communist Manifesto
Popper: The Open Society
Hayek: The Constitution of Liberty; Law, Legislation and Liberty
Mises: (praxeology)
Parsons: (method)
Rothbard: (non-violence, natural law)
(undone)

Conservative Reading List
From conservative.org. for my own reference.

Reading List: (Books):

Larry Arnhart: Darwinian Conservatism
Aristotle: Politics, Nicomachean Ethics
The Bible (King James, Vulgate)
M.E. Bradford: Founding Fathers: Brief Lives of the Framers of the U.S. Constitution
Peter Brimelow: Alien Nation
Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France
Patrick J. Buchanan: The Great Betrayal, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America; and Death of the West
John C. Calhoun: The Conservative Mind, and the Papers of John C. Calhoun)
Cicero: The Republic
Cochran & Harpending: The 10,000 Year Explosion
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: On the Constitution of Church & State
T.S. Eliot: "Notes Towards a Definition of Culture"
Steven Farron: The Affirmative Action Hoax
Thomas Fleming: The Morality of Everyday Life: Rediscovering an Ancient Alternative to the Liberal Tradition; The Politics of Human Nature; Immigration and American Identity
Ian Fletcher: Free Trade Doesn’t Work
Sam Francis: Revolution from the Middle; Shots Fired; America Extinguished; Essential Writings on Race
Paul Gottfried: After Liberalism; Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt; Strange Death of Marxism; Encounters; Conservatism in America
James Kalb: The Tyranny of Liberalism
Russell Kirk: The Conservative Mind, Roots of American Order
Donald W. Livingston: Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium
Thomas DiLorenzo: The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War
Richard Lynn: The Global Bell Curve; IQ and the Wealth of Nations
Joseph de Maistre: Considerations on France
Michael O’Meara: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe
Friedrich Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morality; Beyond Good and Evil
Robert Nisbet: The Quest for Community
Joseph Pearce: Small Is Still Beautiful
Josef Pieper: Leisure: The Basis of Culture; Tradition: Concept and Claim
Claude Polin: La Cite Denaturee
John Randolph: (See notes for Ch. V, The Conservative Mind)
Jean Raspail: Camp of the Saints
Willhelm Roepke: A Humane Economy
Byron M. Roth: The Perils of Diversity: Immigration and Human Nature
J. Philippe Rushton: Race, Evolution and Behavior
James C. Russell: The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity
Claes G. Ryn: America the Virtuous
Frank Salter: Risky Transactions: Trust, Kinship and Ethnicity; On Genetic Interests
Joseph Scotchie: Revolt from the Heartland
Roger Scruton: Conservative Texts
Oswald Spengler:Decline of the West
Paul Streitz: America First
Tomislav Sunic: Against Democracy and Equality
Twelve Southerners: I’ll Take My Stand
Srdja Trifkovic: The Sword and the Prophet
Robert Weissberg: Bad Students, Not Bad Schools
Chilton Williamson, Jr.: The Conservative Bookshelf; Immigration and the American Future (editor); The Immigration Mystique
Clyde N. Wilson: From Union to Empire

Reading List: (Articles):
Lawrence Auster: "The Politically Incorrect Truth About Rape in the United States"
M.E. Bradford: "A Fire Bell in the Night: The Southern Conservative View," "The Heresy of Equality," "The Lincoln Legacy," "On Rembering Who We Are," "Rhetoric and Respectability," "Dividing The House: The Gnosticism of Lincoln’s Political Rhetoric"
Peter Brimelow: "Time to Rethink Immigration?," "The Economic Impact of Immigration"
Patrick J. Buchanan: "Nation or Notion?"; "Fruits of NAFTA"; "Dismantling America"
John Derbyshire: "Why the Government Should and Can Not Make Us Equal"; "What’s So Scary about Evolution?"
Marcus Epstein: "Myths of Martin Luther King"
Thomas Fleming: "Counting People and People Who Count"
Sam Francis: "The Germanization of Christianity," "Race and the American Prospect," Statement of Principles, "The Origins of ‘Racism’," "The Return of the Repressed," VDare Archives
David Glasner: "Science and the Idea of Progress"
Paul Gottfried: "Oswald Spengler and the Inspiration of the Classical Age"; "Strauss and the Straussians"; "Conservatives, NeoConservatives…What Next?"
Samuel Huntington, "Migration Flows: The Central Issue of our Time"
Thomas Howard: "The ‘Moral Mythology’ of C.S. Lewis"
James Kalb: "Toward an Anti-Inclusivist Right [I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, and IX]"; "Anti-Racism"
George Kennan: "U.S. Overpopulation Deprives Planet of Helpful Civilization"
Russell Kirk: "The Necessity of Dogmas in Schooling"
E. Christian Kopff: "The Classics and the Traditional Liberal Arts Curriculum," "A Return to Sources," "Julius Evola on Tradition and the Right," "History and Science in Tenney Frank’s Scholarship" (Original Frank article: "Race Mixture in the Roman Empire") ; "The Fear of God"
Kevin Lamb: "The Open-Borders Network"; "Whitewash"
Wayne Lutton: “The Southern Poverty Law Center – A Special Report”
John O. McGinnis: "A Defense of Darwinian Conservatism"
Ilana Mercer: "War on white South Africa"
George A. Panichas: "T.S. Eliot and the Critique of Liberalism"
Aurthur Pendleton: "Lew Rockwell and the Strange Death of Paleolibertarianism"
Tom Piatak: "America First, Of Course"; "Bringing Back the Old Economy"
J Enoch Powell: "Rivers of Blood"
Jean Raspail: "The Fatherland Betrayed by the Republic"; "On Camp of the Saints"
Scott Richert: "Are Conversions to Islam Likely to Increase? "
Michael Rienzi: "Ethno-States, Kin Preservation, and the End of Politics"
Paul Craig Roberts: "The Missing Case for Free Trade," "An Economist Rethinks Free Trade," "The Decline and Fall of the American Economy"
Edwin S. Rubenstein: "Legal Immigration – The Bigger Problem"; "The Economic Case for [an Immigration] Moratorium"
Philippe Rushton: "Indians Aren’t That Intelligent," Ethnic Nationalism, Evolutionary Psychology, and Genetic Similarity Theory," "Shared Genes: The Evolution of Ethnonationalism"
Claeas G. Ryn: "Universality or Uniformity? [or why Allan Bloom is left-wing]," "Political Philosophy and the Unwitten Constitution," "How Conservatives Failed ‘The Culture’," "Where in the World are We Going," "Jacobin in Chief"; "Strauss and History"; "Universality and History"
Steve Sailer: "The Reality of Race"; "Race is an Extremely Extended Family";"Race and Its Proper Perspective" (NY Times Article); "Fragmented Future"; "Ethnic Nepotism and the Reality of Race"; "Question for feminists"; "The Left Doesn’t Like Darwin"; "On Dawkins on Race"; "How White Are Hispanics?"; "James Watson & Francis Crick on Race & IQ"
Frank Salter: "Estimating Ethnic Genetic Interests: Is it Adaptive to Resist Replacement Migration?"; "Misunderstandings of Kin Selection…."; "The Misguided Advocates of Open Borders"
Rob Sanchez: "Pledge of Allegiance — to India"; "Pledge of Allegiance — to India, Pt. II"
Richard Spencer: "Is Christianity Western?"; "Darwinism is Right-Wing"
Tim Stephanini: "Indian H-1B Workers Incompetent Cheats and Frauds"
John Tanton: "The Durable Rev. Malthus"
Taki Theodoracopulos: "Bush Pardons Carly Simon’s Little Drug Pusher"
Srdja Trifkovic: "The North Worth Saving" Derek Turner: "Dark Continent"
Eric Voegelin "On Classical Studies"
Clyde Wilson: "The Jeffersonian Conservative Tradition," "The Lincoln Fable"
Jerry Woodruff: "The Use and Abuse of Friedrich Nietzsche," "Samuel Francis on Immigration and the Ruling Class""
 

1. A ”’canon”’ is a historically comprehensive list of influential works from literature, the arts, sciences, law and specifically religious doctrine, used by generations of intellectuals or specialists as a means of establishing standards of comparison, evaluation, or judgment. From the Greek Ancient Greek κανών (kanón, “measuring rod, standard”.) [↩]