I’ve had a lot of people ask me for recommendations on what to read in order to better understand the American political system. That’s an understandable question if you think about the sheer volume of political writing.
To take the guesswork out of it, I’m compiling this short list of political documents, books, and articles that I think every American citizen should be familiar with in order to understand the deeper context of American political history and discourse.
NOTE: Where possible, I link to free resources. Where that’s not possible, I provide an Amazon affiliate link. If you purchase one of these recommend resources through the site, I’ll get a small commission that I will use to keep the site up and running.
Primary Documents
The Declaration of Independence
The foundational document of the American republic should be required reading in its entirety. While it contains stirring lines like “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” the DOI also provides us with the foundational concepts of American political thought and culture. It’s a great place to begin looking for the common ties that bind Americans together across the political spectrum.
Constitution of the United States
It is the foundational document of America’s federal government, so we should be very familiar with it. Unfortunately, I’ve found the many haven’t read the Constitution since high school. Even fewer have read it in its entirety. If you want to understand why the American government can, or cannot, take a particular action, you need to start here: the basic rule book of the American political system.
UN Charter
It’s boring, tedious legal writing, but essential to understanding the role of the world’s premiere international organization, and America’s role in it. It outlines important concepts in international governance.
NATO Treaty
In 1949, America signed on to its longest lasting military alliance. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Charter is a short, worthwhile read that provides insight into our alliance structure and commitments. If you’ve ever wondered why America spends so much on defense, this is a big part of that.
Liberal Political Thought
Let’s be very clear about what I mean by “liberal.” Liberal political thought refers to a specific school of Western political philosophy, established in the Enlightenment that emphasized individual liberty, representative forms of government and rule of law. It’s a much broader term than what most Americans think when they hear the word “liberal.” As Wheaton College’s Amy Black has noted, “In the beginning, we were all liberal.”
There are certainly books to add to this list, but these are the “must reads” if you’re going to understand some of the big ideas that influenced the American Founding.
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics
You can’t begin to understand political thought and its major themes unless you read the guy who invented the field. Aristotle’s treatise on virtue provides the working model for Western concepts of virtue and citizenship.
Aristotle, Politics
This volume is the sequel to the Ethics noted above. Reading the two together provides one with the basic framework of political thought that has informed political science as a field: Defining the best relationship between the government and the governed.
Plato, The Republic
Aristotle’s teacher defined an early concept of the ideal regime in this lengthy Socratic discourse. The interesting thing is that you can find in this book the seeds of ideas that sprouted into both democratic and socialist forms of thought.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
Why should Americans read this text on “why we should have an all powerful government”? Though Hobbes more or less writes in favor of an enlightened despot, his classic work lays the foundation for Anglo-American social contract theory, which informs the writings of arguably America’s first founding father – John Locke.
John Locke, Two Treatises on Government
OK, maybe it is a stretch to call him America’s first founding father, but do you know anyone else Jefferson quoted/paraphrased/plagiarized in the Declaration of Independence? To say John Locke influences American political thought is an understatement. His ideas and his optimism is the taproot of it.
Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace
Kant was writing after the American founding, but his influential essay on a hypothetical world peace is in the background of the language and intent of the UN Charter and NATO treaty listed above. If you want to understand the thinking behind our utopian urge for world peace, this is the essay that started it all… at least in Western thought, and it drives a large portion of American foreign policy.
American Federalism and Democracy
One can say that America is an Enlightenment liberal thought experiment. That may be true to an extent, but such a generalization would miss the truly innovative concepts America’s founders introduced to liberal thought. Federalism would certainly be one of the most significant of those innovations.
James Madison, John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers
It is not very often that you have a country’s founders write a commentary on the constitutions they write. This collection of essays is a tour de force of political thought and persuasive rhetoric that will make you feel dumb when you realize you’re reading the 18th century equivalent of a blog post. Still, this should be required reading if you want to understand the intent behind the structure of American government.
Extra credit if you read the counterargument, The Antifederalist Papers.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Tocqueville gets a lot of credit (justifiably so) for his near prophetic analysis of American democracy and its future. However, Prophet of American Democracy is a title that obscures much of Tocqueville’s stunningly deep work on tracing the contours of a youthful American culture and geography. A close reading of both volumes of this classic work doesn’t just give you insight into American democracy, but also provides a primer on how to study a culture.
Social Democratic Thought
Hegel, Philosophy of Right
Hegel’s complex writings provide the 19th-century continental side of liberal thought. Hegel’s approach to politics is both more collective and stability focused if you compare him to Locke. While Hegel would be appalled at Marx’s bastardization of his dialectical framework, there’s no denying the link. If Locke and Burke are the philosophical godfathers of conservative thought and Marx the godfather of leftist thought, Hegel occupies a place somewhere between these two poles.
Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto
Every American should read the little book that caused the Cold War. Maybe that’s a little hyperbolic, but Marx’s short work caused a revolution in political philosophy that sparked real political revolutions. Reading Marx provides perspective on understanding major concepts on the political left.
Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality
Illich isn’t really writing about politics in this short book, but rather a society’s relationship to technology. However, he correctly identifies this relationship as having a political element and roundly critiques capitalism and socialism as two sides of the same exploitative economic coin. Though his political orientation is on the left, conservatives can receive much value from Illich when it comes to discussing the interactions of virtue and tradition with technology and modernity.
Modern Conservative Thought
Russell Kirk, Ten Conservative Principles
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 as a Republican president should make it clear there’s no such thing as an ideologically conservative party in America. Indeed, the election of President Trump has raised a question many have failed to answer adequately: “What is conservatism? What does it mean to be conservative?” Kirk’s classic essay is an excellent place to start in answering that question. It’s concise and avoids specific appeals to a party, which allows for a broader philosophical discussion rather than a narrow ideological one.
Barry Goldwater, Conscience of a Conservative
Goldwater’s short treatise on what it meant to be a conservative politician is an insightful little book. I particularly like his thoughtful approach to grappling with issues of race, labor unions, and economic inequality. It provides a model for how conscientious conservatives can do the same.
Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism
Goldberg is one of the most honest conservative writers I’ve come across in our modern age of polarization. If you’re liberal, don’t let this book’s title scare you away. While Goldberg writes an expose of the political left, his hardest hitting chapter is the last one. In it, he zeroes in on his fellow conservatives. His main point? Fascism is, and has been, a thing in American politics; unless we’re not all very careful, it can happen again… and both sides will be to blame.