Reading List

25 books I recommend

Last week, I wrote a response to the most common question I’ve got from readers.

The next most common request is for book recommendations, so for subscribers, here are 25 recommendations of books that influenced my own thinking.

POLITICS – Aristotle — The greatest work of political philosophy. Aristotle gives us his teleological account of government rooted in man’s quest for the good life. Monarchy, democracy and oligarchy are considered, but Aristotle settles on a mixed regime as ideal to inculcate virtue in the citizenry and serve the common good. This work represents the peak of classical political philosophy, a repudiation of the liberal “value-neutral” approach to political philosophy which is dominant today.

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RETURN OF THE STRONG GODS – R. R. Reno — Reno’s treatment of the post-war consensus shows how the world-weariness of Europeans after WW2, coupled with the moral imperative “never again” led to the trends of deconstruction and relativism that utterly transformed the intellectual landscape. Western elites and intelligentsia launched a full frontal assault on the “strong gods” of nationalism, religion and the family.

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THE ETHNIC PHENOMENON – Pierre L. van den Berghe — One of a few books that applies the insights of sociobiology to the phenomenon of ethnic nationalism. Van den Berghe contends that ethnic nepotism is rooted in biology, an example of “kin selection”, where organisms evolve to behave altruistically towards their kin to promote the spread of shared genes. Van den Berghe then applies his sociobiological lens to analyse various historical forms of ethnic relations like colonialism, slavery, caste systems, and assimilation.

THE FACES OF JANUS: MARXISM AND FASCISM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY — A. James Gregor — Gregor is an underrated scholar who was the preeminent scholar on fascism, and this work best summarises his argument regarding 20th century totalitarian regimes. Gregor is able to break out of the ideological shackles of many historians of these regimes, and show that a left/right interpretive lens is flawed. Communist regimes inevitably morphed into a state form most like fascism, while fascist regimes took on many socialist aspects which undermine the myth of fascist regimes as “capitalism in decay”. Also useful for Gregor’s tracing the origins of (and dismantling) Marxist myths around the rise of fascism.

THE REPUBLIC – Plato: The most famous work of Western Philosophy for a reason. Whitehead said all of philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, and The Republic more than any dialogue contains a near complete account of his thought.

APOLOGY – Plato: The story of Socrates’ trial on charges of impiety and corruption. Socrates' unwavering commitment to the pursuit of truth, even in the face of death, establishes him as the intellectual cornerstone of Western philosophy.

THE ANCIENT CITY — Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges — This 19th century study of Greek and Roman religious customs shows the centrality of ancestor worship and lineage to the ancients. Each family had their own hearth, sacred fire, gods and religion. From these small units grew the city, which was itself a larger ancestor cult. Coulanges explains how Christianity did away with these customs, which will seem so archaic as to be almost foreign to a modern Western reader — a world where religion, identity, law and the state were inseparably conjoined, and where modern ideas like individual rights and civic identity were not even conceivable.

AFTER LIBERALISM – Paul Gottfried — Gottfried is probably the finest paleoconservative thinker, and this is his most interesting work. After Liberalism presents a critique of the modern managerial state as leading to a transformation of 19th century bourgeois liberalism. The new managerial class has adopted a task of social engineering, aiming to pacify through the welfare state and and eliminate prejudice, but this has come into conflict with, and eroded, the classical liberal principles of self-government and individual autonomy.

THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE – Mircea Eliade — The Romanian scholar of religion presents a dichotomy between sacred and profane spaces as a way of understanding the religious impulse. Eliade argues the pursuit of the sacred is something perennial across all cultures — it is a fundamental attribute of the human condition to seek out, honour, and maintain what we perceive as "sacred".

THE TERRITORIAL IMPERATIVE – Robert Ardrey — An American playwright who ventured into anthropology, Ardrey presents the case that there is a universal “territorial imperative” across species — a desire to have and hold space against outsiders. In some of his other work, he lays out the sociological insights that come from recognising man as a tribal, territorial animal, many of which go against the moral consensus of today.

THE DELUGE – Adam Tooze — Peter Hitchens recommended this as the best book on history. It’s a sweeping history of World War 1 and its aftermath by economic historian Tooze, showing how the events of these few years shaped everything that was to come in the next century — Versailles and the rise of Nazism, the Bolshevik revolution, the Great Depression and the global dominance of the United States.

IMPERIUM — Francis Parker Yockey — Yockey is a fascinating character and by all accounts a genius intellect who wrote Imperium without notes in Ireland in 1948. Yockey builds on the ideas of Oswald Spengler in his analysis of the soul of European civilisation, the causes of its cultural decline, and his survey of the “world situation” written three years after the Second World War. Yockey’s advocacy of a united European imperium has been hugely influential on post-war radical right thought.

“In this book are the precise, organic foundations of the Western soul, and in particular, its Imperative at the present stage.”

THE TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY – Jacques Ellul — Skip Kaczynski and go to the more thoughtful French philosopher. Ellul’s critique of the social effect of “technique” are more relevant now than ever — he gets to the essence of the alienating tendencies of the modern system more precisely than any French postmodernist.

THE CULTURE OF CRITIQUE – Kevin MacDonald — MacDonald’s application of group-evolutionary strategy to the Jewish people made him a pariah, but it is a serious and scholarly contribution to the field. Even if one is skeptical of that field, there is lots of well sourced history and biographical details on influential figures which are interesting to follow by themselves.

CHURCHILL, HITLER AND THE UNNECESSARY WAR – Patrick J. Buchanan: Buchanan’s foray into revisionism makes a clear case of an “unnecessary war” and dismantling the black and white story that has been used to justify so many foreign interventions since.

THE DEATH OF THE WEST – Patrick J. Buchanan — Many of the arguments will seem like old hat to any nationalist, but Buchanan does a great job of taking the paleocon perspective on the West and using it to show the urgency of reversing demographic decline and mass-immigration. This was a gateway to nationalism for many conservatives, and the time since only vindicates Buchanan’s predictions.

THINKING BEING – Eric Perl — Perl offers a new understanding of classical metaphysics that shows there is a continual approach from Parmenides through to Plato and Aristotle and culminating in Thomas Aquinas. Perl argues the foundation of classical metaphysics is the belief in indissoluble togetherness of thought and being, first clearly expressed by Parmenides.

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TRIBE: ON HOMECOMING AND BELONGING — Sebastian Junger — This is a short book with a simple thesis, but one I cite a lot. Junger makes the case that we cannot address man’s search for meaning or the isolation and ennui that plague modern society without recognising our deep inclination to live in tight-knit, tribal communities. The book presents some remarkable examples of the human capacity for altruism in times of crisis — and the profound meaning this imbues on individuals who experience it, something modern society is failing to provide.

THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD: BEING, CONSCIOUSNESS, BLISS – David Bentley Hart — I recommend this not just for its compelling presentation of the classical theist account of God, but because it’s one of the best takedowns of the modern naturalist worldview, and the poverty of its explanations for beauty, consciousness and truth.

MAKING SENSE OF RACE – Edward Dutton — A fine presentation of the basics of race differences and their sociological significance. Explains all the necessary scientific understanding of race in layman’s terms, and dismantles some of the common leftist tropes around blank-slatism.

THE POWER OF ISRAEL IN THE UNITED STATES — James Petras: Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby is obviously highly recommended, but this is an overlooked contribution to the topic. Petras, a leftist academic, studiously traces the involvement of the Israel lobby in stirring the Iraq war, and takes apart some of the common Chomskyite arguments about the oil lobby or US Imperialism being the prime mover of foreign policy in the Middle East.

THE NEOCONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION – Murray Friedman — Friedman is a Jewish scholar, and he documents the incredible breadth of influence of his group on the United States in the post-war period. Necessary to understand the motives behind the creation of what we now know as conservatism.

NATIONS – Azar Gat — The best book on the sociology of nationalism. Gat, who is a historian by trade, takes on all the bad sociology that dominates academic discussion of nationalism, then take a tour around the world and through history to show that nationalism is something with deep roots and a long history.

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MEN AMONG THE RUINS – Julius Evola — Written after the destruction wrought by the Second World War and reflecting on the forces of dissolution that brought the world to that point, this is Evola’s most readable, most accessible, and most relevant work.

MAN AND NATURE – Seyyed Hossein Nasr — This is a nice summation of the traditionalist school critique of modern thought. It presents an ecological perspective from the right — grounded in a holistic metaphysics rather than the secular, romantic deep green movements of the left. It also presents a fascinating genealogy which traces the gradual desacralisation of nature, rooted in the scientific worldview and an excessive emphasis on dualism which developed in Christianity.