Who are the key authors and what are the key books in the liberal, conservative, libertarian and radical traditions? The National Association of Scholars is designing a project to examine how political theory is conveyed in the American undergraduate curriculum. To that end we need to compile lists of works that (A) unambiguously represent different strands of political theory, (B) are widely recognized, and (C) are plausible material for undergraduate courses. We are interested in contemporary books as well as older works, but nothing published before 1750. Our goal is to compile lists of ten books in each category that all sides would agree are a fair sample of these political traditions.
John Rawls, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, J. S. Mill, J.-J. Rousseau, Howard Zinn, Robert Nozick, Ayn Rand, Russell Kirk, Paulo Freire, C. Wright Mills, Ludwig von Mises, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Oakeshott, Eric Voegelin, Albert Jay Nock, Reinhold Niebuhr, Charles Reich, Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Alasdair MacIntyre, William F. Buckley, Barbara Ehrenreich, Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, John Kenneth Galbraith, Charles Taylor, F.A. Hayek...Who is missing?
If you would like to help, post your answer here or send an email to nasonweb@nas.org.
