The normative questions underneath every political argument.
14 topics · 37 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Politics and the English Language
George Orwell · 1946
Vague, stale language conceals bad thinking and defends the indefensible; clear prose is a political act.
+8 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Prince
Niccolò Machiavelli · 1532
Separates political effectiveness from moral goodness, describing how power is actually held rather than how it ought to be.
+16 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Federalist Papers
Hamilton, Madison & Jay · 1788
Argues that factions are inevitable and must be channelled through structure rather than suppressed by virtue.
+10 more at this level
12 of 37 works
George Orwell
Vague, stale language conceals bad thinking and defends the indefensible; clear prose is a political act.
Assumes nothing, and it is short enough to finish before you next write anything
≈5,000 wordslink checked 17 Sept 2026Plato
Socrates argues that having accepted the benefits of a state's laws for a lifetime, he is bound by an implicit agreement to accept its judgment even when it is unjust, and escaping his sentence would itself be a wrong.
about 25 minutes to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyÉtienne de La Boétie
Tyranny survives only because the many actively cooperate in their own subjection, so obedience rather than force is what a tyrant actually depends on, and it can be withdrawn without a single blow struck.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Thomas Paine
Written against Burke's Reflections, argues that rights come from being human rather than from inherited precedent, so each generation may remake its own government rather than being bound by the arrangements of the dead.
about 6 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Mary Wollstonecraft
Women appear inferior in reason and virtue only because they are denied the education given to men, so equality between the sexes requires equal education rather than a different nature.
about 6 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026John Stuart Mill
Society may limit an individual's actions only to prevent harm to others, never merely to enforce a majority's taste or morality.
about 3.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Karl Marx
Attacks the draft programme of German social democracy for compromising on the labour theory of value and for imagining a distributive formula, 'to each according to his needs,' that only becomes possible once scarcity itself is abolished.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Pyotr Kropotkin
Cooperation, not competition, is the dominant factor in evolution and in human society, which undercuts the case for coercive states built on the premise that people must be forced to cooperate.
about 6.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Michael Sandel
Argues, against Rawls, that people cannot reason about justice from behind a veil of ignorance stripped of the attachments and communal identities that in fact supply most of what they will ever have reason to value or debate.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Niccolò Machiavelli
Separates political effectiveness from moral goodness, describing how power is actually held rather than how it ought to be.
Assumes a rough sense of Renaissance Italy, or the examples read as a list of unfamiliar names
about 3.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyJohn Locke
Government is a trust created to protect pre-existing natural rights to life, liberty and property, and a government that violates that trust may be resisted.
about 4 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026David Hume
Government's authority rests on long habit and settled opinion rather than on any real or even fictional contract, since almost no state in history was actually founded by the consent of the governed.
link checked 17 Sept 2026This subject genuinely sits in more than one domain. These fields approach the same ground with different methods.