The Left

The right-thinking people who move us forward.

Whigs, philosophes, Liberals, Radicals, Leftists, Progressives, etc. History and views; causes of our present decrepitude and ways to fix it.

Akhil Reed Amar and Alan Hirsch, For the People: What the Constitution Really Says about Your Rights
Paul Berman, A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968
Sheri Berman, The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe's Twentiet Century
Michael Bérubé, The Left at War
Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Economic Democracy
William O. Douglas, Points of Rebellion [A sermon on the text that "a little rebellion now and again is a good thing", circa 1970. To see how both American liberalism and the Republic have declined, recall that Douglas was a Supreme Court justice at the time.]
Barbara Ehrenreich
- The Worst Years of Our Lives
- The Snarling Citizen
- "Confessions of a Recovering Statist"
Susan George, "How to Win the War of Ideas: Lessons from the Gramscian Right"
Todd Gitlin, Straight from the Sixties
Albert Hirschman, "The Rhetoric of Reform" [online]
Robert Hughes, Culture of Complaint
Stephen Holmes, An Anatomy of Antiliberalism
Leszek Kolakowski
- Towards a Marxist Humanism [British title: Marxism and Beyond]
- Main Currents of Marxism (his magnum opus)
- Modernity on Endless Trial
Paul Krugman, Peddling Prosperity
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
John Roemer, A Future for Socialism [Review: The Red Monday Efficient Allocation Blues]
Richard Rorty, "First Projects, Then Principles" [Even though he's wrong about the effects of international trade]
Bertrand Russell
- Freedom and Organization, 1814--1914
- Power
- Authority and the Individual
George Soros, "The Capitalist Threat" and "Towards a Global Open Society".

Ronald Aronson, After Marxism
Brian Barry, Why Social Justice Matters
Becker, Heavenly City of the 18th Century Philosophers
David Belkin, The Left and Limited Government
Norman Birnbaum, After Progress: American Social Reform and European Socialism in the Twentieth Century
Carl Boggs, Social Movements & Political Power: Emerging Forms of Radicalism in the West
Derek Bok, The Trouble with Government [blurb]
Stephen Eric Bronner, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Towards a Politics of Radical Engagement
Peter N. Carroll, Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy (Congress for Cultural Freedom, CIA)
Condorcet
Bogan Denitch, After the Flood: World Politics and Democracy in the Wake of Communism
Charles Derber et al., What's Left? Radical Politics in the Postcommunist Era
George Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850--2000
Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams
Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal
Judge Learned Hand, Spirit of Liberty
Stephen Hart, Cultural Dilemmas of Progressive Politics: Styles of Engagement among Grassroots Activists [Blurb]
Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society [Covers only leftists. This is unfortunate, since the pilgrimages of leftists to the Soviet Union in the 1930s were paralleled by those of rightists to Italy and Germany...]
Hughes, Sophisticated Rebels (French left since the '60s)
John M. Jordan, Machine-Age Ideology: Social Engineering and American Liberalism, 1911--1939
Ira Katznelson, Liberalism's Crooked Circle: Letters to Adam Michnick
Khilnani, Arguing Revolution (French leftists)
Joss Marsh, Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England ["tells the forgotten stories of more than two hundred working-class `blasphemers,' whose stubborn refusal to silence their `hooligan' voices helped secure our rights to speak and write freely today."]
Kevin Mattson, Intellectuals in Action: The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945--1970
Gerassimos Moschonas, In the Name of Social Democracy: The Great Transformation, 1945 to the Present
Cosma Orsi, "The Political Economy of Solidarity" [PDF. No relation.]
C. Owen Peapke, Evolution of Progress
Rawls
- A Theory of Justice
- Political Liberalism
John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World
John Roemer, Equality of Opportunity
Saul, Voltaire's Bastards
Amartya Sen, Inequality Reexamined [Review by Danny Yee around someplace]
Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionist
Charles Shipman, It Had to Be Revolution: Memoirs of an American Radical
Gregory D. Sumner, Dwight Macdonald and the Politics Circle: The Challenge of Cosmopolitan Democracy
Eric Voeglin, New Science of Politics [Ouch. You talk about your reactionaries. "Conservative" is much too pale a word for Voeglin; he's extremely metaphysical, possibly Thomist, certainly peddling an odd hybrid of Christianity, Plato and Aristotle, for which the State's "representing" some sort of "truth" is decidedly more important than representing the actual people who have to live with it. But very interesting.]
Ellen Willis
- Don't Think, Smile!
- No More Nice Girls
Garry Wills, Necessary Evil

Notebooks

The Left