The political theory canon

Updated 22.07.2026

This is one list of core texts in political theory.

Practically, students in Stanford’s political theory program are expected to master these texts and authors before advancing to candidacy. Other institutions have, unsurprisingly, similar but not identical reading lists.¹ Intellectually, the list reflects the fact that political theory is an ongoing conversation with its own tradition. Like any canon, its core texts are contingent, contested, and open to revision. Accordingly, this list serves as both my reading plan and a map of the major debates and themes that organize the discipline.

N.B. Greyed-out links indicate pages yet to be created. Unbolded authors mark additional texts from my training that, while not on Stanford’s official reading list, were presented in conversation with them.

Ancient

c. 725 BCE Homer The Iliad

c. 700 BCE Hesiod Theogony

Works and Days

[[Catalogue of Women]] (attributed)

431 BCE [[Thucydides]] [[The History of the Peloponnesian War]]

380 BCE [[Plato]] [[Apology]]

[[Crito]]

[[Gorgias]]

[[Republic]]

350 BCE [[Aristotle]] [[Nicomachean Ethics]]

[[Politics]]

Modern

1532 [[Machiavelli]] [[The Prince]]

[[Discourses on Livy]]

1651 [[Hobbes]] [[Leviathan]]

1689 [[Locke]] [[A Letter Concerning Toleration]]

[[Second Treatise of Government]]

1754 [[Rousseau]] [[Discourse on the Origins of Inequality]]

[[The Social Contract]]

1785 [[Kant]] [[Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals]]

[[Political Writings]]

1788 [[Hamilton]] [[The Federalist]]

[[Madison]]

[[Jay]] [[The Federalist]]

1789 [[Bentham]] [[An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation]]

1790 [[Burke]] [[Reflections on the Revolution in France]]

1820 [[Hegel]] [[Philosophy of Right]]

1835 [[Tocqueville]] [[Democracy in America]]

1848 [[Marx]] [[The Communist Manifesto]]

[[The German Ideology]]

[["Critique of the Gotha Program"]]

1859 [[Mill]] [[On Liberty]]

[[Utilitarianism]]

[[Considerations on Representative Government]]

[[The Subjection of Women]]

1887 [[Nietzsche]] [[On the Genealogy of Morals]]

Contemporary

1903 [[Du Bois]] [[The Souls of Black Folk]]

1919 [[Weber]] [[Economy and Society]]

[["Politics as a Vocation"]]

1932 [[Schmitt]] [[The Concept of the Political]]

1952 [[Strauss]] [[Persecution and the Art of Writing]]

1956 [[Dahl]] [[A Preface to Democratic Theory]]

1958 [[Berlin]] [["Two Concepts of Liberty"]]

1958 [[Arendt]] [[Between Past and Future]]

[[The Human Condition]]

1961 [[Hart]] [[The Concept of Law]]

1967 [[Pitkin]] [[The Concept of Representation]]

1971 [[Rawls]] [[A Theory of Justice]]

[[Political Liberalism]]

[[The Law of Peoples]]

1974 [[Nozick]] [[Anarchy, State, and Utopia]]

1975 [[Scanlon]] [["Preference and Urgency"]]

1975 [[Foucault]] [[Discipline and Punish]]

1981 [[Dworkin]] [["What is Equality? Part II: Equality of Resources"]]

1983 [[Walzer]] [[Spheres of Justice]]

1986 [[Raz]] [[The Morality of Freedom]]

1989 [[Cohen]] [["On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice"]]

[[Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality]]

1989 [[Okin]] [[Justice, Gender, and the Family]]

1990 [[Young]] [[Justice and the Politics of Difference]]

1992 [[Habermas]] [[Between Facts and Norms]]

1993 [[Sen]] [["Capability and Well-Being"]]

1993 [[Williams]] [[Shame and Necessity]]

1999 [[Anderson]] [["What Is the Point of Equality?"]]

2005 [[Nagel]] [["The Problem of Global Justice"]]

2006 [[Nussbaum]] [[Frontiers of Justice]]

Footnotes

See, for example, the publicly available political theory reading lists and supplemental reading suggestions from Yale, Columbia, and UChicago. ↩