Political Science Reading Lists for Undergraduates

The Racial Contract argues that the society we live in is a continuing white supremacist state. Holding up a mirror to mainstream philosophy, this provocative book explains the evolving outline of the racial contract from the time of the New World conquest and subsequent colonialism to the written slavery contract, to the "separate but equal" system of segregation in the twentieth-century United States.

The Federalist Papers are an indispensable guide to the intentions of the founding fathers who created the United States, and a canonical text in the development of western political thought.

Young discusses our responsibilities to address "structural" injustices in which we among many are implicated (but for which we not to blame), often by virtue of participating in a market, such as buying goods produced in sweatshops, or participatingin booming housing markets that leave many homeless. Young argues that addressing these structural injustices requires a new model of responsibility, which she calls the "social connection" model.

Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition--justice as fairness--and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons.

This highly regarded volume features a modern translation of all ten books of The Republic along with a synoptic table of contents, a prefatory essay, and an appendix on The Spindle of Necessity by the translator and editor, Raymond Larson. Also included are an introduction by Eva T. H. Brann, a list of principal dates in the life of Plato, and a bibliography.

1961 book by the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, in which the author provides a psychiatric and psychologic analysis of the dehumanizing effects of colonization upon the individual and the nation, and discusses the broader social, cultural, and political implications inherent to establishing a social movement for the decolonization of a person and of a people. The French-language title derives from the opening lyrics of "The Internationale". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wretched_of_the_Earth

The Communist Manifesto summarises Marx and Engels' theories concerning the nature of society and politics, namely that in their own words "[t]he history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles". It also briefly features their ideas for how the capitalist society of the time would eventually be replaced by socialism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Communist_Manifesto

Visible Identities offers a careful analysis of the political and philosophical worries about identity and argues that these worries are neither supported by the empirical data nor grounded in realistic understandings of what identities are. Martin Alcoff develops a more realistic characterizationof identity in general through combining phenomenological approaches to embodiment with hermeneutic concepts of the interpretive horizon.

Visible Identities offers a careful analysis of the political and philosophical worries about identity and argues that these worries are neither supported by the empirical data nor grounded in realistic understandings of what identities are. Alcoff develops a more realistic characterizationof identity in general through combining phenomenological approaches to embodiment with hermeneutic concepts of the interpretive horizon.

Schwartz argues for the centrality of the question of equality to democratic politics. Second, he critically analyzes and explains the shocking rise in inequality in the United States over the last three decades. This he does with conceptual clarity, rich interdisciplinary analysis, and a thorough examination of hard socioeconomic data. Third, he assails the near absence of concern for this soaring inequality among contemporary political theorists, and offers a cogent, and stinging, explanation that takes to task the discipline's preoccupation with difference and identity severed from the pragmatics of democratic equality.

Marx aimed to reveal the economic patterns underpinning the capitalist mode of production in contrast to classical political economists such as Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Kapital

Machiavelli offers advice for how to gain and maintain power, unencumbered by values and moral conventions.

In his groundbreaking work, the author presciently writes that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line," and offers powerful arguments for the absolute necessity of moral, social, political, and economic equality.

The Dialectic of Sex was the first book of the women's liberation movement to put forth a feminist theory of politics.