A starter path through political philosophy’s big questions: power, justice, freedom, authority, and the shape of a good society. This list brings together a few foundational works that still echo through modern political thought.
Plato
Thomas Hobbes
Niccolò Machiavelli
John Stuart Mill
Hannah Arendt
Alexis de Tocqueville
Edmund Burke, J. G. A. Pocock
Michel Foucault
John Locke
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Milton Friedman
F. A. Hayek
Simone De Beauvoir
Charles de Secondat Montesquieu (Baro
Robert Nozick
Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels
John Rawls
Barbara Freethy