Reading list · 8 books
Books to understand the left
For a conservative reader: the arguments progressives make, in their own words, from Rawls to Evicted.
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Makes the case
A Theory of Justice (opens Bookshop.org)
John Rawls · 1971
Harvard philosopher John Rawls argues that fair principles are those chosen behind a veil of ignorance, and the book supplies much of the moral vocabulary of modern liberalism.
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Makes the case
The Socialist Manifesto (opens Bookshop.org)
The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality
Bhaskar Sunkara · 2019
Bhaskar Sunkara, founding editor of Jacobin, sets out the history of socialist movements and argues for a democratic socialist politics built on working-class organization.
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Makes the case
Abundance (opens Bookshop.org)
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson · 2025
Journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue that liberals should fix the housing, energy and permitting rules that block building, and criticize their own side's governing record.
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Makes the case
The New Jim Crow (opens Bookshop.org)
Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Michelle Alexander · 2010
Civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander argues that the war on drugs and mass incarceration created a racial caste system, an argument that shaped a decade of criminal justice reform.
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A portrait
Between the World and Me (opens Bookshop.org)
Ta-Nehisi Coates · 2015
Ta-Nehisi Coates writes a letter to his teenage son about growing up in Baltimore and about what it means to live in a Black body in America.
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Makes the case
The Color of Law (opens Bookshop.org)
A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
Richard Rothstein · 2017
Economic Policy Institute scholar Richard Rothstein documents how federal, state and local housing policy deliberately created racially segregated neighborhoods, and argues that government owes a remedy.
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A portrait
Evicted (opens Bookshop.org)
Poverty and Profit in the American City
Matthew Desmond · 2016
Sociologist Matthew Desmond lived among tenants and landlords in Milwaukee for a year and shows how eviction drives poverty. The book won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
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Makes the case
How to Be an Antiracist (opens Bookshop.org)
Ibram X. Kendi · 2019
Historian Ibram Kendi combines memoir with a framework in which policies are either racist or antiracist, a central text for how many progressives now talk about race.
Chosen by Unbiasable. No publisher pays for a place on this list. Updated September 2026.
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