The Left

Last update: 15 Feb 2026 11:00
First version:

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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.

See also:
• Cultural Criticism
• Economics
• the Enlightenment
• Environmentalism
• Feminism
• Karl Marx
• Marxism(s)
• Political Philosophy and Political Theory
• Socialism
• Revolutions and Revolutionaries
• the Right
• Unions
• the Welfare State

Recommended (very misc., needs sub-division):
• 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
• Colin Crouch, Making Capitalism Fit for Society
• 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
• 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
• Francesca Polletta, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements
• 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]
• George Soros, "The Capitalist Threat" and "Towards a Global Open Society".

To read:
• 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 and Political Power: Emerging Forms of Radicalism in the West
• Derek Bok, The Trouble with Government
• Stephen Eric Bronner, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Towards a Politics of Radical Engagement
• Peter N. Carroll, Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War
• 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
• Stephen Hart, Cultural Dilemmas of Progressive Politics: Styles of Engagement among Grassroots Activists
• Eric Heinze, Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical Theory and the Future of the Left
• Nancy J. Hirschmann, The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom
• 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)
• 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
• John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World
• Terence Renaud, New Lefts: The Making of a Radical Tradition
• John Roemer, Equality of Opportunity
• Doug Rossinow, Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America
• 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