Inderjit wrote:
For any fans of surrealist works, I recommend, Albert Camus's 'The Outsider'; BRILLIANCE!
This is the same book as
The Stranger, right? Just a different translation of the title? If so - I agree, it's brilliant. One of a relatively small number of
books that I read for high school and really liked.
I think you should trudge through some of the classics, Marx and Engel's The Communist Manifesto, J.S Mill's On Liberty, Rousseau's The Social Contract and it's Discources, Machiavellia’s The Prince and of course Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations.
If you really want to understand the history of political thought, I think you've got to go back to ancient Greece and read at least Plato's
Republic and Aristotle's
Politics. Frankly, I don't think that either of these is very good in itself, but they did form the basis of a lot of later political thought.
I'd actually recommend certain other works by Marx in place of the
Manifesto. His early "economic and philosophical manuscripts" are very good. And the later
Capital is I think a much more serious and profound work than the
Manifesto.
Also, I think that Hobbes's
Leviathan should be read to see the starting point taken by Locke, Rousseau, and others.