2010 Conference Reading List
Are you registered for the upcoming summer conference?
If so, you can prepare by reading the following books.
This list will be updated from time to time so add a bookmark and check back soon!
The Constitution of the United States
The Declaration of Independence
Two more added:
De Toqueville’s immortal Democracy in America
Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France
And the poetic knowledge panel poem for this year:
France, An Ode by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Other recommendations if you have time:
- Michael Polanyi: The Logic of Liberty
- The Federalist Papers (#10 is the most famous. Read any one or two and you’ve been schooled!)
- Russell Kirk: The Roots of American Order
- Friederich Hayek: The Road to Serfdom
- M Stanton Evans: The Theme is Freedom: Religion, Politics, and the American Tradition
To see the replacement of freedom ordered by nature to God with a secular, abstract, and ultimately untenable forms of freedom, here’s some late night reading (keep the night light on, some of this is scary stuff):
- Machiavelli: The Prince
- Thomas Hobbes: Leviathon
- John Locke:
- John Stuart Mill: On Liberty (a decisive vacating of the meaning of the word)
- Jean Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract (fatal errors, literally)
- Adam Smith: Cities and the Wealth of Nations
- Kant: Critique of Practical Reason, What is Enlightenment
- Hegel: Yikes
- Marx: Das Kapital, Communist Manifesto
- John Dewey: On the Impact of Darwinism Upon Philosophy (this is only about ten pages and available on line so if you can only read one of these selections, this is the one).
Finally, for an amazing collection of books, many available in digital form for free, go to the Liberty Fund and find their Library of Freedom. Too Enlightenment, but helpful nonetheless.
David Kern
