Social Sciences Books
These are books written to explain or argue about how power, society, and institutions actually work — some as straight political theory, others as fiction using a society as its real subject. Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan lays out one of the most influential arguments ever made for why organized government exists at all. Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal uses biting satire, not argument, to attack British policy toward Ireland. Karl Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte dissects a specific political coup to build a much larger theory of how history repeats itself. Read together, they show three completely different ways of making an argument about power — through formal theory, through satire, and through close political analysis.
Where to start
Leviathan
One of the foundational arguments for why organized government exists — still cited constantly today.
Where to start
A Modest Proposal For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick
Swift's savage satire proposing an outrageous 'solution' to Irish poverty — still shocking, still effective.
Where to start
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Marx's sharp, specific analysis of a political coup — the source of his famous line about history repeating itself.
34 books total in this collection, free to read with synchronized LibriVox audio.
The Prince
Niccolò Machiavelli
Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience
Henry David Thoreau
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories
Kate Chopin
Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austen
Leviathan
Thomas Hobbes
A Modest Proposal For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick
Jonathan Swift
The Complete Project Gutenberg Works of Jane Austen A Linked Index of all PG Editions of Jane Austen
Jane Austen
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
The Professor
Charlotte Brontë
The New Machiavelli
H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
Four Short Stories By Emile Zola
Émile Zola
Dead Souls
Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol
Moon-Face, and Other Stories
Jack London
The Description of Wales
Cambrensis Giraldus
The Itinerary of Archbishop Baldwin Through Wales
Cambrensis Giraldus
The Pool in the Desert
Sara Jeannette Duncan
Hiero
Xenophon
The Polity of the Athenians and the Lacedaemonians
Xenophon
Dolly Dialogues
Anthony Hope
Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things
Lafcadio Hearn
![Love and Freindship [sic]](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1212/pg1212.cover.medium.jpg)
Love and Freindship [sic]
Jane Austen
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg
Mark Twain
Ursula
Honoré de Balzac
Penelope's English Experiences Being Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton
Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
The Provost
John Galt
Selected Stories of Bret Harte
Bret Harte
The Crisis in Russia
Arthur Ransome
The Ancien Régime
Charles Kingsley
Bureaucracy
Honoré de Balzac
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Karl Marx
Russia
Donald Mackenzie Wallace
The Ayrshire Legatees; Or, The Pringle Family
John Galt
The Jimmyjohn Boss, and Other Stories
Owen Wister