Introducing the No Kings Book Club

I’ve long had the sense that the concentration of power is the root of most human suffering. When too much control over other people’s lives accumulates in too few hands, things go wrong in predictable ways. Wealth inequality, the domination of workers by management, the alienating structure of school: these all feel like symptoms of the same underlying disease.

But “I have a feeling” isn’t an argument. I can’t yet articulate why I believe this, or defend it against the obvious counterarguments. So I’ve put together a reading list, spanning anarchism, political philosophy, critical theory, and economics, to see if I can turn an intuition into a coherent worldview.

This is the No Kings Book Club. I’ll be sharing my notes and reflections on each book as I go, building into something I can actually defend.

Book List

  1. Two Cheers for Anarchism by James C. Scott
  2. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology by David Graeber
  3. Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher
  4. Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott
  5. Weapons of the Weak by James C. Scott
  6. The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber
  7. Republicanism by Philip Pettit
  8. The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
  9. Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire
  10. Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom

I might add more, either to the end or in-between, as I go.

This is the first post in The No Kings Book Club.