The Open Society and its Enemies
by Karl Popper | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Political philosophers since Plato have sought to have us ruled by the wise and the virtuous. No, says Popper, the real question is how to prevent bad and incompetent governments from doing too much damage. Limits on their power and the ability to change them peacefully are better protection than virtue.

The notion of rejecting the inferior rather than striving for perfection fits comfortably with Popper’s account of scientific discovery as conjecture and refutation. This is how we progress: we try out alternatives and discard the ones which fail us. It may be less dazzling, but it is systematic and it works.

 

The History of the Peloponnesian War
by Thucydides | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

This is the story of the epic struggle between Athens and Sparta for control of the Mediterranean world 2,500 years ago. Thucydides vividly brings to life the characters involved, complete with their weaknesses, their foibles and their strengths. His tragedy unfolds as virtue and best intentions vie with suffering and cruelty. His tale is told impartially, but he tells it with the soul of a poet as well as an historian, and in his anecdotes and incidents we recognize not the people of a dead past, but people who thought and reacted much like ourselves.

 

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
by Robert Heinlein | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

No, it is not that good. I use this first class piece of science fiction as a proxy for the whole genre which includes Asimov, Bradbury and the other giants. This one tells of a rebellion on the moon. Others stir the imagination with empires of a million worlds spanning the galaxy across a thousand years.

Science fiction allows the imagination to soar above the everyday reality of this world to everything which it might become. The genre overall tends to optimism. People face dangers and crises, but they resolve them with enterprise, courage and imagination, and learn a little more about themselves in the process.

 

Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
by David Hume | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

What a joy it is to watch an intelligent mind thinking. Hume asks how we know things, and starts with himself. He muses about the status of sensory inputs. What is it that happens when we think we see something? We suppose the presence of an external world as the source of the inputs to our senses, but what evidence have we other than those senses themselves?

Hume concludes that our knowledge is more tentative than we suppose. His Enquiry is thus an ultimate anti-system book, with a covert sub-text of liberalism. If knowledge is that hesitant, wherein comes the authority to insist upon systems and to impose them?

 

Nineteen Eighty-Four
by George Orwell | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Orwell brings an honesty to this, as to his other works. He hears them talk about equality and the rule of the people, but he sees that the reality is of squalor, oppression and torture. He gives us the language to speak about totalitarianism. Here is thoughtcrime, doublethink, and the use of language to prevent people even thinking unacceptable thoughts. Here is mass subservience to whatever ideas are currently fashionable.

He wrote of socialism's great experiment and the pigsty it created, but it remains true today. Here is news management, spin and the rewriting of history by the totalitarians still among us.