Thread by @AcademicAgent_X

In this thread I will recommend 20 books that will help you on your political journey to celebrate 20k followers. Before starting, goes without saying you should read these two by yours truly. Let us begin!

1. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind (2012)

Book that changed the way I saw everything. Even inspired another book of mine (Shakespeare’s Moral Compass, which Haidt himself praises on the back).

Much of my anti-theorycel orientation is owed to this understanding of humans.

2. Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain (1999)

Should be a foundational book for any British dissident. Many details on how elites have carefully conspired for decades to manage public perception and manufacture consensus when majority opinion has always been against them.

3. Tomislav Sunic, Against Democracy and Equality (2011)

Now to start really challenging some of your assumptions. Few better introductions to genuine rightwing thought. In fact if you read this and watched every single Jonathan Bowden lecture, you’d receive an education.

4. Pierre van den Berghe, The Ethnic Phenomenon (1987)

One of @bronzeagemantis ‘s favourite books which is how I found it. Shows the political importance of ethnicity and race through history and puts paid to the idea the British Empire was somehow “proto-woke”.

5. Thomas Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850)

It was Curtis Yarvin who got us all to read this and for that I’ll always be grateful to him. Carlyle is a force of nature. You’ve never experienced truly full-on rightwing assault unless you’ve read Carlyle here at his most grumpy.

6. Arthur Bryant, Unfinished Victory (1940)

At some point you must take the full redpill as regards WW2 etc. Many books out there, but this account from a no-nonsense Englishman before propaganda kicked in (he later bought every copy to hide it) is a shot between the eyes.

7. Hilaire Belloc, The Jews (1922)

You can’t go long without encountering this topic. The Forbidden Texts on this question are well known, but for me nothing quite hets to the heart of it like this one. Many interesting details of English history buried in here. Must read.

8. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy (1968)

The only book by a Marxist here My early scholarly work can be seen as the culmination of a decade-long struggle to come to terms with it. I have since come to see that he was right about much and I was coping. The NPC is real.

9. Carl Stephenson, Medieval Feudalism (1942)

I will keep recommending this book as the single best short introduction to feudalism and how it broke down. Particularly interesting is the emphasis he puts on its ethnic rather than religious origins.

10. James Burnham, The Machiavellians (1943)

Few books have influenced me more. This directly inspired both The Populist Delusion and the title of a previous book of mine The Defenders of Liberty (2020). Still the best one-shot destruction of liberal democratic myths going.

11. Guillaime Faye, Sex and Deciance (2014)

Faye is better known for his stuff on immigration and race in France, but this savage book is the best and most realist I have read on sex, gender, marriage and so on. Very thought-provoking and ultimately, I think, probably correct.

12. Kerry Bolton, Revolution from Above (2011)

Bolton has a lot of books, and often they provide a lot of good information but then don't quite hang together. Not so here, where he essentially exposes the fakery of the Cold War and capitalism vs. communism ideological struggle.

13. Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World (1934)

You have to be ready to read this. It'll melt your mind. If you're not ready you'll "bounce off it" and it'll mean nothing to you. When you are ready, it'll help complete your final transformation.

14. Sam Francis, Beautiful Losers (1993)

Leviathan and Its Enemies is his big theoretical work, but really you want Francis savage and unleashed. Essay on Martin Luther King Jr Day is worth the price of admission alone. A man about 30 years ahead of his time.

15. Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement (2020)

My oft-repeated phrase "Culture is Downstream from Law" was inspired by Caldwell's book which shows how 60s counter-culture and civil rights were top-down elite projects against the will of the people.

16. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (1926)

Once you get past that chapter on maths (the Irenicus's Dungeon of the book), you'll find a beautiful love poem to world history, sad and poinant, fully cosnisant of the threat that stands before us. Optimism is cowardice.

17. Scott Howard, The Transgender-Industrial Complex (2020)

Full-throated exposé on who is behind trans ideology, who funded it, with names and receipts, and even pictures of their faces. Believe it was banned at least once. Goldmine of information.

18. Theodore J.Kaczynski, Technological Slavery (2010)

The stuff on technology must be confronted: a settlement needs to be made somewhere, no matter where you lie on the question. Mass and scale remain a real problem. Also Uncle Ted's critique of leftwing psychology is vital.

19. Francis Parker Yockey, The Enemy of Europe (1948)

Friends of mine like @PeterRQuinones or @Semiogogue are unappy with my anti-Americanism; usually Evola is seen as the source. Actually, it was Yockey (and later Kerry Bolton) who drove home that the US was always the greater threat than the USSR.

20. Paul Gottfried, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt (2002)

The full implications of the therapuetic state are terrifying; we're already starting to see them. More than another book moaning about immigration, this penetrates deep; ideally read After Liberalism first.

This list is far from exhaustive. I've not chosen favourites but -- with a couple of exceptions -- the most accesssible one-shots. All the works by the authors I cover in the two books in the OP -- especially by Mosca, Pareto, Schmitt, Jouvenel, Vico, Gobineau -- are key.