Best Books on Socialism

“BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY” —Time“It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century.” —David Remnick, The New YorkerThe Nobel Prize winner’s towering masterpiece of world literature, the searing record of four decades of terror and oppression, in one abrid...

"One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades." —John Gray, New York Times Book ReviewHailed as "a magisterial critique of top-down social planning" by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail—sometimes catastr...

An unimpeachable classic work in political philosophy, intellectual and cultural history, and economics, The Road to Serfdom has inspired and infuriated politicians, scholars, and general readers for half a century. Originally published in 1944when Eleanor Roosevelt supported the efforts of Stalin, and Albert Einstein subscribed lock, stock, and ba...

Among the seminal texts of the 20th century, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a rare work that grows more haunting as its futuristic purgatory becomes more real. Published in 1949, the book offers political satirist George Orwell's nightmarish vision of a totalitarian, bureaucratic world and one poor stiff's attempt to find individuality. The brilliance of ...

A recent poll showed 43% of Americans think more socialism would be a good thing. What do these people not know? Socialism has killed millions, but its now the ideology du jour on American college campuses and among many leftists. Reintroduced by leaders such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the ideology manifests itself in starry-ey...

Spufford cunningly maps out a literary genre of his own . . . Freewheeling and fabulous. --The Times (London)Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the twentieth-century magic called the planned economy, which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism cou...

The Harvest of Sorrow is the first full history of one of the most horrendous human tragedies of the 20th century. Between 1929 and 1932 the Soviet Communist Party struck a double blow at the Russian peasantry: dekulakization, the dispossession and deportation of millions of peasant families, and collectivization, the abolition of private ownership...

This book must rank as the most devastating analysis of socialism yet penned. . . . An economic classic in our time.—Henry HazlittMore than thirty years ago F. A. Hayek said of Socialism: "It was a work on political economy in the tradition of the great moral philosophers, a Montesquieu or Adam Smith, containing both acute knowledge and profound wi...

This is the essay that overthrew the socialist paradigm in economics, and provided the foundation for modern Austrian price theory. When it first appeared in 1920, Mises was alone in challenging the socialists to explain how their pricing system would actually work in practice.Mises proved that socialism could not work because it could not distingu...

Darkness at Noon (from the German: Sonnenfinsternis) is a novel by the Hungarian-born British novelist Arthur Koestler, first published in 1940. His best-known work tells the tale of Rubashov, a Bolshevik 1917 revolutionary who is cast out, imprisoned and tried for treason by the Soviet government he'd helped create.Darkness at Noon stands as an un...