Friday, December 12, 2014

Ambergris & Constitutional Prophecy


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            The first constitution to govern what is now North Carolina, other than the original royal charter, was written for hire by the political philosopher John Locke, who served as secretary to the colony’s Lords Proprietors.  These rich Englishmen directed their draftsman to open with a statement of purpose: “that we may avoid erecting a numerous democracy.”  Government of the Carolina Colony would belong to its owners, not those who merely lived there – especially not the hereditary serfs and “negro slaves” that Locke’s constitution excluded from ownership or government.

It was an ironic moment for the theorist of natural freedom and self-government, who later founded a theory of human equality on the ways that people are “promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature.”  It makes the Lords Proprietors’ hired pen the perfect namesake for Art Pope’s John Locke Foundation, which also blends the rhetoric of liberty and equality with a strong commitment to keeping ensuring that those who own the state also rule it.

Locke’s phrases sometimes swam through my head at Moral Mondays rallies in 2013 and 2014.   There we were, still trying to erect a numerous democracy.  We were promiscuous in our equality, the kind of proud motley Carolina that generations of white supremacists feared.  But we were also still unequal among ourselves, marked by lines of wealth and privilege, and subject to laws that made the state less democratic than before: Locke’s Lords Proprietors would not have been entirely displeased by Thom Tillis’s North Carolina.

**
You don’t have to be, like me, a constitutional lawyer and political theorist to think of constitutions at a Forward Together rally.  Constitutional language is sacred text in the mouth of Reverend William Barber, head of North Carolina’s NAACP and the visionary of Moral Mondays and the Forward Together movement.  As those who have so much as dropped in on a rally know, Reverend Barber works with two canons: one religious, the other and civic.  The Bible resonates everywhere in his speeches.  “Without vision the people will perish,” he quotes from Proverbs, and you realize that everything you have been hearing is in cadences and phrases that English speakers are trained to vibrate to, whether we are churched or unchurched. 

But the civic canon really catches me.  When Reverend Barber raised the roof at 2014’s Netroots Nation, an annual gathering of progressive activists, he opened with several minutes of provisions from North Carolina’s 1868 constitution.  This Reconstruction document established a principle of equal and universal citizenship to the state for the first time.  It outlawed slavery forever in the state.  Its drafters deliberately echoed the Declaration of Independence, declaring it self-evident that all people are created equal.  They also added “the enjoyment of the fruits of their own labor” to the people’s inalienable rights, a potent statement of the anti-slavery principle.  The Reconstruction constitution took Thomas Jefferson’s words, the fine phrases of a slaveholder, and applied them to everyone – restoring them to their right meaning, or, if you prefer, dismantling the master’s house with the master’s tools.

Constitutional language is living tissue in Reverend Barber’s fierce, looping rhetoric.  The speeches move in several dimensions at once.  They interpret the history of Reconstruction, interracial fusion politics, and white reaction, following time’s arrow in a kind of mythic loop, in which the present becomes the past, a second Reconstruction in the Civil Rights movement and Barack Obama’s election, a second Redemption (white supremacists’ favored term for their attack on Reconstruction) in the Tea Party and North Carolina’s right-wing legislature.  The language loops, too, phrases and images recurring and gathering force with each pass.  These cycles of ever more forceful recitation come to suggest an upward spiral, in the energy of the repeating words and the historical promise of the echoing events, until both explode into prophecy, which is not a promise of help from above but a call to act where you stand.  In dark times, the speeches manage to say that history is on your side, that language itself is on your side.

North Carolina’s Reconstruction constitution was written with the ashes and blood of the Civil War still present to the minds of its authors.  Some of those authors were freedmen, recently enslaved people like Abraham Galloway, one of the Reconstruction constitution’s 15 black authors, who freed himself by escaping to Canada in 1857, then returned to North Carolina as a Union spy and abolitionist tactician during the Civil War.  It is in part a peace treaty and document of surrender, abjuring secession forever and thanking God for the preservation of the Union.  It is a victor’s document, but one written to enshrine the rights of those its own canon – the Declaration and the US Constitution of 1789 – ignored.   Today it is the civic sacred text of a movement of underdogs, the charter of a dream deferred.

Civic sacred texts, like the Christian Word, carry the memory of blood and wounds.  The idea of equal citizenship took on life and power among slaveholders, and among settlers who expelled and slaughtered Native Americans, confident that both God and history were on their side.  Equal citizenship for some came with excluding others from citizenship altogether, either as enslaved laborers in the South or as inconvenient savages on the frontier.  Yet the lived reality of political equality among the oppressors that worked the ideal ever deeper into American myth, imagination, and practice.  This reality drenched the fine phrases of equal citizenship in the blood of lynchings and massacres, associating them indelibly with what we have learned to call white privilege.  But these same phrases are also the civic catechism of Reverend Barber’s peaceful, democratic, and entirely unfinished revolution.   
 
            **
           
            How can slaveholders’ words anchor a language of prophecy and redemption?  (I am deliberately using redemption, the word that white supremacists used for their attack on Reconstruction, because it is also the right word for progressive constitutional prophecy.)  How does the record of hypocrisy and violence call Moral Mondays marchers – as Reverend Barber put it in his refrain at the mass rally of February, 2014 – to higher ground?  What are we doing when we treat a constitution as a sort of civic scripture?

            A constitution may do what its name suggests: constitute – form, make up – not just a system of government but a people.  A people, of course, is partly an imagined thing, a way of thinking and seeing.  When you imagine that you are part of such a people, constitutional language offers to tell you something about who you are.  The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s used such language to say, “As Americans, you are already committed to equality.  Now it is time to be true to yourselves.”  This is arguably creepy and too intimate, reaching inside you to make you someone else, while claiming not to change but to perfect you.  But the other side of that creepiness is transubstantiation.  This is the language of redemption, of being born again into the self you were meant to be, the self you always were, but secretly or imperfectly.

            This redemptive attitude treats the glittering generalities of constitutional language, and of the Declaration of Independence, as a Word yet to be made Flesh. 
But it is not just a matter of borrowing religion for politics.  Something is happening in common between the two.

How do I, a secular marcher behind Reverend Barber, hear the language of prophecy and redemption?  There is a tradition in philosophy that holds that all religion is a kind of Word yet to be made Flesh: that its promises of equality, dignity, and harmony among people express human possibility that has not yet become real.  If religion is a human creation, this tradition says, then it must be explained by human wishes and human capacities, not supernatural sources.  Seen in this way, constitutional prophecy and redemption are not displaced forms of religious passion.  Instead, both constitutional and religious prophecy express the human knowledge that we contain more world than we have yet made and inhabited.  They are ways of naming and imagining a world we know we should make, a world we want, which we have not yet found the way to create.  It is a world of equality and inalienable rights, where there is no slavery and the fruits of your labor are your own.

            A constitution, then, is a line of tension connecting the world that exists with other worlds that might be possible, which we name to try to imagine them, and imagine to try to bring them nearer, or at least to see more clearly the distance between their ideals and the unredeemed present.   We use words to form this line of tension, to name the distance between worlds, if not exactly to measure it.

            **
            This is all true.  To my mind, it is powerful.  But there is a danger in redemptive imagination that is part of its power: it gathers all history into covenant, all injustice into reminders of a promise betrayed.  It can obscure the waste, suffering, and horror of past and present, so that its gloss becomes both the highest truth about moments of felt possibility, but also quite inadequate, even false, to the lives where we spend most of our time.  It also misses the irony and strangeness of a world that is too bizarre to be part of any redemptive vision of Millennium, civic or religious.  And it misses wrongs that will never be redeemed, whose nature is immune to redemption.
           
            I don’t intend any criticism of the Forward Together movement here.  I just mean to reflect on what happens to me when my inner dark echoes so fully to civic pieties that I forget the rest.

            John Locke’s Carolina constitution, adopted in March of 1669, may be the strangest fundamental law ever to govern a piece of North America.  It proposed to populate the new colony with “signories,” “landgraves,” and “caciques,” and more familiar feudal categories such as baronies and manors, under the government of a palatine and his council of seven Lords Proprietors.  It is a plan for hereditary aristocracy, with precise and unalterable proportions between political authority and land ownership.  Ratios of acreage, office, and power interlock and turning back on themselves like an Escher drawing.   Locke’s baroque scheme strikes the modern ear as more Dungeons & Dragons than Constitutional Convention. 

Indeed, there was no convention, just a board meeting.  Political governance was corporate governance in the new colonies.  The labor in Carolina was to be done by a hereditary class of serfs called leet-men, who lived under the direct governance of their landed lords (who would administer law to the lower orders in “leet-courts”).  Below them were “negro slaves,” who were not just legal subordinates, but property, at the whims of their owners.  None of these classes of laborers were part of the body politic formed by the Fundamental Constitutions, which opened, “We, the lords and proprietors … have agreed to this … form of government.”  That is quite a contrast to “We the people,” the phrase that famously opened the US Constitution in 1789.  Most of the people in Locke’s Carolina were not the People, but the help, or just the stuff.  This constitution was intended to shut down all future democracy “in the most binding ways that can be devised.”

How do I feel about it?  I feel a macabre fascination, which I suppose is why I’ve worked this essay back around to it.  And, honestly, I find John Locke’s constitution funny.  It is funny because it is so rococo, a form of racialized exploitation and political tyranny done up in ruffs and lace, a slave state from the Eastern Lands of Game of Thrones.  Daenerys Targaryen would have liberated John Locke’s Carolina.  Or maybe it’s not funny, but I wish it were.  I wish it were because I wish we could laugh away the absurdities of race, wish that all undemocratic and arbitrary power were all nakedly preposterous as what Locke proposed.  But of course what he wrote didn’t seem at all preposterous to him, or, more to the point, to “we the lords and proprietors.”  The world you have to change always seems obdurate and halfway natural, while the injustices of faraway times and places feel fundamentally insubstantial: they should disappear like the Wizard of Oz, with a tug of a curtain.     

In the event, Locke’s constitution didn’t last long.  It had mostly faded from relevance by 1700.  That said, Locke’s constitution was widely printed and circulated in the colony for three decades, and was fundamental law in those strange and turbulent years (which spanned a restoration and revolution in the home country). Later Carolina constitutions are comfortingly familiar.  The phrase “We the people” would not open a North Carolina constitution until Reconstruction, but already in 1776 the newly independent colonists declared that “all political power is vested in and derived from the people only.”  That constitution is studded with personal rights and protections against abuse of power.  The trick is that these apply only to “freemen.”  It is a freeman’s constitution, meaning, mostly, a white man’s covenant.  A form of democracy had come, but those who were left out of it now did not even merit a mention, unlike the leetmen and slaves that Locke’s constitution had called out by name.  Only silence marked their exclusion in 1776, the unspoken implication that “freemen” had an opposite. 

This sort of state constitution formed the template for the Supreme Court’s notorious1858 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which declared shortly before the Civil War that the US Constitution should be read to mean “we the white people,” the Declaration of Independence to declare “all white men are created equal,” and white supremacy was the implicit, permanent commitment of American nationhood.  This, of course, is what Reverend Barber’s beloved 1868 constitution was written to destroy.  In a sense, it lasted only thirty years, until the violent reassertion of white supremacy, constitutionalized in amendments that set up literacy tests for voters – except those who had been eligible to vote in 1867, that is, white people who were “freemen” under the old, slavery constitution.  Those amendments brought a poll tax as well.  This was the constitution of Jim Crow and separate but equal, which the Second Reconstruction displaced.

**
Locke’s constitution – there, I can’t let go of it! – holds that any ambergris found on the Carolina coast belongs to the Lords Proprietors of the colony.  Ambergris, for those who don’t recall, is a potent gray mass produced in the digestive tracts of sperm whales.  Before the magic of chemistry, it was a major raw material for perfume.  A rare ingredient for a luxury good, it was prized and costly.

            It is a telling little irony.  When Locke described the origins of property in his most influential work, the Second Treatise of Government, he offered ambergris as proof that the world primordially belonged to everybody and nobody, but a person could make a part of it his own by taking hold of it.  Isn’t it true, he wrote, that a walker who finds ambergris on the beach becomes its owner, and demonstrates this ancient, basic human power to make nature into property?  Well, not so much in Carolina.

            That small betrayal of Locke’s own general principles in his Carolina constitution might stand for many larger betrayals.  Locke was a theorist of human equality, which, as noted, he described nature as having spread “promiscuously” throughout the species.  He argued that anyone who tried to get you in his absolute power had, in effect, declared war on you, and that you could kill him in self-defense.  Unless, apparently, you were a “negro slave” in Carolina and he your master.  In that case, his absolute power over you was part of the constitution, which has no more room for promiscuous equality than for a numerous democracy.

            **
            These kinds of inconsistencies capture my imagination partly because, as a constitutional lawyer, I belong to a strange subculture whose members sometime imagine principles as Archimedean points: if we could just find their true meaning, we could shift the world.  We are trained to go after inconsistencies the way acupuncturists go after blocked meridians.

            But that is not all.  Here again, the redemptive idea is making itself felt.  If only we could overcome these betrayals and errors, it suggests, we could make things right, as they were always meant to be.  This is the implicit idea of the whole tradition of civic preaching that Reverend Barber echoes, and which goes back to Abraham Lincoln and the abolitionists, and runs through Martin Luther King, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and others who portrayed the first Emancipation and the second Reconstruction as redeeming the country’s original promise.  This is an American story with a Christian template: original sin destroys what should be perfect harmony; only a sacrifice of blood, faith, and patience can redeem it and restore the primal design.  Those who like to say this is a Christian country may not realize exactly how right they are.  They should be answered: yes, conceived in sin and redeemed in blood.

            But even the story of redemption makes it all too neat.  Powerful as it has been as a tool of emancipation, it misses something else, something the Declaration of Independence and the Reconstruction constitution conceal, but Locke’s constitution lays bare.  The settlements that became the United States did not begin as an imperfect democracy, struggling to work itself pure.  They began as a project of settler colonialism, building a new world of economic opportunity for free settlers and the investors at home – the Lords Proprietors of the Carolina Colony.  The American Revolution took the home investors out of the picture and consolidated self-government for free settlers – but still, and for a very long time, on the backs of enslaved people and the lands of expelled peoples.  The exclusion and oppressions of American history began not as original sin but as what conservative constitutional theorists call original meaning.  Steps toward equality and genuine democracy have not have been corrections to a founding mistake, but revolutionary reallocations of power and privilege.  They radicalized the idea of citizenship that white male settlers claimed for themselves with their revolution; but in radicalizing it, they transformed it, because exclusion and oppression were built into it from the start and by design – albeit over the objections of genuine democrats like the immigrant Thomas Paine and the free black radical David Walker.

            What does this mean?  Well, for one, that an adequate Reconstruction needs to be just that – a deep engagement with the roots of continuing inequality in inherited wealth, economic structure, and institutions such as schools and the criminal justice system.  That we are fooling ourselves if we believe the key is already hidden in our old principles, if we could just get them right – no matter how potent and attractive this idea is, no matter how much partial good we can manage with it.  That our problem is not just to perfect our democracy, but to decolonize our national life.  The constitution that would do that has not been written – yet.
           




Monday, December 8, 2014

11 Theses on the Anthropocene

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1.     It is not mainly a scientific or empirical event, even though it has, ironically, landed in the stratigraphers’ bailiwick.  Instead, announcing to Anthropocene is a political and ethical call to take responsibility for the world we participate in making.

2.     It is neither optional nor reversible.  (E.O. Wilson is writing a book on getting out of, or reversing, the Anthropocene.)  Part of the reason is in the fact of our impact on the world (the Anthropocene condition), but just as important is awareness that we are making the world in ways that involve it inextricably in human practices and human meanings (the Anthropocene insight).  This bell cannot be unrung.

3.     The Anthropocene will intensify existing inequalities, from vulnerability to rising seas and expanding diseases (Bangladesh) to having your traditional lands leased out from under you to feed China (much of Africa).  Because these inequalities will be inscribed on the landscape itself, it will be perennially tempting to think of them as natural, inevitable, or what people deserve/had coming.  A constant political challenge in the Anthropocene will be to remember that what “nature does to us” is better regarded as something people do to one another.

4.     As an overarching political and ethical problem, it will be contested along familiar lines.  Not surprisingly, there is a neoliberal Anthropocene in the economize-everything-and-forget-wilderness movement (spurring division in the Nature Conservancy and driving attention-getters like the Breakthrough Institute) and there is a new socialist Anthropocene in Naomi Klein’s interpretation of climate change (This Changes Everything).

5.     Anthropocene politics will remain a distinctly human practice (contrary to some proposals for post-humanist and new-animist approaches to political life), but it need not be human-centered in the sense of restricting its concern to human beings.  One of its most important elements will be constantly revisiting our relation to and engagement of the non-human world

6.     Pre-Anthropocene treatments of the non-human world have been either empiricist (what is it) or idealist (what does it mean)?  An Anthropocene approach will have to overcome this opposition, because the ways we participate in making the world what it is will both reflect and shape what we take it to mean.  Fact and meaning are a single circuit in the human-nature continuum. 

7.     The Anthropocene will not be apocalyptic: it will be a time of perennial slow crisis.  At least for the next century (and how much further can we pretend to see?), most people will be less vulnerable to nature than most people have been for most of history; but systems will falter and fail, the ground will shift, and everything will be harder.  However strange it becomes, it will seem basically normal, and not adapting too readily to that normality will be part of the political and ethical work.

8.     Anthropocene economics will have to accept that there is no longer such a thing as an “externality” – the basic concept in today’s environmental economics – because there is no “outside” of either ecology or economics.  The two are increasingly a single system.  While the neoliberal lesson from this is that all the world must be economized, the alternative is that political and ethical judgments are necessary about the value of life itself.

9.     Previous political thought has been Holocene: it has been able to assume the stability of nature, the definiteness of its meaning, and the distinction between the human and the natural.  Anthropocene political thought can assume none of these, and must take them all on as questions and projects.

10. Literary, political, and philosophical history will not become irrelevant, but we will read it differently, finding the ways in which we have always been Anthropocene, without realizing it.  Our past will appear in a different light, with more resources than we had realized for the future.

11. Environmentalism does not end with the Anthropocene, but it changes form.  Instead of a set of topical areas, it becomes a way of asking questions about everything, from the energy economy to the transport system to the aesthetics of the global atmosphere.  It will ask of each of these: What kind of way is this of inhabiting the earth, and how does that habitation shape both the world and the consciousness of the inhabitants?

Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Syllabus for Past & Future of Capitalist Democracy

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The Past and Future of Capitalist Democracy


Fall 2014
Duke University
Professor Jedediah Purdy
Office hours will be announced weekly

            CB indicates materials available through our electronic coursebook, i.e., our Sakai site.  Other assignments are from books that have been ordered and are also widely available used.  Please buy the correct edition so that we are all working from the same page in discussion.  A list of assigned books appears at the end of the syllabus.  

            Most weeks we will spend both sessions working through the full assignment, so you should plan to have read the assignment by Monday.  In the first, preliminary week, we have a divided assignment.

            Sixty percent (60%) of the grade will be based on a final paper of 35-45 pages.  The remainder will be based on class discussion.


Week 1: Introductory Themes
            First session:
*Francis Fukuyama, Introduction to The End of History and the Last Man Introduction (xi-xxiii, 39-51, 71-81, 131-36, 199-208) (CB)

            Second session:
*Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century (CB) 291-96, 333-35, 347-58, 407-09, 416-18, 422 (first paragraph only)
            *Wolfgang Streeck, Buying Time, 3-10, 15-20 (CB)
            *Streeck, “How Will Capitalism End?” 50-64 (note this is only part of the posted essay)
            *Mark Lilla, “The Truth about Our Libertarian Age”
            *Will Steffen, et al., “The Anthropocene”

Week 2: The State and the Problem of Order
            *Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan Introduction, Chs.6, 8, 10-21, 29-31, 46-7, Conclusion
            *Hobbes, Elements of Law, Book II, Ch.10, §8 (CB)
             *Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Book One, Chs. I-III (CB)
           
Week 3: Sociability and Sovereignty
            *Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Basic Political Writings (Hackett)
“Discourse on the Origin of Inequality,” pp. 27-92
“On the Social Contract,” pp. 155-252


Week 4: Adam Smith and the Theory of Sympathy
*David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Oxford Philosophical Texts) Section 1 – Section 5 (pp. 73-118), Conclusion – Appendix 3 (pp. 145-175)

*Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Liberty Classics)
            Part I, pp. 9-26, 50-66
Part II, pp. 67-71, 82-92
Part III, pp. 109-113, 126-131, 149-150, 171-178
Part IV, pp. 179-193
Part VI, pp. 212-217, 227-237
Part VII, pp. 265-266


Week 5: The Theory of Commercial Society
*Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (Liberty Classics)
Book I: Ch. 1-2 (all); Ch. 3: §1-2; Ch. 4: §1-4, 13-18; Ch. 5: §1-10; Ch. 6: §1-9; Ch. 7: all; Ch. 8: §1-28, 36-48; Ch. 9: §10-11, 13, 20, 24; Ch. 10: §1-3; Part I (page 116): §1-2, 5-9, 11-12, 17-30; Part II (page 135): §1-7, 12-13, 16-25, 27-33, 36-38, 40-43, 45-46, 48, 51-54, 58-61; Ch. 11: Conclusion (pages 264-7).
Book II: Intro; Ch. 1 (all); Ch. 3: §1-20, 25-32, 42.
Book III: Ch. 1 (all); Ch. 2: §1-4, 7, 9-21; Ch. 3: §1-12; Ch. 4: 1-7, 10-13, 15-19, 24.
Book IV: Ch. 1: §1-10, 35-45; Ch. 2: §1-31, 37, 40-45; Ch. 3: Part II (page 488): §1-3, 8-13; Ch. 8: §1-2, skim §3-14, 25-32, 47-51, 54.
Book V:  Ch. 1: Part I: §1 (p.688), §15-19, 39-44; pages 708-728 (incl. §14); §1-61 (pages 758-788); §1-19 (pp. 788-799) ; Conclusion (on p. 814-6) ; Ch. 2: §1-7 (817-9), 13, 18-21; Part II, §1-7, §12-18 (on pp. 831-3), §1-3 (on pp. 864-5); §1-9 (869-73), 19-20, 31-34, 43-44, 66 (on p. 899), 69, 73-4, 76, 78


Week 6: Democracy in America (and generally)
*Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Mayer, trans.
George Lawrence (Harper and Row)
Vol. I
Introduction
Part 1, Chs. 3, 4; Ch. 5, pp. 61-70, 86-99
Part 2, Chs. 4; Ch. 5, pp. 196-202, 218-231; Ch. 6-9; Ch. 10, pp. 327-332; 340-63



Week 7: Tocqueville, continued:

Vol. II
Preface
Part I, Chs. 1-3; 5
Part II, Chs. 1-9; 13; 17; 20
Part III, Chs. 1; 8-12; 19; 21
Part IV, entire

Week 8: John Stuart Mill, Progress, and Liberty
            *On Liberty, 1-128

Week 9: Progress and Nature, cont’d
            *Mill, The Subjection of Women, 471-582
            *Mill, ”Nature” (CB)

 Week 10: Liberal Modernity and Political Economy
*Mill, from On Liberty and Other Essays, Principles of Political Economy (CB) and Chapters on Socialism (CB)

Weeks 11: Marx, alienation, materialism, and politics
            *Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” 143-45 in Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader
            *Marx, excerpts from “On the Jewish Question” (CB)
            *Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (CB)
            *Marx, “The German Ideology” (146-200)
            *Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party” (473-99)
            *Marx, “Inaugural Address to the Working Men’s Association” (512-19)
           
Week 12: Marx and the dynamics of capitalism
            *Marx, Capital: Volume I & Volume III (294-442)


Week 13: Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals













Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Richard Tuck, ed., Cambridge University Press)
ISBN: 9780521567978

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Basic Political Writings (Hackett, 2d. ed.)
ISBN-13: 978-1603846738

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Oxford Philosophical Texts)
ISBN-13: 978-0198751847

Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Liberty Fund)
ASIN: B009CN605K

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Liberty Fund, two volumes)
ISBN-13: 978-0865970069 (Vol. I)
ISBN-13: 978-0865970076 (Vol. II)

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (J.P. Mayer, ed., Harper Perennial)
ISBN-13: 978-0061127922

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays (Oxford World’s Classics)
ISBN-13: 978-0199535736

The Marx-Engels Reader (Robert C. Tucker, ed., 2d. ed.) (Norton)
ISBN-13: 978-0393090406

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (Oxford World’s Classics)
ISBN-13: 978-0199537082