Recommended Background Reading

Sociology Economics Politics
Psychology
Biology
Chemistry
Physics
Mathematics
Philosophy

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Additional books on more specific topics
Sociology
Jared Diamond
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Barry Glassner
Culture of Fear
Tibor Machan
Generosity: Virtue in Civil Society
Julian Simon
Hoodwinking the Nation
Susan Blackmore
The Meme Machine
Francis Fukuyama
The Great Disruption
Dinesh D'Souza
The End of Racism
Virginia Postrel
The Future and Its Enemies
Tyler Cowen
In Praise of Commercial Culture
Joseph Lopreato, Timothy Crippen
Crisis in Sociology: The Need for Darwin
Kevin Kelly
Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World
Economics
Henry Hazlitt
Economics in One Lesson
David D. Friedman
Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life
N. Gregory Mankiw
Principles of Economics
Julian Simon
The Ultimate Resource 2
Friedrich A. Hayek
The Fatal Conceit
Milton Friedman
Free to Choose: A Personal Statement
James Buchanan
The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy
James Buchanan, Richard Musgrave
Public Finance and Public Choice: Two Contrasting Visions of the State
Amity Shlaes
How Taxes Drive Americans Crazy and What to Do About It
Walter E. Williams
More Liberty Means Less Government
Thomas Sowell
Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy
Politics
David Boaz
Libertarianism-A Primer
David Boaz
The Libertarian Reader
Thomas Sowell
The Vision of the Anointed
Murray Rothbard
For a New Liberty
Charles Murray
What It Means to Be a Libertarian
An elegant introduction to "small L" libertarianism.
Richard Epstein
Simple Rules for a Complex World
George Will
Restoration: Congress, Term Limits and the Recovery of Deliberative Democracy
R. J. Rummel
Death by Government
Stephane Courtois, Karel Bartosek, Andrzej Paczkowski, Jean-Louis Panne, Jean-Louis Margolin
The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression
James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay
The Federalist Papers
Randy Barnett
The Structure of Liberty
Frederic Bastiat
Selected Essays in Political Economy

Psychology
Robert Wright
The Moral Animal
Matt Ridley
The Origins of Virtue
David Buss
The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating
Edward O. Wilson
On Human Nature
Steven Pinker
The Language Instinct
David Buss (editor)
Sex, Power, Conflict: Evolutionary and Feminist Perspectives
Stuart A. Vyse
Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition
Michael Shermer, Stephen Jay Gould
Why People Believe Weird Things
Michael Shermer
How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science

Biology
Matt Ridley
The Red Queen
Richard Dawkins
The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins
The Blind Watchmaker
Matt Ridley
Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters
Jared Diamond
The Third Chimpanzee
Edward O. Wilson
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis

Chemistry
Hugh Aldersey-Williams
The Most Beautiful Molecule: The Discovery of the Buckyball

Physics
Brian Greene
The Elegant Universe
Stephen Hawking
A Brief History of Time
John Gribbin
Schrodinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality: Solving the Quantum Mysteries

Mathematics
John H. Holland
Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity
Robert Axelrod
The Evolution of Cooperation
Robert Axelrod
The Complexity of Cooperation
Larry Samuelson
Evolutionary Games and Equilibrium Selection
Jörgen Weibull
Evolutionary Game Theory
Peyton Young
Individual Strategy and Social Structure: An Evolutionary Theory of Institutions
Donald Saari
Basic Geometry of Voting
Jean-Francois Laslier
Tournament Solutions and Majority Voting

Philosophy
Edward O. Wilson
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
Daniel Dennett
Darwin's Dangerous Idea
John Locke
Two Treatises on Government
Robert Wright
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny


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