Learn politics
This page is a staged plan for learning political theory from scratch, built for someone who has never taken a politics class. It moves in a fixed order: first the vocabulary that political argument assumes you already know, then the ideologies that group those arguments into rival packages, then the individual thinkers and the books they wrote, and finally the primary texts themselves. Each ideology here is stated as its own advocates would state it, followed by the strongest objections its critics raise, because the point of the stage is to understand positions rather than to score them. Every concept, ideology and thinker links to real sources, mostly the Stanford and Internet Encyclopedias of Philosophy, Wikipedia and the Avalon Project, so you can check any claim and read further.
Stage 1. Learn the vocabulary
Finish this stage able to define eighteen core political terms in your own words and to say what turns on each of them.
Take the concepts in the order listed: the first six build on one another, and the rest can be read singly. Read the definition here, then one cited source, then close both and write two sentences from memory. Where a concept has a contested edge, as liberty, equality and justice all do, write down both readings rather than picking one, because the arguments you meet later are usually arguments between them.
Stage 2. Map the ideologies
Finish this stage able to state each ideology's core claims in a form its own advocates would accept, and to name the strongest objection made against it.
Read each summary and its core claims, then at least one cited source. The test to apply at the end of each is whether someone who holds the position would recognise your account of it. Read them in pairs, because they are answers to each other: liberalism and conservatism on inherited institutions, socialism and social democracy on what to do about markets, republicanism and liberalism on what freedom means, anarchism against all of them on whether a state can be justified at all.
Stage 3. Meet the thinkers
Finish this stage with a working map of fifteen thinkers: their dates, the problem each was responding to, and which of their books to read first.
Read them in the order listed, which is roughly chronological, because most of them are answering someone earlier. Locke answers Hobbes; Burke and Wollstonecraft answer the same revolution from opposite sides; Marx answers the liberal economists; Rawls sets the terms his critics then argue against. Read at least one cited source per thinker before starting their primary texts in the next stage.
Stage 4. Go to the sources
Finish this stage having read one complete primary text rather than a summary of one.
Start with a short one. Machiavelli's Prince, Rousseau's Social Contract, Mill's On Liberty and the Communist Manifesto can each be read in a few sittings. Hobbes' Leviathan, Locke's Second Treatise, Aristotle's Politics and Tocqueville's Democracy in America are longer and reward reading one book or part at a time rather than the whole. Every text listed here with a Project Gutenberg link is public domain and free in full, and the Avalon Project holds the founding documents. Read the primary text before any commentary on it, and keep a note of the passages you disagree with.
