1. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932) – Concerned about the loss of your liberties? Don't worry; pop a soma and have some sex. Big Pharma's favorite dystopic novel, and the only one with FDA approval.
2. F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944) – When almost everyone, even in the so-called free countries, was in love with social-democratic tyranny, Hayek warned them of where they were heading.
3. Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power (in French 1945, in English 1948) – A poetic, beautifully written analysis of how the independent, intermediating powers had been obliterated by the relentless march of the centralized, "democratic" state.
4. G. M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary (1947) – Top Nazi monsters, now awaiting their verdicts as war criminals, seem like all-too-ordinary men: most of them seem intelligent, reasonable, and no more monstrous than the next guy, if perhaps a bit too inclined to believe that when the head of state gives an order, one must obey.
5. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) – The indispensable work on totalitarianism, from which we have taken not only essential understandings, but also much of the vocabulary we use to talk about it: Newspeak, doublethink, Big Brother. Indeed, to describe something as "Orwellian" now paints a picture worth more than a thousand words.
6. Anthony de Jasay, The State (1985) – Think there are sound "public interest" reasons for the state? Think again.
7. R. J. Rummel, Death by Government (1994) – Rummel compiles the data and reduces the twentieth century's moral depravity to the unadorned arithmetic of how many millions of "their own" citizens the various states have deliberately killed. Latest count: more than 200 million.
8. Timur Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification(1995) – Why does a tyranny survive? Perhaps because none of its resentful subjects appreciates how many others also oppose it, and therefore everyone is afraid to speak out and put his own neck in the guillotine.
9. Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002) – War and all the horrors that attend it exert a powerful, seductive psychological attraction for many of us, even though it is, when viewed close up, little different from vicious workaday criminality.
10. Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke (2008) – Think the great states that engaged in World War II were led by moral and intellectual paragons? Baker uses their own words to let them convict themselves of almost willfully plunging their subjects into unspeakable horrors.
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