The book that rests on my library coffee table is not Peter Lynch’s
Beating the Street or even my own, but several books by historian Paul Johnson on the makings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries… There is no better teacher than history in determining the future…. There are answers worth billions of dollars in a $30 history book. – Bill Gross
As we saw earlier, one good way to invest your time instead of reading newspapers is to read books about history.
As Jon Elster in Explaining Social Behavior suggests:
[…] I believe the best training for any social scientist is to read widely and deeply in history, choosing works for the intrinsic quality of the argument rather than the importance or relevance of the subject matter.
This list of history books is suggested by Jon Elster and what those books have in common is that their authors “combine utter authority in factual matters with an eye both for potential generalizations and for potential counterexamples to generalizations. By virtue of their knowledge [the authors] can pick out the “telling detail” as well as the “robust anomaly,” thus providing both stimulus and reality check for would-be generalists.
Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America.
Joseph Schumpeter – Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.
Arthur Young – Travels in France During the Years 1787, 1788, 1789.
Marc Bloch – Feudal Society.
Alexander Zinoviev – The Yawning Heights.
James Fitzjames Stephen – A History of the Criminal law of England.
E. P. Thompson – The Making of the English Working Class.
G. E. M. de Ste Croix – The Class Struggles in the Ancient Greek World.
Joseph Levenson – Confucian China and its Modern Fate.
Paul Veyne – Bread and Circuses.
Paul Veyne – The Roman Empire.
G. Lefebvre – Great Fear of 1789.
Keith Thomas – Religion and the Decline of Magic.
Alexis De Tocqueville – The Ancien Régime and the Revolution.
Gordon Wood – The Radicalism of the American Revolution.
Jean Egret – The French Prerevolution, 1787-1788.
Alan Taylor – The Internal Enemy.
Marc Bloch – Strange Defeat.
H. R. McMaster – Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam.
L. Gardner – Pay any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam.
Paul Langford – Public Life and the Propertied Englishman 1689–1798.
Martin Ostwald – From Popular Sovereignty to the Sovereignty
of Law: Law, Society, and Politics in Fifth-Century Athens
J. R. Pole – Political Representation in England and the Origins of the
American Republic.
J. Uglow – In These Times: Living in Britain through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793–1815.
Geoffrey Parker – Imprudent King: A New Life of Philip II
Peter Novick – That Noble Dream.
Peter Novick – The Holocaust in American Life.