A Library of Books That Really Changed Minds

To Kill A Mockingbird is not on the list

Every time I visit a bookshop, I’m struck again by the monolithically progressive feel of promoted books. This got me thinking: what are bookish contrarians reading, and how do they find interesting titles when bookshops are so homogeneous? I decided to ask my X followers.

If, I enquired, you used to believe all the conventional dogmas, and now don’t, what one book changed your worldview? I got an avalanche of replies. These quickly added up to a reading list so lively, eclectic and wide-ranging I’ve collated it here. (My inaugural deradicalisation book was Theodore Dalrymple’s Life at the Bottom, which several other readers agreed was influential for them too. Two other readers also mentioned Dalrymple’s Our Culture, What’s Left of it, and one Spoilt Rotten.)

I haven’t been absolutely comprehensive, because people are still adding to the list. But I’ve tried to draw out patterns. Philosophy, political science, faith, cultural critique, and a solid leavening of great works of fiction all attest to the transformative power of reading. The list also delineates, as it were in negative, the worldview to which “deradicalisation” in this sense is reacting. From fiction that centres the tragic nature of the human condition, through grim lessons of history and foreign-policy realism to Christian apologetics, and explicit critiques of progressivism, the picture is of quiet or not-so-quiet mutiny against blank-slate secularism, and all who sail in her.

I make no personal representations as to their wisdom or value, beyond saying each is on the list because least one person in my extended network found it transformative. I’ve taken the time (much more than expected) to compile it, because we live amid information super-abundance, awash in more books than anyone could read in a hundred lifetimes. My own reading tends to be selected based on whimsy, other books’ end-notes, personal recommendations, and whatever review titles land on the doormat. Of these, recommendations weigh most heavily.

I’ve begun with titles that got a single recommendation. There were loads! Then I moved on to those with two, then three or four and finally a Deradicalisation Hall of Fame, comprising books that multiple people said transformed the way they saw the world. And this was a striking collection, which challenges our polarised age with the a compelling case for the transformative power of long-form writing unflinchingly committed to truth over tribe.

Literature and fiction

Single mentions in the fiction category included Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudoun, which filmmaker Michael Nayna says “showed me how public morality gets leveraged for private interests”. There were some dystopian sci-fi classics - CS Lewis’ - That Hideous Strength and EM Forster’s The Machine Stops, along with classic treatments of the human condition: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and Henry James’ The Bostonians.

Also in the human-condition category comes Chaim Grade’s My Quarrel With Hersh Rasseyner, which a commenter reports “contains the most scathing denunciation of Western liberalism I have ever encountered in print.” Jung Chang’s family epic Wild Swans changed one reader’s worldview, while another reports that Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being conveyed the teaching that “No matter your position in life it can be stripped from by fate and the system”. Intriguingly, one respondent mentioned 2007 Nobel Prize-winner Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, comparatively little-referenced now but a highly subversive lens now on multiple woke dogmas.

There were also a few works of social-commentary fiction, including Robert Tressell’s The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists and Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole. And others mentioned more immediately political works, notably Lionel Shriver’s Mania, Michel Houellebecq’s Atomized, and Jean Raspail’s explosive The Camp of the Saints (long considered too incendiary to republish, but last year reprinted in a new English translation).

Political theory and criticism

There was a lot in this category. Several books denounced the post-war counterculture, including Heath and Potter’s The Rebel Sell: How Counterculture Became Consumer Culture, David Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, and Peter Collier and David Horowitz’s Destructive Generation. Lots more challenged aspects of leftism and, especially, the modern “woke” kind: Nick Cohen’s What’s Left and Ben Cobley’s The Tribe look specifically at the British left, while Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning’s The Rise of Victimhood Culture, Bernard Henri-Levy’s Barbarism with a Human Face, and Helen Pluckrose’s Cynical Theories examine aspects of this phenomenon internationally. Several more challenged specifically the stifling of these ideologies on speech, thought, and politics: Mick Hume’s Trigger Warning, Jonathan Rauch’s The Kindly Inquisitors, Pascal Bruckner’s Tyranny of Guilt and Tammy Bruce’s The New Thought Police.

There was a further cluster of books on the managerial elite and its discontents, notably John Carey’s seminal The Intellectuals and the Masses, Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals, James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, James Scott’s classic Seeing Like A State, and Catherine Liu’s Virtue Hoarders. Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement sits somewhere between challenges to wokeness and managerialism, while Theodore Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and its Future just wants to blow everything up. And Renaud Camus’ Enemy of the Disaster, while superficially about immigration, is also properly understood a challenge to post-national managerialism.

A few geopolitics and IR books got a mention, notably Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations, Eamonn Fingleton’s Jaws of the Dragon and Kenneth Waltz’s Man, the State, and War. John Glubb’s Fate of Empires probably belongs here, too, as does Ian Morris’ War: What Is It Good For?. Then there was a more general category of challenges to received opinion, including Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist, Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile, Michael Crichton’s climate-change-sceptic State of Fear, and Arlie Hochschild’s study of the Tea Party, Strangers in Their Own Land.

Philosophy and Faith

Some heavy-hitters here, including the Catechism of the Catholic Church and, for one respondent, The Book of Mormon. There’s also a mention each for Plato’s Dialogues, Cicero’s The Republic, and Alasdair Macintyre’s After Virtue. Several readers had their minds expanded by books exploring the fault-line between theism and atheism, or across faiths, with those named including David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions, Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel, Sam Harris’ The End of Faith, and Nabeel Qureshi’s Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus. Difficult to categorise between this category and psychology, meanwhile, is Ian McGilchrist’s The Master and his Emissary, a look at left- and right-brained thinking and how these shape culture at large.

Victorian judge, philosopher, statesman and critic of JS Mill James Fitzjames Stephen deradicalised someone with Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, an early critique of these ideas. GK Chesterton’s Heretics also changed someone’s worldview by taking early aim at modern sacred dogmas from a Catholic perspective, and Rene Guenon’s The Crisis of the Modern World did via “the perennial philosophy”. Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences changed someone’s worldview by locating the origin of modern woes in nominalism.

Several Christian authors changed worldviews by challenging contemporary dogmas, such as Carl Trueman in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Udo Middleman in Pro Existence, Robert Spritzer S.J. in Healing the Culture, and DC Schindler in Freedom from Reality. And one contributor had his or her (let’s be real, probably his) worldview transformed by Bronze Age Pervert’s Bronze Age Mindset.

Men, women, and family

This was a wide-ranging category, encompassing pro-family arguments such as Waite and Gallagher’s The Case for Marriage and Louise Perry’s The Case Against The Sexual Revolution, plus a roster of gender-critical and feminist texts including Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls, Victoria Smith’s Hags, Janice Raymond’s classic The Transsexual Empire, and John Colapinto’s biography of poor, mutilated David Reimer, As Nature Made Him: The Boy who was Raised as a Girl.

There were also some contrarian and even anti-feminist ones: Christina Hoff Somers’ Who Stole Feminism got a mention, as did Susan Faludi’s Stiffed and Carrie Gress’ The Anti-Mary Exposed.

Science

The theme here is probably books in which science challenges received dogma: Michael Ghiglieri’s The Dark Side of Man and Vincent Sarich’s Race opened eyes by questioning liberal views on violence and racial differences, while Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene did so by propagating an amoral view of human survival. Ullica Segerstrale’s Defenders of Truth: the Sociobiology Debate and Robert Nisbet’s The Sociological Tradition both broadened people’s understandings of these disciplines, and how they interact with ideology.

Psychology

Nick Chater’s The Mind is Flat: The Illusion of Mental Depth and The Improvised Mind delivered, for one reader, an “Absolute sucker punch to much of the bunkum about ‘the unconscious’ that permeates western humanities.” Robert Jay Lifton’s Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism offered another insight into the history of political brainwashing.

History, biography, memoir

Homer’s The Iliad could sit under literature, but it’s oral history originally, so I’m putting it here. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel also transformed one worldview, as did Hannah Arendt’s classic exploration of the Holocaust, The Banality of Evil.

Several people recommended conservative critiques of modern policy and governance, including Peter Hitchens’ A Brief History of Crime, Vincent Cannato’s The Ungovernable City and Jared Taylor’s Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure Of Race Relations In Contemporary America. Another, Emma Griffin’s Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution, opened eyes by recounting the Industrial Revolution from the perspective of the working classes at the sharp end of its sometimes brutal transformations. PJ O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores redpilled someone, by lifting the lid on how American government actually works.

In the memoir category we found Lee Kuan Yew’s From Third World to First, David Horowitz’s Radical Son, and JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy.

Business/finance

There weren’t many books in this category, which maybe says something about my internet community; or maybe it says something about economics books. Ron Paul’s End the Fed changed one mind though by calling for, well, ending the fed. Milton Friedman one more, arguing for free markets in Free To Choose, Capitalism and Freedom, and Paul Heyne opened a set of eyes by explaining key economic concepts in The Economic Way of Thinking.

Deradicalisation Honourable Mentions

Books that were mentioned twice included, on the literary front, Tolstoy’s War And Peace and Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. Political theory and criticism included Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy: The God that Failed, Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political, Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, James Bartholemew’s The Welfare State We’re In, Michael Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics and other essays, and and Helen Joyce’s superb Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality.

Grand histories of Western culture included Tom Holland’s epic Dominion and Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual.

Deradicalisation Runners-Up

Several people recommended, on the literary front, the poetry, essays & memoir of Czeslaw Milosz. Four also namechecked Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, a bleak allegory of Soviet political terror.

Roger Scruton was the philosopher of choice, having changed minds with An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture, A Political Philosophy, Soul of the World, and Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands. Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life surely also belongs broadly under philosophy, with three mentions, and the one science title among runners-up was Charles Murray’s still-controversial The Bell Curve, also with three.

The rest in this category were, broadly, political theory and criticism: Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (four mentions), Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds, Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed (three each), plus three namechecks for Christopher Lasch , two for The Revolt of the Elites and one for The Culture of Narcissism. There were two women among these runners-up: Abigail Shrier, who changed four respondents’ worldview with her searing exposé of child gender transition, Irreversible Damage, and yours truly, though I suspect this was more an effect of the respondent filter bubble than any absolute impact.

The Hall of Worldview-Changing Fame

The real giants of deradicalisation stood out pretty quickly. But they weren’t who I expected at all! It contains philosophers, great works of fiction, stubbornly truth-seeking scientists, social critics, and one foundational holy book (you can probably guess which one). But there aren’t many thinkers here who I’d characterise as polemical social conservatives. Instead, overall, what characterises the Hall of Fame is intellectual integrity. I certainly don’t agree with all these worldviews, but in each case the commitment to it is both profound, and worked out at length and with a commitment to truth as the author sees it.

I think there are lessons here, both on the transformative power of books but also on which books change minds, and how. There’s plenty of room in the bookshop for titles aimed at people who have already made up their minds, and want to feel good about it; but the ones that really change the world bring their readers along, to new places.