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Comment by emerged | Hacker News Reader

I've long been looking for a wikipedia for political stances. So you can sort of choose your own adventure going deep into the set of perspectives and why people choose them.

Maybe building that would be impossible because the bias of curators would fill it with strawmen etc.

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You might be better off looking up the foundational texts for the various political philosophies. There's a lot of meaty and interesting stuff there. I'm partial to socialism, but reading the originals for liberalism, anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, etc is illuminating. People read (some of) this stuff in polisci degrees, but mostly they focus on quantitative micro stuff at the expense of the theories that motivate people. One thing polisci majors read is "Democracy in America" which was by a Frenchman taking a look at the new order post-revolution. As a socialist, I am partial to materialist views of history, and you can learn a lot by studying historical and scientific descriptions of the real conditions of societies. Usually they diverge quite significantly from whatever the ensconced and sheltered ruling class at the time likes to believe.

An incomplete but useful list of classics might be the list following. You may wish to start with wikipedia entries on them, or other sources, but reading the texts themselves is useful!

Plato: The Republic

Aristotle: Nichomachean Ethics; and Politics

Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan John Locke: Two Treatises of Government

Rousseau: The Social Contract

Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws De Toqueville: Democracy in America

Karl Marx: The Communist Manifesto; and Das Kapital.

JS Mill: On Liberty (the classic Utilitarian Enlightenment work)

John Rawls: A Theory of Justice (A hugely important work on rights and principles of political decisionmaking)

Robert Nozick: Anarchy, State and Utopia (a right-wing / libertarian oriented response to Rawls)

Michael Sandel: Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (critique of liberalism and introducing communitarianism)

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