Eric Neumayer, LSE, Department of Geography and Environment, e.neumayer@lse.ac.uk
Below I recommend ten books by eight authors of political theory and philosophy. Where possible, I provide links to freely available online versions of the books, but I highly recommend reading the printed books, particularly in those versions published by Cambridge University Press in their series Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought and by Oxford University Press in their series Oxford University Press World Classics.
Plato is often criticized as an early frontrunner of totalitarian thought and social engineering. With some justification. Read Plato's The Republic, particularly Part VI on Women and the Family and Part VII on The Philosopher Ruler.
Niccolo Machiavelli is the master of cunning and scheming for one's own benefit. How to stay on top without any concern for those below. Read Machiavelli's The Prince.
Thomas Hobbes was one of the greatest political philosophers. He was criticized for justifying absolute state power. But while he has no concept of separation of powers and of civil liberties, his Leviathan was sincerely conceived as serving the welfare of the ruled who would otherwise be exposed to anarchy, in which life is, in his famous words, "short, nasty and brutish". Read Hobbes's Leviathan and his De Corpore Politico.
John Locke and Montesquieu are the true founders of parliamentary democracy and the separation of powers as we know it. Read Locke's Two Treatises of Government and Montesquieu's The Spirits of Law.
Immanuel Kant was not primarily a political philosopher, but his categorical imperative provides the foundation for modern human rights and his sketch of a perpetual peace between liberal democracies continues to inspire modern conflict studies. Read Kant's Metaphysic of Morals and Perpetual Peace.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels provided a brilliant analysis of how capitalism is both liberating and oppressive at the same time. Read Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto.
Many Germans who lived through the Nazi period claimed that they could not have known that a National Socialist government would lead Germans to commit a war of aggression and destruction as well as genocide. A convenient lie as reading Hitler's Mein Kampf (My Struggle) shows. A political agenda of course, not political philosophy, making for a painful, but most revealing read of mass murder foretold.