Columbia Taught Me Socialism. These Books Taught Me the Truth.

Here are the 7 books that destroyed everything I learned at Columbia

At Columbia University, we read every socialist theorist under the sun—from Theodor Adorno to Jacques Derrida to Frantz Fanon to Karl Marx himself.

But we never read the other side of the aisle.

In colleges across the nation, socialism has become the dominant ideology—and by no accident, either. English departments teach almost exclusively far-left theorists, and as a result, the majority of students emerge from humanities departments with staunch socialist convictions that carry over into their adult lives.

I’ve always been a capitalist—my parents’ abysmal experience living under socialism in the Soviet Union overrode every pro-socialist argument I heard from my professors—but until fairly recently, I’d never explored the intellectual underpinnings of capitalism in the same way that I was forced to dive into socialism during my undergraduate and graduate years. So over the past year, I’ve made it my mission to read as many liberal-minded (in the classical liberal sense!) theorists as possible, and I’d love to share some of my favorites with you all today.

So if you believe in capitalism—or are just curious to learn from intellectuals who aren’t radical Marxists—here are seven books that will get you started in understanding the pillars of capitalism and a free society.

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1) Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman

While somewhat dated, Capitalism and Freedom provides a broad overview of capitalism and how it plays out in different parts of our society—from racial politics to education.

For supplemental reading, I recommend Friedman’s well-known 1970 essay The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits. There was a lot of buzz after the social revolutions of the 1960s about the “social responsibility” of businesses, and Friedman does a great job demonstrating that a profit-driven model will actually yield the most social good.

2) The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek

Across the ocean, Friedman found a close ally in Hayek, whose book The Road to Serfdom dives into the dangers of planned economies. As an increasing number of academics developed socialist proclivities in response to the rise of Nazism in Germany, Hayek made it his duty to challenge the notion that socialism was necessarily opposed to Nazism by highlighting the similarities between the two ideologies. In The Road to Serfdom, he argues that the Nazis hated the socialists not because of their economic convictions, but because they represented “cosmopolitanism” (i.e. Jewish identity).

But what I love most about Hayek is the lucidity of his prose. While many “theorists” of the latter half of the 20th century were busy hiding behind buzzwords and obscurantism, Hayek set out to write for the people. I always say that the mark of an intelligent person is the ability to lay out any idea—no matter how complex—in accessible terms. Hayek certainly passes this test.

3) The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz

The Captive Mind is an overview of the dangers of totalitarianism with a specific focus on the Soviet Union. While Milosz won the Nobel Prize in 1980 for his fiction, he is best known today for this unique work of non-fiction, which masterfully captures the psychology behind Soviet authoritarianism. The most famous concept from this book is “ketman”—the act of outwardly conforming to totalitarianism while secretly maintaining different true beliefs. Of course, this idea is quite relevant to us today.

4) Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

My next pick is not a work of theory but a novel. Darkness at Noon tells the story of a political prisoner in an unnamed state inspired by the USSR. Koestler fought in the Spanish Civil War alongside George Orwell, and while the two share many literary sensibilities, Darkness at Noon never enjoyed the popularity of Animal Farm or 1984, (perhaps because it wages war on the philosophical underpinnings of socialism themselves, whereas Orwell focuses on authoritarianism as a whole).

I personally prefer Koestler to Orwell because he nails the individual psychology of your typical authoritarian. Orwell, on the other hand, is more concerned with the collective authoritarian psyche.

You can access my YouTube deep dive into Darkness at Noon here.

5) The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand

The Virtue of Selfishness explores Rand’s philosophy on objectivism through a series of short essays co-written by her longtime partner Nathaniel Branden. Ayn Rand gets a bad rap, of course, and while I don’t agree with everything she has to say, I don’t think that she deserves much of the hate she gets from the literary and philosophical world. There are aspects of her philosophy that we can certainly learn from today—and her ideas make even more sense in the context of her Soviet background.

6) The Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havel

In his book The Power of the Powerless, former Czech president Vaclav Havel warns us of the dangers of totalitarianism—and, in this case, the system he dubs “post-totalitarianism.”

The book is most famous for its depiction of a hypothetical greengrocer who puts a sign on his window with the slogan “Workers of the World Unite!” The sign, of course, isn’t there because the greengrocer genuinely believes in its message—it’s simply a social and political signal to everyone around him that he’s done the “right” thing.

In other words, Havel described virtue signaling long before we had people putting the Palestinian flag in their Bluesky bios.

7) The Open Society and its Enemies by Karl Popper

Finally, we have The Open Society and its Enemies, and it is criminally underrated. Popper was a friend of Hayek’s and a notable opponent of Karl Marx. In this particular book, he takes down Plato, Hegel, and Marx as he lays out the pillars of a free society. I’m actually still in the middle of reading this one now, but Popper already has me hooked on his critique of Plato’s Republic. I don’t agree with him on everything, and, of course, he decides to open the book by blaming the Jews (classic), but aside from that, I’m excited to get to the next part, where he’ll go after Hegel and Marx. Havel actually wrote the preface to this book, so this one is a great read directly after The Power of the Powerless.

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So there you have it—the starter pack to anti-socialist intellectual thought. Let me know which book you’re starting with in the comments, and don’t forget to subscribe to Pens and Poison for more contrarian literary and cultural takes.

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