# Foundations Works Hub These are the **canonical political-philosophy works** the Foundations shelf draws on — the texts whose arguments the rest of the KB measures contemporary political projects against. Their full records live in the global `/Works/Books/` folder (one canonical record per work, alongside all the right-wing-specific books like *[[Atlas Shrugged]]*, *[[The Bell Curve]]*, *[[The Camp of the Saints]]*); this document is the **navigational index** for the subset that does the load-bearing work for /Foundations/. **Architecture note (2026-05-01).** Until 2026-05-01 these 10 texts lived in a parallel `/Foundations/Works/` subfolder with `type: foundation-work`. Same reasoning as the People migration the same day: parallel containers split the backlink graph and create duplicate-record bugs. The folder was consolidated into `/Works/Books/` (`type: work` + `foundations` tag) and this document took its place as the navigational layer. The same MOC pattern was completed for `/Foundations/Concepts/` on 2026-05-15 — see [[Foundations Concepts]]. ## How to find these in the vault All entries below carry `type: work` and the `foundations` tag. To list them dynamically (Dataview): ```dataview LIST FROM "Works" WHERE contains(tags, "foundations") SORT year ASC ``` ## Power and sovereignty (16th–17th c.) The texts that founded political realism and the theory of the state — the frameworks that make contemporary debates about executive power, sovereignty, and political legitimacy legible. - [[The Prince]] (Machiavelli, 1513/1532) — The founding text of political realism. *Virtù* and *fortuna*; the empirical study of how power is acquired and maintained; the separation of political analysis from moral judgment. The contemporary right reads *The Prince* and ignores the republican *Discourses*. **Record created.** - [[Leviathan]] (Hobbes, 1651) — The social contract as escape from the state of nature; absolute sovereignty as the price of order; the Hobbesian baseline that contemporary authoritarian rhetoric assumes (American carnage, border invasion, civilizational collapse). The book Locke responded to and the Founders rejected — but whose problem they never fully escaped. **Record created.** ## Enlightenment political philosophy (17th–18th c.) The texts that built the conceptual scaffolding the American experiment was constructed on. - [[Two Treatises of Government]] (Locke, 1689) — Social contract; natural rights; consent of the governed; right of revolution. Destroys divine-right theory; constructs liberal-democratic theory. Source code of the Declaration. - [[The Spirit of the Laws]] (Montesquieu, 1748) — Separation of powers; checks and balances; institutional liberty. The structural blueprint of the Constitution. Cited by the Framers more than any other single source. - [[The Social Contract]] (Rousseau, 1762) — General will; popular sovereignty; inequality as socially constructed; freedom as self-governance. The egalitarian Enlightenment radicalization of Locke. ## American founding and the revolution debate (1776–1790) The texts that translated Enlightenment political philosophy into the operational structure of American government — and the conservative counter-argument that defined the left-right axis. - [[Common Sense]] (Paine, 1776) — Monarchy is absurd; popular sovereignty; democratic self-governance. The pamphlet that converted colonial grievance into revolutionary cause. - [[The Wealth of Nations]] (Smith, 1776) — Founding text of classical economics; the actual Smith (anti-monopoly, pro-progressive-taxation, public-goods-supportive) versus the right-wing caricature. - [[The Federalist Papers]] (Hamilton, Madison, Jay, 1787–1788) — Operating manual for American democracy. Federalist 10 (faction), 51 (checks and balances), 70 (energetic executive within checks), 78 (judicial review). - [[Reflections on the Revolution in France]] (Burke, 1790) — The founding text of Anglo-American conservatism. Inherited institutions as accumulated wisdom; abstract rights as dangerous; the prediction of revolutionary tyranny. Burke's response to Paine's radicalism created the left-right axis the KB maps. **Record created.** ## 19th-century renewal (philosophy, abolition, democratic theory) The texts that tested whether the founding promises would be enforced. - [[On Liberty]] (Mill, 1859) — Harm principle; tyranny of the majority; marketplace of ideas; individuality as essential to progress. The framework both Christian nationalism and "free speech absolutism" violate. - [[Democracy in America]] (Tocqueville, 1835–1840) — Civil society and voluntary associations; tyranny of the majority (independently of Mill); democratic despotism; equality as democratic drive. Reads like prophecy. ## 20th-century theorists (markets, totalitarianism, justice) The texts that diagnosed how markets destroy, how democracies fail, and what justice requires. - [[The Great Transformation]] (1944) — The double movement; fictitious commodities; unregulated markets destroy social fabric and provoke authoritarian backlash. The counter-argument to Hayek published the same year. **Record created.** - [[The Open Society and Its Enemies]] (Popper, 1945) — Historicism as the intellectual root of totalitarianism; the open society as democratic error-correction; the paradox of tolerance. Written by a founding MPS member whose framework is the strongest internal critique of what the MPS project became. - [[The Origins of Totalitarianism]] (Arendt, 1951) — Atomization; mob-elite alliance; destruction of factual truth; superfluousness. The diagnostic framework for the current authoritarian moment. - [[The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere]] (1962) — How capitalism colonized democratic discourse; the public sphere concept; refeudalization. The framework contemporary disinformation and social-media critique extends. **Record created.** - [[A Theory of Justice]] (Rawls, 1971) — Veil of ignorance; difference principle; fair equality of opportunity; priority of liberty. The strongest philosophical case for the welfare state. ## Sibling MOCs - [[People]] — the thinkers who wrote these texts - [[Foundations Concepts]] — the political-philosophy concepts these works established - [[Power Theory]] — the analytical frameworks for understanding how power operates ## Forward-planned additions Additional canonical political-philosophy works that would plausibly fit this shelf, listed for future-stub consideration. The inclusion criterion: *does the contemporary right's project make systematic sense to track in opposition to this work's framework?* - **Aristotle, *Politics*** — the originating Western political philosophy text; mixed constitution; civic virtue - **Plato, *[[The Republic]]*** — philosopher-king tradition; the NRx project's distorted invocation - **Cicero, *On the Republic* / *On Duties*** — Roman republicanism; mixed government - **Marx & Engels, *[[The Communist Manifesto]]*** (1848) and **Marx, *Capital*** (1867) — the labor-value tradition and class analysis; the negative pole around which the postwar conservative project organized - **Lincoln, *The [[Gettysburg Address]]* and *Second Inaugural*** (1863, 1865) — the texts that reframed the Founding's equality clause as constitutional commitment - **Du Bois, *The Souls of Black Folk*** (1903) and ***Black Reconstruction in America*** (1935) — the African-American political-philosophy tradition the anti-CRT movement targets - **MLK, *Letter from Birmingham Jail*** (1963) — the immanent-critique tradition [[Frederick Douglass]] pioneered - **Nozick, *Anarchy, State, and Utopia*** (1974) — the libertarian counterweight to Rawls; the philosophical defense of minimal-state libertarianism - **Sandel, *Liberalism and the Limits of Justice*** (1982) and ***What Money Can't Buy*** (2012) — the communitarian critique of liberalism - **Berlin, *Two Concepts of Liberty*** (1958) — negative vs. positive liberty; the framework many free-speech debates implicitly invoke The criterion for moving any of these from forward-planned to actually-stubbed: at least one /Subjects/, /Ideologies/, or /Concepts/ entry in the KB needs to wikilink it for analytical work.