Top 10 books about freedom

Adam Wagner is a human rights barrister at Doughty Street Chambers. He is the founder and Chair of RightsInfo.

His new book is Emergency State: How We Lost Our Freedoms in the Pandemic and Why it Matters.

Jonathan Freedland, author of The Escape Artist, on Emergency State: "Clear-eyed, forensic and compelling, Wagner sets out what happened during the Covid-19 pandemic - and the lessons we need to learn."

At the Guardian Wagner tagged ten "books that show us what freedom is and others that tell more frightening stories of freedom being taken away." One title on the list:

A Theory of Justice by John Rawls

Not quite a poolside page-turner, but Harvard professor John Rawls’s book offers, as much as any other work of 20th-century philosophy, a blueprint for a society where freedom can be enjoyed by most people, most of the time. It was probably the book that led me to human rights law, along with Rawls’s great inspiration, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Rawls’s grand project is designing a society where liberty and equality can be achieved – and he came closer than many.

Read about the other entries on the list.

A Theory of Justice is among George Dvorsky's nine philosophical thought experiments that will keep you up at night.

--Marshal Zeringue