Reading list · 12 books
Peter Thiel's reading list
Peter Thiel co-founded PayPal and Palantir, made the first outside investment in Facebook, and wrote Zero to One—a book that came out of his Stanford CS183 course on startups. His intellectual diet is unusually wide for a Silicon Valley figure: he reads continental political philosophy, Catholic theology, mimetic theory, and classical literature alongside economics and business. His reading influences show up directly in his public arguments: that most progress is stagnation dressed as novelty, that monopoly is the goal, and that conventional wisdom is almost always wrong.
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01
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Peter Thiel
Thiel's own book, which distills his Stanford CS183 lecture notes. The argument that every truly new thing escapes competition by being genuinely singular—a secret no one else believes—follows directly from Girard: if everyone is copying everyone else's desires, the entrepreneur who notices something others dismiss has an edge that compounds.
- Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World
02
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World
René Girard
The book Thiel has named as the most influential he has read. Girard argues that human desire is mimetic—we want what others want—and that sacrificial violence, culminating in the scapegoat mechanism, is the hidden foundation of culture. Thiel applies this framework to markets, startups, and geopolitics with striking consistency.
- The Concept of the Political
03
The Concept of the Political
Carl Schmitt
Schmitt's short 1932 treatise defines the political through the friend-enemy distinction and argues that liberalism's refusal to acknowledge genuine conflict is a category error. Thiel has cited this in interviews as a book that illuminates dynamics that mainstream political theory papers over—particularly relevant to his views on sovereign decision and the limits of technocratic governance.
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04
The End of History and the Last Man
Francis Fukuyama
Fukuyama's thesis that liberal democracy represents the endpoint of ideological evolution is exactly the kind of consensus Thiel builds his career against. He has engaged with it publicly not to dismiss it but to argue that Fukuyama's endpoint may have arrived prematurely, and that the real contest between order and chaos is still open.
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05
F. A. Hayek
Hayek's warning about central planning and the knowledge problem underpins Thiel's skepticism of large institutions—government bureaucracies, but also incumbent corporations. In his Stanford lectures he returned repeatedly to the idea that distributed knowledge resists aggregation, and that monopoly power held by a startup differs fundamentally from monopoly held by a state.
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06
Robert Nozick
Nozick's defense of the minimal state and individual rights as side-constraints rather than goals gives Thiel the philosophical vocabulary for his libertarianism. His early career—founding the Stanford Review, writing The Diversity Myth—drew on Nozick's critique of redistributive justice as a form of forced labor.
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07
Thomas Hobbes
Hobbes's argument that sovereignty is a necessary fiction to escape the state of nature sits in productive tension with Thiel's libertarianism. He has spoken about Hobbes alongside Schmitt as thinkers who take the problem of order seriously rather than assuming it away. The question of who decides in a genuine emergency recurs throughout his public arguments.
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08
Niccolò Machiavelli
Machiavelli's realism—the gap between how men live and how they ought to live—resonates with Thiel's insistence on facing the world as it is rather than as conventional morality says it should be. The Medici dedicatee is also a figure in Thiel's preferred historical arc: the Renaissance patron who understood that power and culture are not separable.
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09
Plato
Plato's dialogues, especially the Republic, are a recurring reference in Thiel's speeches and writing. The allegory of the cave maps cleanly onto his account of how mimetic conformity keeps people from seeing first-principle truths. His interest in philosopher-kings—technically competent decision-makers shielded from mob opinion—is a thread he picks up from Plato and runs through to his political investments.
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10
Aristotle
Aristotle's ethics grounds the classical philosophy strand. Thiel's argument in Zero to One that the best career is not the most competitive but the most singular echoes Aristotle's eudaimonia—a life fully actualized in its own specific excellence rather than in comparison to others. The contrast with Girard is deliberate: where Girard sees mimesis as inescapable, Aristotle points toward a way out.
- The Lord of the Rings
11
The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien
Thiel has cited Tolkien's mythology directly as one of the few modern works that takes the reality of evil seriously without domesticating it. The rejection of industrial modernity in Tolkien—Saruman as the technocrat who believes he can improve on nature—resonates with Thiel's own ambivalence about what Silicon Valley actually builds. He has contrasted Tolkien's pre-modern cosmology with the progressive optimism he finds naive.
- Natural Right and History
12
Natural Right and History
Leo Strauss
Strauss's recovery of classical natural right—against the modern slide into historicism and relativism—is a background influence on how Thiel frames the question of whether there are permanent truths about political life. The Straussian method of reading between the lines of canonical texts, taking esoteric meaning seriously, matches Thiel's own habit of mining intellectual history for contrarian positions.
More on Peter Thiel's picks
Thiel's list coheres around a single anxiety: that Western civilization may be stuck—technologically, politically, and spiritually—even as it tells itself otherwise. René Girard's mimetic theory provides the unifying lens. If desire is imitative and rivalry inevitable, then the interesting question is what structures—religious, political, commercial—have historically contained or redirected that violence. The books here explore that question from several directions.
The political philosophy cluster (Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Schmitt, Strauss) traces how thinkers have grappled with order, power, and the friend-enemy distinction. Thiel takes Schmitt seriously in ways that make liberal commentators uncomfortable; he has cited Schmitt's critique of parliamentary liberalism as a live diagnosis, not a historical curiosity. Hayek and Nozick anchor the libertarian strand—minimal state, spontaneous order, the dangers of central planning—though Thiel's libertarianism has grown more eschatological over time.
Tolkien sits here not as escapism but as myth: Thiel has spoken about the Lord of the Rings as a pre-modern cosmology that takes evil seriously in ways modernity refuses to. And Zero to One closes the loop—his own synthesis of what he learned from all of it, argued through the lens of startups but aimed at civilization.
