Black Panthers in a reading circle, (Photo: Pirkle Jones)

The politics of reading

Originally published: Simplifying Socialism on June 12, 2026 by A. J. Horn (more by Simplifying Socialism) (Posted Jun 15, 2026)

Culture, Human Rights, Ideology, Literature Global Newswire

The act of reading is so much more than following text with your eyes or—if you prefer audiobooks—with your ears. Done properly, reading is the art of coming to a better understanding through intellectual interaction with the author(s). It’s important to understand what reading beyond an elementary level entails because anyone that plans on learning new things on their own, outside of an academic institution, will have to gain insight by reading. It’s not enough to rely on AI or other shortcuts, one has to do the work of reading properly if they want to gain anything other than cursory information , i.e., if they want true insight.

Many books have been written about reading, most having to do with speed reading, but probably none have stood the test of time as well as Mortimer J. Adler’s How to Read a Book. It isn’t difficult to see why this is the case as Adler makes a compelling argument that good reading means understanding an author’s point: what they wrote and why they wrote it. Not really a world-changing concept and it certainly wasn’t an original thought from the mind of Adler, but he understood that the greatest thinkers throughout history had been reading in such a way that schools, at least in the United States, had never taught.

What Adler failed to understand is that the limitations of American education are not accidental. They emerge from the social functions schools are expected to perform. It serves an ideological purpose in obscuring reality to fit a carefully constructed worldview, in which a mythos is conjured surrounding the history of the country, making the U.S. out to be an exceptional nation rightfully dominating a hemisphere of inferior countries. Illiteracy is a crisis, but it’s a systemic crisis that both the system and state require in order to maintain their survival, which, if anything, increases the importance for understanding what it means to properly read and how to do so with as much skill as one can obtain.

Education and schooling are always political. When a board of education or state or federal legislature dictate public school curricula it is political, for lawmakers are elected and board of education members are either elected or appointed by elected officials. Private schools and academies that set their own curriculum are mini-states in themselves instilling in their students the philosophies, worldviews, and ideologies that are foundational to the school and the school’s leadership. Institutions make the choice which literature to require, remove, and ban instructors from teaching.

This is not to make the argument that schools don’t teach their students to read or think critically, but that they only teach them to read to a specific level and they only instruct them in thinking critically—which often translates incorrectly to “negatively”—about specific things. Students are taught to be hostile toward certain concepts, people, countries, ideas, etc. but not to be critical investigators of their own accord.

To understand why this matters, we need to distinguish between literacy and critical literacy. A literate person can decode words, summarize basic arguments, and repeat information proficiently enough to complete their daily tasks. A critically literate person can identify assumptions, evaluate evidence, compare multiple interpretations, and recognize what a text leaves unsaid. This is the difference between consuming information and investigating it.

Consider the way most students are taught history. They are expected to learn names, dates, events, and occasionally competing interpretations. Rarely, however, are they encouraged to ask deeper questions about the production of historical knowledge itself. Why do some events occupy entire chapters while others receive only a paragraph? Why are some figures remembered as heroes and others forgotten? Why are certain explanations presented as obvious while alternative explanations are excluded altogether?

The same pattern appears outside instruction in history. In economics, students are often taught markets before they are taught theories of power. In political science, they learn institutions before they learn critiques of those institutions. In literature, they learn to identify themes and symbols long before they learn to identify themes and symbols long before they learn to interrogate the social assumptions embedded within the text itself.

Adler understood better than most ever have that reading requires active engagement, that the reader must identify an author’s terms, arguments, assumptions, and conclusions before they can fairly and accurately judge them. Yet Adler largely treats literature as though it exists within a great conversation of ideas between the reader and author, where the primary task is understanding what each participant is trying to say. This isn’t wrong but is inadequate if the goal of reading is to understand, along with what the author is saying, why the author wrote it.

Ideas do not emerge out of nowhere and books are not simply conversations between minds. Books are products of specific societies, written by specific people, under specific social conditions. To understand a text fully requires more than understanding the author’s argument. It requires understanding why that argument emerged in the first place.

This was one of the great insights of Antonio Gramsci: the ruling class does not maintain its position through force alone. It governs through what Gramsci called cultural hegemony, the process by which a particular worldview comes to be accepted as common sense. The most effective forms of domination are those that cease to appear as domination altogether. They become natural, obvious, and unquestioned. They become the background assumptions through which people understand themselves and the world around them.

Schools are among the most important institutions through which this process occurs. Long before students encounter explicit political arguments, they are taught ways of seeing the world. Certain historical narratives are emphasized while others are ignored. Certain questions are encouraged while others are treated as inappropriate, unrealistic, or radical. Students learn facts as well as frameworks. They are taught which explanations are “legitimate” and which explanations can be dismissed without serious consideration.

We should, therefore, not understand reading as merely an encounter with an author’s ideas. Reading is an encounter with ideas and arguments, but it is also an encounter with the social forces and general conditions that helped produce those ideas and arguments. Every text carries with it assumptions about human nature, society, morality, politics, and history. Often the case is that these assumptions are so deeply embedded that neither the author nor the reader notices them. The task of critical reading is to make the invisible visible.

A similar insight appears in the work of Michel Foucault. Rather than focusing exclusively on economic power or state coercion, Foucault examined the ways institutions shape how people think about themselves and regulate their own behavior. His concept of biopolitics describes the management of populations through systems of knowledge, expertise, and administration. Schools, hospitals, prisons, workplaces, and government agencies do more than organize society, they play an influential role in producing particular kinds of people.

This production of subjects occurs through countless ordinary practices. Students learn to follow schedules, meet deadlines, obey authority figures, compete with their peers, and measure themselves according to externally imposed standards. None of these practices are necessarily sinister in themselves. The point is that they are never neutral. Every institution creates habits, expectations, and norms. Every educational system cultivates a particular kind of citizen.

The same is true of reading. A person who has only been taught to identify an author’s main idea has learned one form of literacy. A person who has learned to interrogate assumptions, trace historical contexts, identify ideological commitments, and compare between competing interpretations has learned another, much higher, more complete, form of literacy. More than a gap in skill, the difference between the two is in how the reader and the author relate to knowledge itself.

For this reason, the struggle over education is ultimately a struggle over consciousness. Every society requires some method of reproducing itself, some way to prolong its continuation. It must transmit values, beliefs, and forms of knowledge from one generation down to the next. The definitive question being whether education will encourage intellectual dependence or intellectual autonomy. Will students learn to become passive consumers of information or critical investigators of reality?

The reader who only asks: “What does this author mean?” has taken an important first step. The reader who asks: “Why does this argument appear at this moment in history?” has taken a second. Both must go further. The reader who asks: “What assumptions does this text help to reproduce, what relations of power does it reflect, what worldview does it encourage me to accept, and why does it matter?” has begun to read critically in the fullest sense.

The goal of being a critical reader is not to be cynical, not to dismiss every text as propaganda or reduce every idea to hidden interests. Rather, it is to recognize that understanding requires movement in two directions simultaneously. We must enter the author’s world in order to understand their argument, but we must also step outside that world in order to understand its limits. Good reading requires both sympathy and suspicion, comprehension and critique.

This brings up an important point on why genuinely advanced reading can be unsettling. Once acquired, it rarely remains confined to books. The habits developed through critical reading spread outward. The person who learns to interrogate a text often soon begins interrogating news reports, political speeches, economic theories, advertisements, educational curricula, and common sense itself. They become less willing to accept claims solely because an authority figure itself has presented them and begin demanding explanations where previously they accepted assumptions.

At its highest level, reading ceases to be the consumption of information and becomes a practice of intellectual self-emancipation. The reader no longer encounters a book as a passive recipient waiting to be instructed; they enter into a dialogue with the author, history, and society itself. They learn how to understand the world presented to them, and how to investigate the forces that shaped that presentation.

If critical reading is a form of intellectual self-emancipation, then the question naturally becomes: how does one actually do it? How does a reader move beyond the mere consumption of information and toward a genuine understanding of it?

The answer Adler gave was that reading is an activity, not an experience. Most people approach books as though knowledge can be directly transferred from the page into the mind. They mistake recognition for understanding. They encounter a familiar concept, agree with a conclusion, or remember a fact and conclude that they have learned something. Adler understood that genuine understanding required much more than obtaining information. The task of the reader is to identify an author’s central question, determine the problems they are attempting to solve (or the concepts they are attempting to make clear), understand how they reached their conclusions, and evaluate whether those conclusions follow soundly from the evidence and arguments presented.

I understand this may seem quite obvious, but it is remarkable how few people actually read in this way. Many people approach books looking to read for confirmation—to reinforce what they already believe—rather than understanding. They seek agreement with their worldview or ammunition against what they dislike. Seen this way, the book becomes a tool for reinforcing prior commitments rather than an opportunity to encounter a new perspective. Under such conditions, reading abandons critical investigation.

The first responsibility of a reader, for Adler, is intellectual honesty. Before agreeing or disagreeing with an author, one must first be capable of explaining their position accurately. Before criticizing an argument, one must understand it on its own terms. This is a surprisingly demanding standard. It requires patience, humility, and a willingness to suspend judgment long enough to understand a perspective that may ultimately prove mistaken.

Yet understanding alone is not enough. A person may perfectly comprehend a text and still fail to grasp its larger significance. One may understand every argument in a political treatise while remaining blind to the historical circumstances that produced it. One may accurately summarize an economic theory while failing to recognize the assumptions about human nature on which it rests. One may understand a philosophical system while overlooking the social interests that make it persuasive to a particular audience.

Hence why critical reading must operate on multiple levels simultaneously. The first level asks: “What is the author saying?” The second asks: “Is the author correct?” The third asks: “Why is this argument being made at all?” The fourth asks:

What broader worldview does this argument presuppose and help reproduce?

These questions are cumulative, they build upon one another. The reader who skips the first question cannot—in any meaningful way—answer the others. One cannot insightfully critique a position that one does not understand. At the same time, the reader who stops at the first question mistakes comprehension for insight. Understanding an argument is the beginning of critical thought, but it is not its conclusion.

The greatest readers throughout history have understood this. While reading economic works, Marx investigated the social conditions that gave rise to political economy itself. While analyzing political institutions, Gramsci examined the cultural forces that made those institutions appear legitimate. While scrutinizing laws and governments, Foucault explored the systems of knowledge through which individuals come to understand themselves and others. In each case, reading is much more than interpretation. For the greatest minds, reading became a method of unlocking the world underscoring the text on the surface.

Again, seen in this light, the importance of learning how to read well extends far beyond books. Reading is one of the primary ways human beings encounter the accumulated knowledge, experiences, and ideologies of their society. To read poorly is to inherit those ideas uncritically. To read well is to place oneself in a position to evaluate them. It is the worthwhile difference between accepting a worldview and consciously choosing one.

In the end, Adler was correct about the most important thing: reading is an activity. It is work. Understanding does not happen automatically simply because words pass before our eyes. To be enlightened is an incredible honor because insight must be earned through effort, attention, and engagement. Where Adler stopped, however, is where the broader significance of reading begins.

Reading is a conversation between the reader and history, between the reader and society, between the reader and the countless forces that have shaped both the text and themselves. Every text is the product of a particular world, and every act of reading is an opportunity to better understand that world.

Learning to read well matters. It would be a mistake to see this as an issue of academic achievement, professional advancement, or the accumulation of facts. Of course those things have their place, but they are secondary. The true value of reading is that it expands our capacity to understand reality. It allows us to encounter ideas beyond our own immediate experience, to question assumptions we once accepted without reflection, and to recognize the possibilities that previously seemed invisible.

A society saturated with information but lacking critical readers is not an informed society. Information alone does not have much use; facts cannot interpret themselves; data does not appear out of nowhere with zero context. Put simply, without the ability to evaluate, contextualize, and critique what we encounter, we remain vulnerable to manipulation regardless of how much information is available to us. In the modern day where information is more accessible than ever but our attention spans are worse than ever before, the ability to read critically becomes even more important.

The struggle to become a better reader is therefore part of a larger struggle to become a more conscious human being. To read critically means to refuse passive acceptance. It is to insist upon understanding before judging, inquiry before certainty, and evidence before belief; it is to cultivate the habit of asking not only what is being said, but why it is being said, who benefits from it being said, and what alternatives remain unexplored.

Perhaps this is why the greatest readers throughout history were rarely content to remain readers alone. Reading transformed how they understood the world, and that transformed how they acted within it. Books provided them with so much more than information, they provided them with new ways of seeing—and, ultimately, of being.

That, finally, is what is at stake. The purpose of reading is not to know more, but to see more; to recognize the hidden assumptions beneath common sense, the historical forces beneath institutions, and the human possibilities concealed beneath the world as it presently exists. To learn how to read well is, in a very real sense, to learn how to think for oneself, and there are few skills more valuable than that.

Monthly Review does not necessarily adhere to all of the views conveyed in articles republished at MR Online. Our goal is to share a variety of left perspectives that we think our readers will find interesting or useful. —Eds.

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