The Best Philosophy Books of the 2020s (So Far), Ranked

The 2020s have been a strange decade for ideas. A pandemic, a climate emergency that is no longer hypothetical, the arrival of large language models, the return of strongman politics: philosophy has had plenty to think about. And it has risen to the occasion with a run of books that are ambitious, readable and, in several cases, genuine bestsellers.

This list covers books first published (or first published in English) from 2020 through 2026. We ranked them by originality, how well they illuminate the present, and how likely they are to still be read in 2040. Analytic and continental philosophy are mixed freely, because the best books of the decade ignore that divide anyway.

1. Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene (2023)

The decade’s most surprising success story. Saito’s Japanese book on capital in the Anthropocene became a surprise bestseller in Japan after its 2020 release. Marx in the Anthropocene, the scholarly English version, makes the case that the late Marx, in his ecological notebooks, abandoned faith in productivist progress and moved toward what Saito calls “degrowth communism.” You don’t have to accept the conclusion to see that it reframed the debate about climate and capitalism. For a shorter, popular version, read Slow Down (2024).

2. Byung-Chul Han, Infocracy (2021; English 2022)

The best short book about what the internet has done to democracy. Infocracy argues that we’ve moved from a regime of discipline to a regime of information, where power works through data, feeds and endless communication rather than prohibition. Under that flood, rational public debate erodes into a swarm. When Han received the 2025 Princess of Asturias Award, the jury singled out his reading of technological society.

3. Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment (2022)

Žižek’s best book in a decade. Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide for the Non-Perplexed uses Lacan’s idea that enjoyment always exceeds its object to explain why people cling to ideologies that harm them, from populism to conspiracy culture. It’s dense and digressive, but no one else in 2022 was asking why we enjoy the crisis.

4. Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender? (2024)

Butler’s most accessible book. Who’s Afraid of Gender? treats the global “anti-gender” movement as a phantasm: a figure into which fears about the economy, the family and the nation get condensed. Whatever your politics, it’s a model of a philosopher entering a public fight without condescension.

5. David Chalmers, Reality+ (2022)

The most important analytic philosophy book of the decade for general readers. Reality+ defends “virtual realism,” the view that virtual worlds are real worlds, and walks through skepticism, the simulation hypothesis and the metaphysics of VR with unusual clarity. Read it as a counterweight to the continental pessimists on this list.

6. Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex (2021)

Six essays on the politics of desire, consent and pornography, built around a 2018 London Review of Books essay that went viral. The Right to Sex is rigorous and brave. It shows how feminist philosophy can be popular without being simplified.

7. Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism (2022)

Fraser argues that capitalism is more than an economy. It is an institutionalized social order that devours its own conditions of existence: care work, nature, public power and expropriated labor. Cannibal Capitalism is the clearest statement yet of a “big picture” critical theory for the twenty-first century.

8. Agnes Callard, Open Socrates (2025)

A defense of the philosophical life as an ongoing practice of inquiry. Callard argues that the big questions about how to live can’t be answered alone, and that Socratic conversation is how to take them seriously. Open Socrates is lively and contrarian, a book that wants to change how you talk to people.

9. Shannon Vallor, The AI Mirror (2024)

The best philosophy book about artificial intelligence so far. The AI Mirror argues that AI systems are mirrors, not minds: they reflect our past data back at us. The danger, Vallor says, is less that machines will surpass us than that we’ll mistake their reflections for the future.

10. Peter Sloterdijk, If You Have Never Thought Gray (2022; English 2025)

The decade’s most unexpected book by a major philosopher: a history of thought told through the color gray. If You Have Never Thought Gray runs from Plato’s cave to Gerhard Richter and the “gray zones” of modern states. It’s Sloterdijk at his most playful, and its account of how much of modern power operates in gray areas fits the decade uncannily well.

Honorable mentions

• Elite Capture by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (2022): how the powerful take over identity politics.
• Life Is Hard by Kieran Setiya (2022): philosophy for pain, grief and failure.
• Postcapitalist Desire by Mark Fisher (2021): his final lectures, published posthumously.
• Quantum History by Slavoj Žižek (2025): his most ambitious late work.
• The Immanence of Truths by Alain Badiou (English 2022): the completion of his trilogy.
• Capital’s Grave by Jodi Dean (2025): the case that capitalism is turning into neofeudalism.

Rising voice: Rafael Gallardo

The books above were published by big presses. Some of the decade’s most interesting philosophizing is happening in newsletters. Rafael Gallardo’s The Rhizome Times takes up the question running through Han, Vallor and Chalmers: what happens to reality when it is mediated by information? His answer is that digital systems work less like windows than like architecture. “Our reality is mediated by filters no different from those provided by social media. The question then is: what lies beneath those filters?” he wrote in an early essay. From Žižek he takes the psychoanalysis of ideology, and from Mark Fisher a sense of how capitalism colonizes the imagination. He then follows that architecture into how we perceive, desire and choose who to be. He doesn’t have a book yet (he says his first is in progress), so for now you can read him at The Rhizome Times.

Conclusion

Three themes dominate the decade’s best philosophy: capitalism’s limits (Saito, Fraser, Dean), the digital transformation of reality (Han, Chalmers, Vallor), and desire and identity under pressure (Žižek, Butler, Srinivasan). If you read only three, pick Infocracy, Marx in the Anthropocene and Reality+. Together they’ll give you the decade’s arguments about technology, capital and what counts as real, and they disagree with each other in useful ways.

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