THE GREAT WORKS OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
The purpose of this list is to provide a starting point for those
interested in reading the original sources for all of the concepts
that underly Western thought.
Links will be provided to downloadable files.
Ancients
Homer: Iliad, Odyssey
Aeschylus: Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides, Prometheus Bound
Sophocles: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, Philoctetes, Ajax
Euripides: Hippolytus, Bacchae, Medea
Aristophanes: Clouds
Herodotus: Histories
Thucydides: Peloponnesian War
Plato: Meno, Gorgias, Republic, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Symposium, Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, Timaeus, Phaedrus, Laws, Ion, Laches
Xenophon, Memorabilia, Anabasis, Education of Cyrus
Euclid: Elements
Aristotle: Poetics, Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, On Generation and Corruption, Politics, Parts of Animals, Generation of Animals, De Anima, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Categories
Hebrew Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Samuel I and II, Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, Song of Songs, Psalms
The Bible: New Testament
Epictetus: Discourses, Manual
Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
Plutarch: Lycurgus, Solon
Virgil: Aeneid
Plutarch: “Caesar,” ”Cato the Younger,” “Antony,” “Brutus”
Tacitus: Annals
Cicero: On the Republic, On Friendship, About the ends of Goods and Evils
Aurelius: Meditations
Plotinus: The Enneads
Augustine: Confessions, The City of God
St. Anselm: Proslogium 1077-1078
Maimonides: Guide for the Perplexed
Aquinas: Summa Theologica
Dante: Divine Comedy
Chaucer: Canterbury Tales
Moderns
Copernicus: Dedication of The Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies, 1543
Machiavelli: The Prince, Discourses
More: Utopia
Erasmus: In praise of folly
Luther: 95 Theses
Calvin: Institutes of Christian Religion 1536
Montaigne: Essays
Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel
Shakespeare: Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, The Tempest, As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Sonnets
Cervantes: Don Quixote
Descartes: Discourse on Method, Meditations, Rules for the Direction of the Mind
Galileo
Harvey (1578-1657): On The Motion of The Heart And Blood In Animals, 1628
Bacon: Novum Organum
Hobbes: Leviathan
Milton: Paradise Lost
La Rouchefoucauld: Maximes
La Fontaine: Fables
Pascal: Pensees
Spinoza: Ethics, Theological-Political Treatise
Moliere: Le Misanthrope
Locke: Second Treatise of Government
Racine: Phaedre
Newton: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
Kepler: Harmony of the World
Swift: Gulliver’s Travels
Leibniz: The Monadology, 1714.
Lessing:The Education of The Human Race, 1778
Voltaire: Candide
Condorcet: On the Future Progress of the Human Mind, 1794
Hume: Treatise of Human Nature
Montesquieu: Spirit of the Laws (1748)
Fielding: The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749)
Rousseau: Social Contract, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Emile, Confessions
Gibbon: Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Adam Smith: Wealth of Nations, Theory of Sentiments
Burke: Reflection on the Revolution in France
Boswell: The Life of Johnson
A. Pope: Essay on Man
Paine: Common Sense, The Rights of Man
FRENCH Declaration of the Rights of Man
Kant: Critique of Pure Reason, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, What is Enlightenment?
AMERICAN FOUNDING DOCUMENTS: “Articles of Confederation,” “Declaration of Independence,” “Constitution of the United States of America”
Hamilton, Jay and Madison: The Federalist
Anti-federalists
Schiller: Letters Upon The Aesthetic Education of Man, 1794
Goethe: Faust, Metamorphosis of Plants
David Ricardo (1772-1823): The principles of political economy and taxation, 1815
LANDMARK SUPREME COURT CASES
Franklin: Autobiography
Jefferson: writings
Herder
Goethe: Faust, Metamorphosis of Plants
Clausewitz, On War
Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit
Fichte
Carlyle
Emerson
Thoreau: Civil Disobedience
Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Tocqueville: Democracy in America
Lincoln: Selected Speeches Cooper Union Address
Douglass: Narrative of the Life
Benjamin Disraeli: Utilitarian Follies
John Henry Newman: Sermons, Who is to Blame?
Herbert Spencer: Progess: Its Law and Causes, 1857
John Stuart Mill: On Liberty, Autobiography
Kierkegaard: Philosophical Fragments, Fear and Trembling
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice
George Eliot: Middlemarch
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19th Century
Darwin: Origin of Species, Descent of Man, Voyage of the Beagle
Marx: Capital, Political and Economic Manuscripts of 1844, The German Ideology
Dostoevski: Brothers Karamazov, Demons, Crime and Punishment, Notes form Underground
Tolstoy: War and Peace, Anna Kerenina
Melville: Billy Budd, Bartleby the Scrivener, Benito Cereno
Charles Saunders Peirce, Fixation of Belief
William James, Psychology, Briefer Course
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Supreme Court Opinions, writings
Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil, Birth of Tragedy, Uses and Abuses of History for Life
Baudelaire: Flowers of Evil, What is Romanticism?
de Quincey: Confessions of an English Opium Eater
Thomas Henry Huxley: Evolution and Ethics, 1894.
Louis Pasteur : Extension of The Germ Theory, 1880
Collingwood, Autobiography, the Idea of History
Stendhal: The Red and the Black
Proust: Swann’s Way
Emile Durkheim Suicide: A Study in Sociology; Elementary forms of Religious Life
Flaubert: Un Coeur Simple, Madame Bovary
20th Century
(1900)
Freud: Interpretation of Dreams
Planck
Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Bergson, Creative Evolution
Max Weber, Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Science as a Vocation, Economy and Society
Booker T. Washington: Selected Writings
W.E.B. Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk
Pope PIUS X, Pascendi Dominici Gregi
(1910)
Franz Boas, Mind of Primitive Man
Proust, In search of lost time
James Joyce: The Dead, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses
Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West
Jung, C.G.Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido, a Contribution to the Evolution of Thought. (1916)
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1918)
John Maynard Keynes: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919)
T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland
Wittgenstein: Tractatus, Philosophical Investigations, Blue and Brown Books
Lenin: The State and Revolution
(1920)
Yeats
Thomas Mann,Magic Mountain
Woolf,To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway
SCOPES TRIAL
H.L. Mencken
Walter Lippmann
Kafka, The Castle, The Trial
Hitler, Mein Kampf
Buber, Martin. I and Thou. 1923
Lukacs: History and Class Consciousness
Heisenberg, Werner. Uncertainty Principle. 1927
Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), selections from “Basic Writings”
Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (1929)
(1930)
Kurt Gödel: On Formally Undecidable Propositions Of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems, 1931
Benedict, Ruth. Patterns of Culture. 1934
Keynes: The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. (1936)
Husserl: Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology
Kojeve: Introduction to the reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit
Mumford: Technics and Civilization
(1940)
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno: Dialectic of Enlightenment
Erich Fromm: The Fear of Freedom
Karl Jaspers: The Perennial Scope of Philosophy
Koestler: Darkness at Noon
Malraux: Man’s Fate
Neumann: Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism
Polanyi: The Great Transformation
Popper: The Open Society and Its Enemies
Samuelson: Economics: An Introductory Analysis
Schumpeter: Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
Martin Wright: Power Politics
Kinsey, Alfred C. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. 1948
Riesman: The Lonely Crowd
F. Hayek: Road to Serfdom (1944)
Orwell, Essays, 1984
Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences
NUREMBERG WAR CRIME TRIALS
(1950)
Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition
Raymond Aron: The Opium of the Intellectuals
Kenneth Arrow: Social Choice and Individual Values
Roland Barthes: Mythologies
Winston Churchill: The Second World War
Norman Cohn: The Pursuit of the Millennium
Milovan Djilas: The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System
Mircea Eliade: Images and Symbols
Marcuse, Eros and Civilization
Lucien Febvre: The Struggle for History
John Kenneth Galbraith: The Affluent Society
Erving Goffman: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
Arthur Koestler and Richard Crossman (eds): The God That Failed: Six Studies in Communism
Primo Levi: If This is a Man
Claude Lévi-Strauss: A World on the Wane. Tristes Tropiques 1955
Czeslaw Milosz: The Captive Mind
David Riesman: The Lonely Crowd
Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate (1959)
Jacques Ellul: The Technological Society (La technique ou l’enjeu du siècle.) 1954
Leo Strauss: Natural Right and History
Arnold Toynbee: A Study of History
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations
Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. 1956
Maslow, Abraham. Motivation and Personality. 1954.
Bernays, Edward. The Engineering of Consent. 1955
Greenberg, Clement. Art and Culture: Critical Essays
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex.
Bernard LONERGAN: Insight: A Study of Human Understanding
(1960)
Walter Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz
Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. Letter from Birmingham Jail
Hannah Arendt: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
Daniel Bell: The End of Ideology
Michel Foucault: Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
Milton Friedman: Capitalism and Freedom
Alexander Gerschenkron: Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective
Antonio Gramsci: Prison Notebooks
Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Savage Mind
Konrad Lorenz: On Aggression
E. P. Thompson: The Making of the English Working Class
John XXIII, Pope. Encyclicals of Pope John XXIII. 1965
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique
Jacques LACAN, Ecrits (1966)
McLuhan: The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967)
(1970)
Piaget: Structuralism (1971)
Daniel Bell: The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
Isaiah Berlin: Russian Thinkers
Ronald Dworkin: Taking Rights Seriously
Clifford Geertz: The Interpretation of Cultures
Albert Hirschmann: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty
Leszek Kolakowski: Main Currents of Marxism
Hans Küng: On Being a Christian
Robert Nozick: Anarchy, State and Utopia
John Rawls: A Theory of Justice
Gershom Scholem: The Messianic Idea in Judaism
Alexander Solzhenitsyn: The Gulag Archipelago
Pynchon: Gravity’s Rainbow
Derrida: Of Grammatology
Althusser
Habermas
Barthes, Death of the Author
Lasch: The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations
Carson, Silent Spring
Jacques Monod: Chance and Necessity
Edward O Wilson: On Human Nature
Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene
(1980)
Vaclav Havel: Living in Truth
Alisdair MacIntyre: After Virtue
Stephen Hawking: A Brief History of Time
Milan Kundera: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Primo Levi: The Drowned and the Saved
Roger Penrose: The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics
Richard Rorty: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
Amartya Sen: Resources, Values and Development
Michael Walzer: Spheres of Justice
Said: Orientalism
Bloom: Closing of the American Mind
(1990)
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1990)