The New Science
1725 · 520 pages
History can be known, Vico argues, because men made it. He reads myth and law as the record of every nation passing through ages of gods, heroes, and men, then collapsing into barbarism.
★ 6.4
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
The Muqaddimah
1377 · 512 pages
Ibn Khaldun found history's engine in group solidarity, which carries a tribe from desert to throne, then dissolves in city luxury within three generations. Europe produced nothing comparable for centuries.
★ 6.7
Civilization and Its Discontents
1929 · 186 pages
Freud's answer to why we are unhappy: civilization survives only by making us surrender aggression and desire, and the aggression we cannot spend outward turns inward as a permanent, unpayable sense of guilt.
★ 6.9
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
1755 · 92 pages
The first man to fence a field and say this is mine founded civil society, Rousseau writes, and ruined it. His case against progress split the Enlightenment and still unsettles readers.
★ 7.2
Lord of the Flies
1954 · 192 pages
English schoolboys are marooned on an island without adults, hold a vote, and are soon hunting each other. Golding tells it so plainly that you believe every step of the descent.
★ 7.8
Heart of Darkness
1899 · 110 pages
Marlow steams up the Congo to retrieve an ivory agent gone strange upriver. Conrad found empire hollow, and the novelist Achebe's charge of racism has kept the book under argument ever since.
★ 8.6