Series: Princeton Classics

More than half a century after its translation into English, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis remains a masterpiece of literary criticism. A brilliant display of erudition, wit, and wisdom, his exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depicted reality has taught generations how to read Western literature. This new expanded edition includes a substantial essay in introduction by...

In this landmark book, Scott Page redefines the way we understand ourselves in relation to one another. The Difference is about how we think in groups and how our collective wisdom exceeds the sum of its parts. Why can teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone? And why are the best group decisions and predictions those...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Bancroft Prize, and the Parkman Prize From acclaimed diplomat and historian George Kennan, a landmark history of the crucial months in 1917–1918 that forged the pattern of Soviet-American relations When the Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917, American diplomats in St. Petersburg and Moscow found themselves in a bewildering situation....

Are antisemitism and white supremacy manifestations of a general phenomenon? Why didn't racism appear in Europe before the fourteenth century, and why did it flourish as never before in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Why did the twentieth century see institutionalised racism in its most extreme forms? Why are egalitarian societies particularly susceptible to virulent racism? What do apartheid South...

A landmark comparative history of Europe and China that examines why the Industrial Revolution emerged in the West. The Great Divergence sheds light on one of the great questions of history: Why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe? Historian Kenneth Pomeranz shows that as recently as 1750, life expectancy, consumption, and product and factor markets were comparable in...

How only violence and catastrophes have consistently reduced inequality throughout world history. Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines...

The Coming of the French Revolution remains essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of this great turning point in the formation of the modern world. First published in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, and suppressed by the Vichy government, this classic work explains what happened in France in 1789, the first year of the...

A clear, accessible exploration of how and why we love by prominent philosopher and bestselling author Harry Frankfurt. In The Reasons of Love, leading moral philosopher and bestselling author Harry Frankfurt argues that the key to a fulfilled life is to pursue wholeheartedly what one cares about, that love is the most authoritative form of caring, and that the purest...

Murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide, and incest: the darker side of classic fairy tales is the subject of this groundbreaking and intriguing study of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Nursery and Household Tales. This expanded edition includes a new preface and an appendix featuring translations of six tales with commentary by Maria Tatar. Throughout the book, Tatar draws on the disciplinary tools...

Originally published in 1975, The Machiavellian Moment remains a landmark of historical and political thought. Celebrated historian J.G.A. Pocock looks at the consequences for modern historical and social consciousness arising from the ideal of the classical republic revived by Machiavelli and other thinkers of Renaissance Italy. Pocock shows that Machiavelli's prime emphasis was on the moment in which the republic...

In this short and powerful book, celebrated philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum makes a passionate case for the importance of the liberal arts at all levels of education. Historically, the humanities have been central to education because they have been seen as essential for creating competent democratic citizens. But recently, Nussbaum argues, thinking about the aims of education has gone disturbingly...

The Reign of Terror continues to fascinate scholars as one of the bloodiest periods in French history, when the Committee of Public Safety strove to defend the first Republic from its many enemies, creating a climate of fear and suspicion in revolutionary France. R. R. Palmer's fascinating narrative in Twelve Who Ruled follows the Committee's deputies individually and collectively, recounting...

A landmark work of literary criticism, Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism is the magnum opus of one of the most important and influential literary theorists of the twentieth century. Breaking with the practice of close reading of individual texts, Frye seeks to describe a common basis for understanding the full range of literary forms by examining archetypes, genres, poetic language,...

The landmark book that situates Blake's poetry within the intellectual movements of his day and unlocks his symbolism for modern readers. Since it was first published, Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry has established itself as the defining commentary on the poetic vision of William Blake. Frye gives a complete solution to the riddles of Blake's longer poems—the so-called 'Prophecies'—and demonstrates how...

In her classic book The Global City, Saskia Sassen explains how New York, London, and Tokyo became command centres of the global economy and, in the process, underwent massive and parallel changes. The book reshapes the way we think about cities in the global economy and continues to provide lessons for the future. A very significant book indeed...A systematic detailed...

The Muqaddimah, often translated as Introduction or Prolegomenon, is the most important Islamic history of the premodern world. Written by the great fourteenth-century Arab scholar Ibn Khaldûn (d. 1406), this monumental work established the foundations of several fields of knowledge, including the philosophy of history, sociology, ethnography, and economics. The first complete English translation, by the eminent Islamicist and interpreter...

From its first publication in 1992, Men, Women, and Chain Saws has offered a groundbreaking perspective on the creativity and influence of horror cinema since the mid-1970s. Investigating the popularity of the low-budget tradition, Carol Clover looks in particular at slasher, occult, and rape-revenge films. Although such movies have been traditionally understood as offering only sadistic pleasures to their mostly...

A landmark work from one of our leading political theorists A sympathetic critique that attempts to free Left politics from its own snares, States of Injury explores how woundedness became a basis for contemporary political identity. Without condemning identity politics, Wendy Brown carefully probes the varied historical forces generating them today and the ways these formative conditions constrain emancipatory desire....

A classic work on radical aesthetics by one of the great philosophers of the early twentieth century, no work of philosopher and essayist José Ortega y Gasset has been more frequently cited, admired, or criticized than his response to modernism, The Dehumanization of Art. The essay, originally published in Spanish in 1925, grappled with the newness of nonrepresentational art and...

What does it mean to be truthful? What role does truth play in our lives? What do we lose if we reject truthfulness? No philosopher is better suited to answer these questions than Bernard Williams. Writing with his characteristic combination of passion and elegant simplicity, he explores the value of truth and finds it to be both less and more...

Leviathan and the Air-Pump examines the conflicts over the value and propriety of experimental methods between two major seventeenth-century thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, author of the political treatise Leviathan and vehement critic of systematic experimentation in natural philosophy, and Robert Boyle, mechanical philosopher and owner of the newly invented air-pump. The issues at stake in their disputes ranged from the physical...

In Hamlet in Purgatory, renowned literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt delves into his longtime fascination with the ghost of Hamlet's father. His daring and ultimately gratifying journey takes him through surprising intellectual territory, yielding an extraordinary account of the rise and fall of Purgatory as both a belief and a lucrative institution—along with a capacious new reading of the power of...

In this volume, Albert Hirschman reconstructs the intellectual climate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to illuminate the intricate ideological transformation that occurred, wherein the pursuit of material interests—so long condemned as the deadly sin of avarice—was assigned the role of containing the unruly and destructive passions of man. Hirschman here offers a new interpretation for the rise of capitalism,...

Named one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time by the Modern Library Anne Carson's remarkable first book about the paradoxical nature of romantic love Since it was first published, Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson's lyrical meditation on love in ancient Greek literature and philosophy, has established itself as a favourite among an unusually broad audience, including classicists,...

Shamanism is an essential work on the study of this mysterious and fascinating phenomenon. The founder of the modern study of the history of religion, Mircea Eliade, surveys the tradition through two and a half millennia of human history, moving from the shamanic traditions of Siberia and Central Asia—where shamanism was first observed—to North and South America, Indonesia, Tibet, China,...

One of the great classics of European literature, Faust is Goethe's most complex and profound work. To tell the dramatic and tragic story of one man's pact with the Devil in exchange for knowledge and power, Goethe drew from an immense variety of cultural and historical material, and a wealth of poetic and theatrical traditions. What results is a tour...

With the publication of The Origins of the Kabbalah in 1950, one of the most important scholars of our century brought the obscure world of Jewish mysticism to a wider audience for the first time. A crucial work in the oeuvre of Gershom Scholem, this book details the beginnings of the Kabbalah in twelfth- and thirteenth-century southern France and Spain,...

One of the world's most widely read social scientists (New York Times) offers his most personal and accessible book, a celebration of how ordinary people can resist oppression and injustice. James Scott taught us what's wrong with seeing like a state. Now, in his most accessible and personal book to date, the acclaimed social scientist makes the case for seeing...

Frank Lloyd Wright first noted the affinity between modern Western architecture and the philosophy of the ancient Chinese writer Laotzu. In this classic work, Amos Ih Tiao Chang expands on that idea, developing the parallel with the aid of architectural drawings and Chinese paintings. Now with a new foreword by David Wang, this book reveals the vitality of intangible, or...

A fascinating exploration of 'hypernormalisation' in a political system that seemed powerful and eternal even when it was on the verge of collapse. Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system, the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of...

An authoritative English translation of one of the most important works in the history of the novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795–1796), Goethe's second novel, is a foundational work in the history of the genre—perhaps the first Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story focusing on the growth and self-realisation of the main character. The story centres on Wilhelm, a young man living in...

A landmark defence of democracy that has been hailed as one of the most important books of the twentieth century One of the most important books of the twentieth century, The Open Society and Its Enemies is an uncompromising defence of liberal democracy and a powerful attack on the intellectual origins of totalitarianism. An immediate sensation when it was first...

Originally published in 1957, this classic work has guided generations of scholars through the arcane mysteries of medieval political theology. Throughout history, the notion of two bodies has permitted the post mortem continuity of monarch and monarchy, as epitomised by the statement, The king is dead. Long live the king. In The King's Two Bodies, Ernst Kantorowicz traces the historical...

The world is a better place than it used to be. People are healthier, wealthier, and live longer. Yet the escapes from destitution by so many have left gaping inequalities between people and nations. In The Great Escape, Angus Deaton, one of the foremost experts on economic development and poverty, tells the remarkable story of how, beginning 250 years ago,...

When it first appeared in 1979, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature hit the philosophical world like a bombshell. In it, Richard Rorty argued that, beginning in the seventeenth century, philosophers developed an unhealthy obsession with the notion of representation: comparing the mind to a mirror that reflects reality. Rorty's book is a powerful critique of this imagery and the...

Politics and Vision is a landmark work by one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century. This is a significantly expanded edition of one of the greatest works of modern political theory. Sheldon Wolin's Politics and Vision inspired and instructed two generations of political theorists after its appearance in 1960. Substantially expanded for republication in 2004, it is both...