Voltaire once said that “An Essay on Man” is “the most sublime didactic poem ever written in any language” (later however, he renounced his admiration for it). Rousseau rhapsodized about its intellectual consolations. Kant recited long...
Mill is usually classified as one of liberalism’s most strident defenders. What is less well known, however, is that Mill became increasingly open to socialist forms of economic organisation in his later life — not least in his Chapters on...
Principles of Political Economy by John Stuart Mill was one of the most important economics or political economy textbooks of the mid-nineteenth century.
Beside discussing descriptive issues such as which nations tended to benefit more in a...
In this work, Mill formulated the five principles of inductive reasoning that are known as Mill's Methods. This work is important in the philosophy of science, and more generally, insofar as it outlines the empirical principles Mill would use to...
Written at the beginning of the second century A.D., Plutarch’s Lives is a brilliant social history of the ancient world by one of the greatest biographers and moralists of all time. In what is by far his most famous and influential work, Plutarch...
These four dialogues enact the trial and execution of Socrates, presenting a dialectical process that shows not only why the Athenians condemned him to death but, much more to the point, the reason why Socrates lived and devoted himself to examining...
The Apology is Plato’s version of the speech given by Socrates as he defended himself in 399 BCE against the charges of ‘corrupting the young, & by not believing in the gods in whom the city believes, but in other daimonia that are novel’...
Orwell’s moving reflections on the English character and his passionate belief in the need for political change. The Lion and the Unicorn was written in London during the worst period of the blitz. It is vintage Orwell, a dynamic outline of his...