"Routledge Classics is more than just a collection of texts...it embodies and circulates challenging ideas and keeps vital debates current and alive." – Hilary Mantel
The Routledge Classics series, with titles by Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Mary Midgley, was launched in 2001. The series contains the very best of Routledge’s publishing over the past century or so, books that have, by popular consent, become established as classics in their field. Drawing on a fantastic heritage of innovative writing published by Routledge and its associated imprints, this series makes available in attractive, affordable form some of the most important works of modern times.
In 2021 we are delighted to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the Routledge Classics series with the publication of fifteen stellar new titles. All include new forewords or introductions and eye-catching cover designs, a hallmark of the series.
By Mary Midgley
September 28, 2023
In an impassioned defence of the importance of our own thoughts, feelings and experiences, the renowned philosopher Mary Midgley shows that there’s much more to our selves than a jumble of brain cells. Exploring the remarkable gap that has opened up between our understanding of our sense of self ...
By Herbert Marcuse
September 28, 2023
Hailed as the 'Guru of the New Left' and a leading figure of 1960s counterculture and liberation movements, the philosopher Herbert Marcuse is amongst the most renowned and controversial thinkers of the twentieth century. Eros and Civilization is one of his best-known books and brought him ...
By Henri Lefebvre
September 28, 2023
Philosopher, sociologist and urban theorist, Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) was one of the great social theorists of the twentieth century and pioneered the theorization of everyday life and space. In this fascinating book, which became a manifesto for urban activism upon its first publication in the ...
By Max Weber
September 28, 2023
Sociologist, historian and political economist, Max Weber is one of the most important thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His astonishing range and penetrating insights resulted in many influential books spanning religion, society, politics and economics, permanently affecting the ...
By Simone Weil
September 28, 2023
Simone Weil (1909–1943) is one of the most brilliant and unorthodox religious and philosophical minds of the twentieth century. She was also a political activist, worked in the Renault car factory in France in the 1930s and fought briefly as an anarchist in the Spanish Civil War, before her tragic ...
By Wilfred Bion
September 28, 2023
Wilfred R. Bion was one of the foremost psychoanalysts of his generation, whose work has shaped and enriched psychoanalysis and psychotherapy indelibly. Renowned for some highly original and sometimes cryptic ideas, such as the alpha function and theory of the grid, Learning from Experience is ...
By Herbert Marcuse
September 28, 2023
No philosopher has arguably had the kind of lasting impact on debates about the nature of reason and society and the individual as Friedrich Hegel. Reason and Revolution is Herbert Marcuse's brilliant interpretation of Hegel's philosophy and the influence it has had on political thought, from the ...
By Jacques Le Goff
September 28, 2023
Known for speaking with the birds, for professing poverty, receiving the stigmata and for initiating the Franciscan order, Francis of Assisi is one of the most radical and inspiring figures in Christianity. In this outstanding and celebrated biography, the distinguished medievalist Jacques Le ...
By Jonathan Culler
January 06, 2023
A work of technical skill as well as outstanding literary merit, Structuralist Poetics was awarded the 1975 James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association. It was during the writing of this book that Culler developed his now famous and remarkably complex theory of poetics and ...
By D. M. Armstrong
October 06, 2022
D. M. Armstrong's A Materialist Theory of the Mind is widely known as one of the most important defences of the view that mental states are nothing but physical states of the brain. A landmark of twentieth-century philosophy of mind, it launched the physicalist revolution in approaches to the mind ...
By Bertrand Russell
September 15, 2022
An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry was first published in 1897 when Bertrand Russell was 25 years old. It marks his first major foray into analytic philosophy, a movement in which Russell is one of the founding members and figurehead. It provides a brilliant insight into Russell's early ...
By Maurice Merleau-Ponty
September 15, 2022
First published in France in 1947, Humanism and Terror is a vital work of political philosophy by one of the leading French philosophers of the twentieth century. Attempting to understand what he called the "dislocated world" that followed immediately after the Second World War—including his own, ...