"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 Nils Christie
October 04, 2016
Crime Control As Industry, translated into many languages, is a modern classic of criminology and sociology. Nils Christie, one of the leading criminologists of his era, argues that crime control, rather than crime itself is the real danger for our future. Prison populations, especially in Russia ...
By Carl Jung
September 29, 2016
Psychological Types is one of Jung's most important and famous works. First published in English by Routledge in the early 1920s it appeared after Jung's so-called fallow period, during which he published little, and it is perhaps the first significant book to appear after his own confrontation ...
By R.D Laing, Aaron Esterson
September 30, 2016
In the late 1950s the psychiatrist R.D.Laing and psychoanalyst Aaron Esterson spent five years interviewing eleven families of female patients diagnosed as 'schizophrenic'. Sanity, Madness and the Family is the result of their work. Eleven vivid case studies, often dramatic and disturbing, reveal ...
By W.H.R. Rivers
May 18, 2001
One of the most fascinating men of his generation, W.H.R. Rivers was a British doctor and psychiatrist as well as a leading ethnologist. Immortalized as the hero of Pat Barker's award-winning Regeneration trilogy, Rivers was the clinician who, in the First World War, cared for the poet Siegfried ...
By Adrian Stokes
December 21, 2001
Adrian Stokes was one of the twentieth century's finest and most discriminating writers on art. Of over twenty works of art criticism, Michelangelo was considered by Lawrence Gowing to be the most complete he ever wrote, presenting an understanding of the great artist that no one subsequently could...
By Bertrand Russell
August 17, 2009
First published in 1923, The Prospects of Industrial Civilization is considered the most ambitious of Bertrand Russell's works on modern society. It offers a rare glimpse into often-ignored subtleties of his political thought and in it he argues that industrialism is a threat to human freedom, ...
By Bertrand Russell
August 13, 2009
Written at the height of the Cold War in 1959, Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare was published in an effort 'to prevent the catastrophe which would result from a large scale H-bomb war'. Bertrand Russell’s staunch anti-war stance is made very clear in this highly controversial text, which outlines ...
By Cornel West
September 11, 2008
'The sheer range of West's interests and insights is staggering and exemplary: he appears equally comfortable talking about literature, ethics, art, jurisprudence, religion, and popular-cultural forms.' - Artforum Keeping Faith is a rich, moving and deeply personal collection of essays from one of ...
By Raymond Tallis
April 07, 2016
Neuroscience has made astounding progress in the understanding of the brain. What should we make of its claims to go beyond the brain and explain consciousness, behaviour and culture? Where should we draw the line? In this brilliant critique Raymond Tallis dismantles "Neuromania", arising out of ...
By Hyman Minsky
April 07, 2016
In the winter of 1933, the American financial and economic system collapsed. Since then economists, policy makers and financial analysts throughout the world have been haunted by the question of whether "It" can happen again. In 2008 "It" very nearly happened again as banks and mortgage lenders in ...
By Richard Ruland, Malcolm Bradbury
April 07, 2016
Widely acknowledged as a contemporary classic that has introduced thousands of readers to American literature, From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature brilliantly charts the fascinating story of American literature from the Puritan legacy to the advent of postmodernism. ...
By Tim Ingold
April 05, 2016
What do walking, weaving, observing, storytelling, singing, drawing and writing have in common? The answer is that they all proceed along lines. In this extraordinary book Tim Ingold imagines a world in which everyone and everything consists of interwoven or interconnected lines and lays the ...