"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 Bertrand Russell
April 05, 2016
Many of the revolutionary effects of science and technology are obvious enough. Bertrand Russell saw in the 1950s that there are also many negative aspects of scientific innovation. Insightful and controversial in equal measure, Russell argues that science offers the world greater well-being than ...
By Victor Ehrenberg
October 19, 2010
From Solon to Socrates is a magisterial narrative introduction to what is generally regarded as the most important period of Greek history. Stressing the unity of Greek history and the centrality of Athens, Victor Ehrenberg covers a rich and diverse range of political, economic, military and ...
By Marjorie Garber
May 11, 2010
The plays of Shakespeare are filled with ghosts – and ghost writing. Shakespeare's Ghost Writers is an examination of the authorship controversy surrounding Shakespeare: the claim made repeatedly that the plays were ghost written. Ghosts take the form of absences, erasures, even forgeries and ...
By Mary Midgley
March 31, 2016
With a new introduction by the author. It is a book of superb spirit and style, more entertaining than a work of philosophy has any right to be.’ – Times Literary Supplement. Throughout our lives we are making moral choices. Some decisions simply direct our everyday comings and goings; others ...
By H. H. Scullard
October 15, 2012
With a new foreword by Tim Cornell ‘Can anyone be so indifferent or idle as not to care to know by what means and under what kind of polity almost the whole inhabited world was conquered and bought under the dominion of a single city of Rome?’ – Polybius, Greek Historian The city of Rome created ...
By Karl Popper
April 26, 2012
With a new foreword by Scott Austin 'I hope that these essays may illustrate the thesis that all history is or should be the history of problem situations, and that in following this principle we may further our understanding of the Presocratics and other thinkers of the past. The essays also try...
By Ernest Gellner
April 19, 2005
When Ernest Gellner was his early thirties, he took it upon himself to challenge the prevailing philosophical orthodoxy of the day, Linguistic Philosophy. Finding a powerful ally in Bertrand Russell, who provided the foreword for this book, Gellner embarked on the project that was to put him on the...
By Carl Gustav Jung
January 29, 2016
In 1935 Jung gave a now famous and controversial course of five lectures at the Tavistock Clinic in London. In them he presents, in lucid and compelling fashion, his theory of the mind and the methods he had used to arrive at his conclusions: dream analysis, word association and ‘active imagination...
By Bertrand Russell
August 19, 2009
First published in 1961, Fact and Fiction is a collection of Bertrand Russell’s essays that reflect on the books and writings that influenced his life, including fiction, essays on politics and education, divertissements and parables. Also broaching on the highly controversial issues of war and ...
By Bertrand Russell
August 13, 2009
Written by one of the twentieth century’s most significant thinkers, Freedom and Organization, is considered to be Bertrand Russell’s major work on political history. It traces the main causes of political change during a period of one hundred years, which he argues were predominantly influenced by...
By Jacob Burckhardt
February 26, 2007
Western Civilisation was in its pomp when Jacob Burckhardt delivered his Judgements on History and Historians; European Empires spanned the globe, while the modern age was being forged in the nationalist revolutions of 1848. As a tutor to the young Friedrich Nietzsche as well as one of the first ...
By Bertrand Russell
April 06, 2009
First published in 1910, Philosophical Essays is one of Bertrand Russell’s earliest works and marks an important period in the evolution of thought of one of the world’s most influential thinkers. This selection of seven essays displays Russell's incisiveness and brilliance of exposition in the ...