History of Ideas

Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit has a long-standing reputation as one of the key books in the history of Western philosophy, but many are unsure ju...

In a narrative that extends from fin de siècle Paris to the 1960s, Edmund Mendelssohn examines modernist thinkers and composers who engaged with no...

From the Occupy protests to the Black Lives Matter movement and school strikes for climate action, the twenty-first century has been rife with acti...

Arguments about liberalism's meanings, endurance, imminent death, or revival are widespread in modern political thought. But what effect do these p...

New to Penguin Classics, the astonishing story of the Copernican Revolution, told through the words of the ground-breaking scientists who brought i...

Scholars commonly take the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789, written during the French Revolution, as the starting point for th...

Republicanism is a powerful resource for emancipatory struggles against domination. Its commitment to popular sovereignty subverts justifications o...

How did science come to have such a central place in Western culture? How did cognitive values--and subsequently moral, political, and social ones-...

Fascinated and often baffled by China, Anglophone writers turned to classics for answers. In poetry, essays, and travel narratives, ancient Greece ...

This is a book about teaching 'disobedient pedagogies' from the heart of empire. The authors show how educators, activists and students are cultiva...

Western legal professionals habitually rely on a version of legal history that bolsters their own sway over the present. The legal mythologies unde...

What if the protagonist of Hegel's Phenomenology were Black? Ryan Johnson and Biko Mandela Gray study the relationship between Hegel's Phenomenolog...

Kant's Reason develops a novel interpretation of Kant's conception of reason and its philosophical significance. Karl Schafer argues that Kant pres...

This edition offers the first English translation of Amalia Holst's daring book, On the Vocation of Woman to Higher Intellectual Education (1802). ...

Why read Leibniz today? Can we still learn from him and not just about him? This book argues that Leibniz offers a powerful, productive model for t...

Manhattan is the tale of a young French scholar who travels to the United States in 1965 on a Fulbright Fellowship to consult the manuscripts of be...