Great Books

Spirit of the Laws

February 24, 1971

Spirit of the Laws

February 24, 1971

Twenty years of work by a French magistrate going blind, and the book that handed the American founders the separation of powers.

Two Treatises of Government

February 23, 1971

Two Treatises of Government

February 23, 1971

Written in secret, at the risk of the scaffold, and published anonymously by a man who denied authorship until he was dead. It is the closest thing the liberal state...

Ethics

February 23, 1971

Ethics

February 23, 1971

Definitions, axioms and numbered propositions, each one closing with a mathematician's Q.E.D. Its author never published it, and had good reason to think he would be prosecuted if he did.

Pensées

February 22, 1971

Pensées

February 22, 1971

One of the great mathematicians of his century died at thirty-nine and left behind a box of paper scraps, some of them sewn into bundles. They are the most disquieting...

Paradise Lost

February 21, 1971

Paradise Lost

February 21, 1971

Blind, defeated, and lucky to have escaped the scaffold, Milton composed the last great epic in English at night and dictated it in the morning to whoever was in the...

Leviathan

February 20, 1971

Leviathan

February 20, 1971

Written in exile while England was killing itself, by a man who thought fear of violent death was the beginning of political wisdom. Nobody has ever made a colder case...