Originally published in England in the spring of 1944—when Eleanor Roosevelt supported the efforts of Stalin, and Albert Einstein subscribed lock, stock, and barrel to the socialist program—The Road to Serfdom was seen as heretical for its passionate warning against the dangers of state control over the means of production. For F. A. Hayek, the collectivist idea of empowering government with increasing economic control would inevitably lead not to a utopia but to the horrors of nazi Germany and fascist Italy.First published by the University of Chicago Press on September 18, 1944, The Road to Serfdom garnered immediate attention from the public, politicians, and scholars alike. The first printing of 2,000 copies was exhausted instantly, and within six months more than 30,000 were sold. In April of 1945, Reader's Digest published a condensed version of the book, and soon thereafter the Book-of-the-Month Club distributed this condensation to more than 600,000 readers. A perennial best-seller, the book has sold over a quarter of a million copies in the United States, not including the British edition or the nearly twenty translations into such languages as German, French, Dutch, Swedish, and Japanese, and not to mention the many underground editions produced in Eastern Europe before the fall of the iron curtain.After thirty-two printings in the United States, The Road to Serfdom has established itself alongside the works of Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and George Orwell for its timeless meditation on the relation between individual liberty and government authority. This fiftieth anniversary edition, with a new introduction by Milton Friedman, commemorates the enduring influence of The Road to Serfdom on the ever-changing political and social climates of the twentieth century, from the rise of socialism after World War II to the Reagan and Thatcher "revolutions" in the 1980s and the transitions in Eastern Europe from communism to capitalism in the 1990s.F. A. Hayek (1899-1992), recipient of the Medal of Freedom in 1991 and co-winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1974, was a pioneer in monetary theory and the principal proponent of libertarianism in the twentieth century.On the first American edition of The Road to Serfdom:"One of the most important books of our generation. . . . It restates for our time the issue between liberty and authority with the power and rigor of reasoning with which John Stuart Mill stated the issue for his own generation in his great essay On Liberty. . . . It is an arresting call to all well-intentioned planners and socialists, to all those who are sincere democrats and liberals at heart to stop, look and listen."—Henry Hazlitt, New York Times Book Review, September 1944"In the negative part of Professor Hayek's thesis there is a great deal of truth. It cannot be said too often—at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough—that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamt of."—George Orwell, Collected Essays

    The book was based on a course of public lectures delivered by Schrödinger in February 1943 at Trinity College, Dublin. Schrödinger's lecture focused on one important question: "how can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?" In the book, Schrödinger introduced the idea of an "aperiodic crystal" that contained genetic information in its configuration of covalent chemical bonds. In the 1950s, this idea stimulated enthusiasm for discovering the genetic molecule and would give both Francis Crick and James Watson initial inspiration in their research.

    Written during the Second World War and circulated privately, it appeared in a printed edition in Amsterdam in 1947. "What we had set out to do," the authors write in the Preface, "was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism."Yet the work goes far beyond a mere critique of contemporary events. Historically remote developments, indeed, the birth of Western history and of subjectivity itself out of the struggle against natural forces, as represented in myths, are connected in a wide arch to the most threatening experiences of the present. The book consists in five chapters, at first glance unconnected, together with a number of shorter notes. The various analyses concern such phenomena as the detachment of science from practical life, formalized morality, the manipulative nature of entertainment culture, and a paranoid behavioral structure, expressed in aggressive anti-Semitism, that marks the limits of enlightenment. The authors perceive a common element in these phenomena, the tendency toward self-destruction of the guiding criteria inherent in enlightenment thought from the beginning. Using historical analyses to elucidate the present, they show, against the background of a prehistory of subjectivity, why the National Socialist terror was not an aberration of modern history but was rooted deeply in the fundamental characteristics of Western civilization.Adorno and Horkheimer see the self-destruction of Western reason as grounded in a historical and fateful dialectic between the domination of external nature and society. They trace enlightenment, which split these spheres apart, back to its mythical roots. Enlightenment and myth, therefore, are not irreconcilable opposites, but dialectically mediated qualities of both real and intellectual life. "Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology." This paradox is the fundamental thesis of the book.This new translation, based on the text in the complete edition of the works of Max Horkheimer, contains textual variants, commentary upon them, and an editorial discussion of the position of this work in the development of Critical Theory.

    Investigating the often neglected fragments of history, evidence is presented indicating that the seeds of democracy were planted one thousand years before the beginning of the Christian Era.

    A major contribution to Heidegger's provocative dialogue with the pre-Socratics, the book attacks some of the most firmly established conceptions of Greek thinking and of the Greek world. The central theme is the question of truth and the primordial understanding of truth to be found in Parmenides' "didactic poem." Heidegger highlights the contrast between Greek and Roman thought and the reflection of that contrast in language. He analyzes the decline in the primordial understanding of truth--and, just as importantly, of untruth--that began in later Greek philosophy and that continues, by virtue of the Latinization of the West, down to the present day. Beyond an interpretation of Greek philosophy, Parmenides (volume 54 of Heidegger's Collected Works) offers a strident critique of the contemporary world, delivered during a time that Heidegger described as "out of joint."

    We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

    De Lubac traces the origin of 19th century attempts to construct a humanism apart from God, the sources of contemporary atheism which purports to have "moved beyond God." The three persons he focuses on are Feuerbach, who greatly influenced Marx; Nietzsche, who represents nihilism; and Comte, who is the father of all forms of positivism. He then shows that the only one who really responded to this ideology was Dostoevsky, a kind of prophet who criticizes in his novels this attempt to have a society without God. Despite their historical and scholarly appearance, de Lubac's work clearly refers to the present. As he investigates the sources of modern atheism, particularly in its claim to have definitely moved beyond the idea of God, he is thinking of an ideology prevalent today in East and West which regards the Christian faith as a completely outdated.

    The Perennial Philosophy includes selections from Meister Eckhart, Rumi, and Lao Tzu, as well as the Bhagavad Gita, Tibetan Book of the Dead, Diamond Sutra, and Upanishads, among many others.

    It takes the form of a diary, recording the earliest days of World War II and the Nazi occupation of France, but this is no ordinary day book: it records the author’s journey through a war-torn world without transcendence. Bataille’s spiritual journey is also an intellectual one, a trip with Hegel, Kierkegaard, Blake, Baudelaire and Nietzsche as his companions. And it is a school of the flesh wherein eroticism and mysticism are fused in a passionate search for pure immanence. Georges Bataille said of his work: “I teach the art of turning horror into delight.” This new translation of Guilty is the first to include the full text from Bataille’s Oeuvres Complètes. The text includes Bataille’s notes and drafts, which permit the reader to trace the development of the book from diary to draft to published text, as well as annotations of Bataille’s source materials. An extensive and incisive introductory essay by Stuart Kendall situates the work historically, biographically, and philosophically. Guilty is Bataille’s most demanding, intricate, and multilayered work, but it is also his most personal and moving one.

    He believed that the deepest reality of human life lies in the relationship between one being and another. Between Man and Man is the classic work where he puts this belief into practice, applying it to the concrete problems of contemporary society. Here he tackles subjects as varied as religious ethics, social philosophy, marriage, education, psychology and art. Including some of his most famous writings, such as the masterful What is Man?, this enlightening work challenges each reader to reassess their encounter with the world that surrounds them.

    It is out of this background that the great critic Theodor Adorno emerged. His finest essays are collected here, offering the reader unparalleled insights into Adorno's thoughts on culture. He argued that the culture industry commodified and standardized all art. In turn this suffocated individuality and destroyed critical thinking. At the time, Adorno was accused of everything from overreaction to deranged hysteria by his many detractors. In today's world, where even the least cynical of consumers is aware of the influence of the media, Adorno's work takes on a more immediate significance. The Culture Industry is an unrivalled indictment of the banality of mass culture.

    A religious diatribe written from within the Church against the established order of things in a presumably "Christian" land.

    It was published in 1944, and in it, she makes a philosophical inquiry into the human situation by way of analogy from the story of when Pyrrhus was asked by his friend Cineas what his plans were after conquering his next empire. Cineas' question is a sort of infinite regress ("and then what?") that only stops when Pyrrhus admits that after the last conquest, he will rest. Upon receiving this answer, Cineas asks why Pyrrhus doesn't rest now instead of going through all the trouble of conquering all these other empires when the final result will be rest anyway.According to Beauvoir, Cineas' question haunts all of our projects, and we will always have to give an answer to it. The authentic answer, as she sees it, goes contrary to traditional interpretations in which Cineas is considered the wiser of the two. Pyrrhus' attitude is considered more authentic in that it is an attitude that directs itself forwards towards goals that are never absolute: According to Beauvoir, the reason for Pyrrhus' final statement that in the end, he is going to rest, is that he lacks imagination.