Hitler had a dream to rule the world, not only with the gun but also with his mind. He saw himself as a "philosopher-leader", and astonishingly gained the support of many intellectuals of his time. In this compelling book, Yvonne Sherratt explores Hi...

First published in 1516, Saint Thomas More's "Utopia" is one of the most important works of European humanism and serves as a key text in survey courses on Western intellectual history, the Renaissance, political theory, and many other subjects. Pree...

The Jewish German philosopher Ernst Cassirer was one of the leading proponents of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism. The essays in this volume provide a window into Cassirer's discovery of the symbolic nature of human existence – the fact that our...

Why has mankind developed so differently from other animals? How and why did language, culture, religion and the arts come into being? In this wide-ranging and ambitious essay, Christoph Turcke offers a new answer to these timeworn questions by scrut...

In this thought-provoking study, Jack Russell Weinstein suggests the foundations of liberalism can be found in the writings of Adam Smith (1723-1790), a pioneer of modern economic theory and a major figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. While offerin...

In "A Common Faith", eminent American philosopher John Dewey calls for the "emancipation of the true religious quality" from the heritage of dogmatism and supernaturalism that he believes characterizes historical religions. He describes how a depth o...

In this extraordinary work, Peter Alexander Meyers shows how the centrepiece of the Enlightenment – society as the symbol of collective human life and as the fundamental domain of human practice – was primarily composed and animated by its most ambiv...

This book gathers together for the first time an important body of texts written between 1672 and 1686 by the great German philosopher and polymath Gottfried Leibniz. These writings, most of them previously untranslated, represent Leibniz's sustained...

The noted German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel wrote a number of essays that deal directly with religion as a fundamental process in human life. These essays set forth Simmel's mature reflections on religion and its relation to modernity,...

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) was a Protestant preacher, an influential religious thinker, and an important moral guide in mid-twentieth-century America. But what does he have to say to us now? In what way does he inform the thinking of political lead...