On Liberty is a philosophical essay by the English philosopher John Stuart Mill. Published in 1859, it applies Mill's ethical system of utilitarianism to society and state. Mill suggests standards for the relationship between authority and liberty. He emphasizes the importance of individuality, which he considers prerequisite to the higher pleasures - the summum bonum of utilitarianism. Furthermore, Mill asserts that democratic ideals may result in...

Originally written only for his personal consumption, Marcus Aurelius's Meditations has become a key text in the understanding of Roman Stoic philosophy. This Penguin Classics edition is translated with notes by Martin Hammond and an introduction by Diskin Clay. Written in Greek by an intellectual Roman emperor without any intention of publication, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius offer a wide range of fascinating spiritual reflections and exercises...

In his celebrated masterpiece, Symposium, Plato imagines a high-society dinner-party in Athens in 416 BC. The guests--including the comic poet Aristophanes and Plato's mentor Socrates--each deliver a short speech in praise of love. The sequence of dazzling speeches culminates in Socrates' famous account of the views of Diotima, a prophetess who taught him that love is our means of trying to attain goodness, and a brilliant sketch of Socrates himself...

"Karl Marx's 1848 text is reframed in this revised Norton Critical Edition in the context of twenty-first-century theoretical debates, capitalist globalization, the information technology revolution, and contemporary struggles up to and including the 2011 "Arab Spring." Simultaneously extolled in its day as truth incarnate and the inspiration for a life-and-death struggle for humankind's liberation and condemned as the vilest of propaganda on behalf...

John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism is one of the most important, controversial, and suggestive works of moral philosophy ever written. Mill defends the view that all human action should produce the greatest happiness overall, and that happiness itself is to be understood as consisting in 'higher' and 'lower' pleasures. This volume uses the 1871 edition of the text, the last to be published in Mill's lifetime. The text is preceded by a comprehensive...

A compilation of several Lincoln speeches, including the Gettysburg address, the "House divided" speech, and his two inaugural addresses.

Hegel's Reason in History and other works inspired a transcendentalist movement that spanned Europe, Great Britain, and the United States.

What did the Prophet teach that so moved the masses? And how did the Western world come to understand the threat embodied in these Eastern "heresies"?