Writing in an age when the call for the rights of man had brought revolution to America and France, Mary Wollstonecraft produced her own declaration of female independence in 1792....

In Utopia, Thomas More gives us a traveller\"s account of a newly discovered island where the inhabitants enjoy a social order based on natural reason and justice, and human fulfilment is open to all....

In his perfectly crafted haiku poems, Basho described the natural world with great simplicity and delicacy of feeling. When he composed The Narrow Road to the Deep North he was a serious student of Zen Buddhism setting off on a series of travels designed to strip away the trappings of the material world and bring spiritual enlightenment....

Selected from the Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, Seneca\"s Letters from a Stoic are a set of \"essays in disguise\" from one of the most insightful philosophers of the Silver Age of Roman literature. This Penguin Classics edition is translated from the Latin with an introduction by Robin Campbell....

A Room of One\"s Own is Virginia Woolf\"s most powerful feminist essay, justifying the need for women to possess intellectual freedom and financial independence....

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....

In Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard\"s infamous and controversial work made a lasting impression on both modern Protestant theology and existentialist philosophers such as Sartre and Camus. This Penguin Classics edition is translated from the Danish with an introduction by Alistair Hannay....

One of a major new Classics series - books that have changed the history of thought, in sumptuous, clothbound hardbacks. The son of a pagan father and a Christian mother, Saint Augustine spent his early years torn between conflicting faiths and world views....

One of a major new Classics series - books that have changed the history of thought, in sumptuous, clothbound hardbacks. Lucretius\" poem On the Nature of Things combines a scientific and philosophical treatise with some of the greatest poetry ever written....

One of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer (1788-1860) believed that human action is determined not by reason but by \"will\" - the blind and irrational desire for physical existence....

Niccolo Machiavelli\"s brutally uncompromising manual of statecraft, The Prince is translated and edited with an introduction by Tim Parks in Penguin Classics. As a diplomat in turbulent fifteenth-century Florence, Niccolo Machiavelli knew how quickly political fortunes could rise and fall....

A rousing call to arms whose influence is still felt today, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels\" The Communist Manifesto is edited with an introduction by Gareth Stedman-Jones in Penguin Classics. Marx and Engels\"s revolutionary summons to the working classes, The Communist Manifesto is one of the most important political theories ever formulated....

One of the most iconoclastic philosophers of all time, Nietzsche dramatically rejected notions of good and evil, truth and God. Beyond Good and Evil demonstrates that the world is steeped in false piety and infected with a \"slave morality\"....

For more than 2,000 years, Sun Tzu\"s The Art of War has provided leaders with essential advice on battlefield tactics, managing troops and terrain, and employing cunning and deception....

Freud\"s epoch-making insights revolutionized our perception of who we are, forming the foundation for psychoanalysis. In Civilization and its Discontents he considers the incompatibility of civilization and individual happiness....