Routledge Classics
About the Book Series
"Routledge Classics is more than just a collection of texts...it embodies and circulates challenging ideas and keeps vital debates current and alive." – Hilary Mantel
The Routledge Classics series, with titles by Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Mary Midgley, was launched in 2001. The series contains the very best of Routledge’s publishing over the past century or so, books that have, by popular consent, become established as classics in their field. Drawing on a fantastic heritage of innovative writing published by Routledge and its associated imprints, this series makes available in attractive, affordable form some of the most important works of modern times.
In 2021 we are delighted to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the Routledge Classics series with the publication of fifteen stellar new titles. All include new forewords or introductions and eye-catching cover designs, a hallmark of the series.
A Common Humanity: Thinking About Love and Truth and Justice
1st Edition
By Raimond Gaita
September 15, 2025
Holocaust denial, racism, genocide of indigenous peoples and the long-lasting harms inflicted by colonialism pose deep challenges to any idea of a common humanity. How can we include these and countless other examples of evil within our vision of a shared morality? These painful human incongruities...
Social Limits to Growth
1st Edition
By Fred Hirsch
September 15, 2025
Fred Hirsch's Social Limits Growth is one of the sleeper hits of economics. Its brilliant and acute insights, informed by Hirsch’s experience as a journalist at The Economist before turning to academia, have become ever more relevant as liberal capitalism confronts challenges from austerity to the ...
The Imagination
1st Edition
By Jean-Paul Sartre
September 15, 2025
'Every theory of imagination must satisfy two requirements. It must account for the spontaneous discrimination that the mind makes between its images and its perceptions, and it must explain the role that the image plays in the operation of thought. Whatever form it has taken, the classical ...
The Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong
1st Edition
By Franz Brentano
September 15, 2025
"Is there such a thing as a moral truth taught by nature itself and independent of ecclesiastical, political, and every other kind of social authority? Is there a moral law that is natural in the sense of being universally and incontestably valid—valid for men at all places and all times, indeed ...
An Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth
1st Edition
By Bertrand Russell
March 17, 2025
In An Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth, Bertrand Russell returns to philosophy after a long period of writing about education, religion and marriage. Investigating how we can be justified in what we know and how we can reconcile knowledge of the physical world with immediate sensory knowledge, ...
Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics
1st Edition
By Peter Strawson
March 17, 2025
Sir Peter Strawson (1919–2006) was one of the leading British philosophers of his generation and an influential figure in a golden age for British philosophy between 1950 and 1970. Individuals, his most important book, is a modern philosophical classic. Bold in scope and ambition, it presents ...
Logic and Knowledge
1st Edition
By Bertrand Russell
March 17, 2025
Bertrand Russell's writings on logic, metaphysics, philosophy of language and epistemology are among the most influential of the twentieth century. Logic and Knowledge presents Russell's very best and most important work on these topics in a single volume, which by placing philosophical logic at ...
Mysticism and Logic
1st Edition
By Bertrand Russell
March 17, 2025
“To abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things – this is emancipation, and this is the free man's worship.” —Bertrand Russell Mysticism and Logic is one of Russell's most celebrated collection of essays. They not ...
The Philosophy of Leibniz
1st Edition
By Bertrand Russell
March 17, 2025
Bertrand Russell’s study of the philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz is one of his earliest books, providing a fascinating glimpse of his philosophical brilliance. It remains one of the most important books on this polymathic seventeenth-century thinker and the only book Russell wrote ...
A Life of One's Own
1st Edition
By Marion Milner
May 01, 2024
'This is what I really want. I want to discover ways to discriminate the important things in human life. I want to find ways of getting past this blind fumbling with existence.' - Marion Milner, from A Life of One’s Own. How often do we really ask ourselves, 'What will make me happy? What do I ...
An Experiment in Leisure
1st Edition
By Marion Milner
May 01, 2024
'Before I began this experiment I had always been haunted by the feeling that the surface of life, what everyone said about it, was quite different from the reality of life, that the important things that were happening all the time were on the whole quite different from what was said about them.'&...
Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381
1st Edition
By Rodney Hilton
May 01, 2024
The Peasants' Revolt of 1381, led by Wat Tyler, was the first popular uprising in British history. Centred around the counties of South East England and rebelling against legislation to fix minimum wages, it was driven by agricultural labourers and the urban working classes but quickly gathered ...