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The Essential Writings of Rousseau

Part of Modern Library Classics

Author Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Edited by Leo Damrosch
Translated by Peter Constantine
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Paperback
$20.00 US
Random House Group | Modern Library
5.24"W x 7.97"H x 1.23"D  
On sale Mar 26, 2013 | 560 Pages | 978-0-8129-8038-7
| Grades 9-12 + AP/IB
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  • Education & Professional Learning > Schools and Education > Philosophy, Theory, and Social Aspects
  • Social Studies > Philosophy & Ethics > Essays
  • Social Studies > Philosophy & Ethics > Introduction to Philosophy
  • Social Studies > Philosophy & Ethics > Political Philosophy
  • About
  • Author
  • Excerpt
Newly translated by Peter Constantine
Edited and with an Introduction by Leo Damrosch

The Essential Writings of Rousseau collects the best and most indispensable work of one of the world’s most influential writers. A towering figure of Enlightenment thought, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was also one of that movement’s most passionate and persuasive critics. His extraordinarily original observations on politics, education, and human nature were provocative in their day and remain resonant more than two hundred years after his death. Rousseau’s 1762 treatise The Social Contract laid intellectual groundwork for both the American and French Revolutions, influencing such figures as Thomas Jefferson. An eloquent writer with profound insight into human psychology, Rousseau also penned one of the most compelling autobiographies ever written—the magisterial Confessions. The entirety of the first three books of that masterpiece along with the complete Social Contract are included in this indispensable volume.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was the author of numerous political and philosophical texts as well as entries on music for Diderot's Encyclopédie and the novels La nouvelle Héloïse and Émile. Rousseau was also a widely loved composer and philosopher. His philosophy had great influence during the French Enlightenment and throughout all of Europe. View titles by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men

It is of man that I have to speak, and the question I shall examine assures that I will be speaking openly, as one does not propose such questions to one's fellow men when one is afraid of honoring the truth. I will, therefore, defend the cause of humanity with confidence before the wise men who invite me to do so, and shall be pleased if I prove worthy of my subject and my judges.

In my view there are two sorts of inequality in the human species: one I call natural or physical, because it is established by nature and consists of differences in age, health, physical strength, and qualities of the mind or soul; the other, one might call moral or political inequality, because it depends on some sort of mutual agreement, and is established, or at least authorized, by the consent of men. This inequality consists of the various privileges that some enjoy at the expense of others, such as being wealthier, more honored, and more powerful than they, or even making themselves obeyed.

One cannot ask what the source of natural inequality is, because the simple definition of the term would be provided as an answer. Even less can one inquire if there is not some essential connection between the two inequalities, for that would be to ask in different terms if those who command are necessarily better than those who obey, and if the power of the body or the mind, and wisdom or virtue, are always found in the same individuals in proportion to their power or wealth: this is a good question, perhaps, in a debate among slaves within earshot of their masters, but it is not fitting for free men of reason who are engaged in a quest for truth.

What, then, is this discourse about? Its aim is to mark within the progression of things the moment in which rights succeeded violence, and nature was subjected to law; to explain by what sequence of miracles the powerful might resolve to serve the weak and the people purchase an imaginary repose at the price of true happiness.

All the philosophers who have examined the foundations of society have felt compelled to go back to the state of nature, but not one has succeeded. Some have not hesitated to suppose that men living in a natural state had the notion of what was just and unjust, without troubling to show that they must already have had that notion, or even that it would have been useful to them to have it. Others have spoken of a natural right that each individual has to protect what belongs to him, yet without explaining what they understand by belongs. Others again, after first granting authority to the more powerful over the weaker, immediately created a government without giving thought to the time that had to elapse before the words authority and government could attain meaning among men. Finally, all the philosophers, speaking constantly of need, greed, oppression, desires, and pride, imbued the state of nature with ideas they had found in society. They spoke of savage man but depicted civilized man. It did not even occur to most of our philosophers to doubt that the state of nature once existed, whereas it is evident from the Holy Scriptures that the first man, having instantly received intellect and precepts from God, was himself not in a state of nature at all; and if one gives the writings of Moses the credence that every Christian philosopher owes them, one must say that even before the Deluge men never existed in a pure state of nature, unless they lapsed into it by some extraordinary occurrence; a paradox that is most difficult to defend and altogether impossible to prove.

Let us therefore begin by setting aside all the facts, for they do not touch on the problem.20 One must not take the inquiries into which one can enter on this subject as historical truths, but merely as hypothetical and conditional reasoning. These are better suited to elucidate the nature of things than to show their true origin, and are comparable to the hypotheses that our natural scientists make every day on the formation of the world. Religion commands us to believe that God Himself drew men out of the state of nature immediately after the Creation, and that men are unequal because he willed them to be so. But religion does not forbid us to form conjectures drawn exclusively from the nature of man and the creatures surrounding him, or to conjecture what might have happened to mankind had it been left to itself. This is what I am asked, and this is what I intend to examine in this discourse. Since my subject concerns man in general, I will strive to adopt a language suited to all nations, or, rather, forgetting times and places in order to think only about the men to whom I am speaking, I shall imagine myself in the Lyceum of Athens, repeating the lessons of my masters, having as my judges Platos and Xenocrateses, and mankind as my auditors.21

Listen, O man, from whatever country you may be, whatever your opinions! Here is your history such as I believe to read it, not in books written by your fellow men, who are liars, but in nature, which never lies. Everything that comes from nature will be true. Nothing will be false, except what I might unintentionally have included of my own. The times of which I shall speak are very distant. How much you have changed from what you once were! It is, so to speak, the life of your species I will describe to you according to the qualities that you have received, and that your education and your habits have been able to corrupt but not destroy. There is, I believe, an age at which an individual might want to stop growing older; you will look for the age at which you wish your species to have gone no further. Discontented with your present state for reasons that herald even greater discontent for your unfortunate posterity, you might perhaps wish to be able to go back in time. And this sentiment must lead to the praise of your first ancestors, the criticism of your contemporaries, and dread for those who will have the misfortune of living after you.



Part One

As important as it might be to consider man from his origins in order to judge his natural state, and examine him, so to speak, in the original embryonic state of his species, I will not follow his development through its successive stages. I will not pause to search in his biology for what he might have been at the beginning in order to eventually become what he is now. I will not examine if, as Aristotle believes, man's elongated nails might originally have been hooked claws, if he was hairy like a bear, and if, walking on all fours, his eyes directed at the ground and confined to a few paces ahead, whether this did not shape the character and also the limits of his ideas. On this question I could form only vague, almost imaginary, conjectures. Comparative anatomy has still made too little progress, and the observations of natural scientists are still too uncertain, to allow for a solid foundation on such a subject. Thus, without turning to supernatural knowledge on this subject, and without regard to the changes that have taken place in man's inner and outer form as he gradually began to apply his limbs to new uses and to nourish himself on new foods, I will assume him to have always had the form I see him having today, walking on two feet, making use of his hands as we make use of ours, directing his eyes at all of nature and surveying with them the vast expanse of heaven.

In stripping this being, constituted as he is, of all the supernatural gifts he might have received, and of all the artificial faculties that he could have acquired only by a long progress; in considering this being, in short, such as he must have emerged from the hands of nature, I see an animal that is less strong than some, less agile than others, but, in sum, formed in the most advantageous way of all. I see him satisfying his hunger beneath an oak, quenching his thirst at the first stream, making his bed beneath the same tree that furnished him his meal--thus his needs are satisfied.

Abandoned to its natural fertility and covered by immense forests that the ax had never mutilated, the earth offers at every step food and shelter to animals of every species. Men, dispersed among them, observe and imitate their industry and thus raise themselves to the instinct of beasts, with the advantage that each species has merely its own instincts, while man, having perhaps none that are his own, appropriates them all, nourishing himself equally on a wide selection of foods that other animals share, consequently finding his sustenance with greater ease than any of the others.
Copyright © 2013 by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About

Newly translated by Peter Constantine
Edited and with an Introduction by Leo Damrosch

The Essential Writings of Rousseau collects the best and most indispensable work of one of the world’s most influential writers. A towering figure of Enlightenment thought, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was also one of that movement’s most passionate and persuasive critics. His extraordinarily original observations on politics, education, and human nature were provocative in their day and remain resonant more than two hundred years after his death. Rousseau’s 1762 treatise The Social Contract laid intellectual groundwork for both the American and French Revolutions, influencing such figures as Thomas Jefferson. An eloquent writer with profound insight into human psychology, Rousseau also penned one of the most compelling autobiographies ever written—the magisterial Confessions. The entirety of the first three books of that masterpiece along with the complete Social Contract are included in this indispensable volume.

Author

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was the author of numerous political and philosophical texts as well as entries on music for Diderot's Encyclopédie and the novels La nouvelle Héloïse and Émile. Rousseau was also a widely loved composer and philosopher. His philosophy had great influence during the French Enlightenment and throughout all of Europe. View titles by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Excerpt

Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men

It is of man that I have to speak, and the question I shall examine assures that I will be speaking openly, as one does not propose such questions to one's fellow men when one is afraid of honoring the truth. I will, therefore, defend the cause of humanity with confidence before the wise men who invite me to do so, and shall be pleased if I prove worthy of my subject and my judges.

In my view there are two sorts of inequality in the human species: one I call natural or physical, because it is established by nature and consists of differences in age, health, physical strength, and qualities of the mind or soul; the other, one might call moral or political inequality, because it depends on some sort of mutual agreement, and is established, or at least authorized, by the consent of men. This inequality consists of the various privileges that some enjoy at the expense of others, such as being wealthier, more honored, and more powerful than they, or even making themselves obeyed.

One cannot ask what the source of natural inequality is, because the simple definition of the term would be provided as an answer. Even less can one inquire if there is not some essential connection between the two inequalities, for that would be to ask in different terms if those who command are necessarily better than those who obey, and if the power of the body or the mind, and wisdom or virtue, are always found in the same individuals in proportion to their power or wealth: this is a good question, perhaps, in a debate among slaves within earshot of their masters, but it is not fitting for free men of reason who are engaged in a quest for truth.

What, then, is this discourse about? Its aim is to mark within the progression of things the moment in which rights succeeded violence, and nature was subjected to law; to explain by what sequence of miracles the powerful might resolve to serve the weak and the people purchase an imaginary repose at the price of true happiness.

All the philosophers who have examined the foundations of society have felt compelled to go back to the state of nature, but not one has succeeded. Some have not hesitated to suppose that men living in a natural state had the notion of what was just and unjust, without troubling to show that they must already have had that notion, or even that it would have been useful to them to have it. Others have spoken of a natural right that each individual has to protect what belongs to him, yet without explaining what they understand by belongs. Others again, after first granting authority to the more powerful over the weaker, immediately created a government without giving thought to the time that had to elapse before the words authority and government could attain meaning among men. Finally, all the philosophers, speaking constantly of need, greed, oppression, desires, and pride, imbued the state of nature with ideas they had found in society. They spoke of savage man but depicted civilized man. It did not even occur to most of our philosophers to doubt that the state of nature once existed, whereas it is evident from the Holy Scriptures that the first man, having instantly received intellect and precepts from God, was himself not in a state of nature at all; and if one gives the writings of Moses the credence that every Christian philosopher owes them, one must say that even before the Deluge men never existed in a pure state of nature, unless they lapsed into it by some extraordinary occurrence; a paradox that is most difficult to defend and altogether impossible to prove.

Let us therefore begin by setting aside all the facts, for they do not touch on the problem.20 One must not take the inquiries into which one can enter on this subject as historical truths, but merely as hypothetical and conditional reasoning. These are better suited to elucidate the nature of things than to show their true origin, and are comparable to the hypotheses that our natural scientists make every day on the formation of the world. Religion commands us to believe that God Himself drew men out of the state of nature immediately after the Creation, and that men are unequal because he willed them to be so. But religion does not forbid us to form conjectures drawn exclusively from the nature of man and the creatures surrounding him, or to conjecture what might have happened to mankind had it been left to itself. This is what I am asked, and this is what I intend to examine in this discourse. Since my subject concerns man in general, I will strive to adopt a language suited to all nations, or, rather, forgetting times and places in order to think only about the men to whom I am speaking, I shall imagine myself in the Lyceum of Athens, repeating the lessons of my masters, having as my judges Platos and Xenocrateses, and mankind as my auditors.21

Listen, O man, from whatever country you may be, whatever your opinions! Here is your history such as I believe to read it, not in books written by your fellow men, who are liars, but in nature, which never lies. Everything that comes from nature will be true. Nothing will be false, except what I might unintentionally have included of my own. The times of which I shall speak are very distant. How much you have changed from what you once were! It is, so to speak, the life of your species I will describe to you according to the qualities that you have received, and that your education and your habits have been able to corrupt but not destroy. There is, I believe, an age at which an individual might want to stop growing older; you will look for the age at which you wish your species to have gone no further. Discontented with your present state for reasons that herald even greater discontent for your unfortunate posterity, you might perhaps wish to be able to go back in time. And this sentiment must lead to the praise of your first ancestors, the criticism of your contemporaries, and dread for those who will have the misfortune of living after you.



Part One

As important as it might be to consider man from his origins in order to judge his natural state, and examine him, so to speak, in the original embryonic state of his species, I will not follow his development through its successive stages. I will not pause to search in his biology for what he might have been at the beginning in order to eventually become what he is now. I will not examine if, as Aristotle believes, man's elongated nails might originally have been hooked claws, if he was hairy like a bear, and if, walking on all fours, his eyes directed at the ground and confined to a few paces ahead, whether this did not shape the character and also the limits of his ideas. On this question I could form only vague, almost imaginary, conjectures. Comparative anatomy has still made too little progress, and the observations of natural scientists are still too uncertain, to allow for a solid foundation on such a subject. Thus, without turning to supernatural knowledge on this subject, and without regard to the changes that have taken place in man's inner and outer form as he gradually began to apply his limbs to new uses and to nourish himself on new foods, I will assume him to have always had the form I see him having today, walking on two feet, making use of his hands as we make use of ours, directing his eyes at all of nature and surveying with them the vast expanse of heaven.

In stripping this being, constituted as he is, of all the supernatural gifts he might have received, and of all the artificial faculties that he could have acquired only by a long progress; in considering this being, in short, such as he must have emerged from the hands of nature, I see an animal that is less strong than some, less agile than others, but, in sum, formed in the most advantageous way of all. I see him satisfying his hunger beneath an oak, quenching his thirst at the first stream, making his bed beneath the same tree that furnished him his meal--thus his needs are satisfied.

Abandoned to its natural fertility and covered by immense forests that the ax had never mutilated, the earth offers at every step food and shelter to animals of every species. Men, dispersed among them, observe and imitate their industry and thus raise themselves to the instinct of beasts, with the advantage that each species has merely its own instincts, while man, having perhaps none that are his own, appropriates them all, nourishing himself equally on a wide selection of foods that other animals share, consequently finding his sustenance with greater ease than any of the others.
Copyright © 2013 by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  • Love's Labour's Lost
    Love's Labour's Lost
    William Shakespeare
    $9.00 US
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    Georges
    Alexandre Dumas
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    The Prince
    Niccolo Machiavelli
    $14.00 US
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    Siddhartha
    Hermann Hesse
    $15.00 US
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    The Essential Feminist Reader
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    Emma
    Jane Austen
    $10.00 US
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    Sep 04, 2007
  • Life on the Mississippi
    Life on the Mississippi
    Mark Twain
    $13.00 US
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  • The Essential Writings of Machiavelli
    The Essential Writings of Machiavelli
    Niccolo Machiavelli
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    Apr 03, 2007
  • The Dhammapada
    The Dhammapada
    Verses on the Way
    Glenn Wallis, Buddha
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  • The Memoirs of Catherine the Great
    The Memoirs of Catherine the Great
    Catherine the Great
    $16.00 US
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    The Murders in the Rue Morgue
    Edgar Allan Poe
    $13.00 US
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  • The Gilded Age
    The Gilded Age
    Mark Twain, Charles Dudley Warner
    $16.00 US
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    Mar 14, 2006
  • The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects
    The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects
    Giorgio Vasari
    $19.00 US
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    Feb 14, 2006
  • The American Transcendentalists
    The American Transcendentalists
    Essential Writings
    Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller
    $20.00 US
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    Jan 10, 2006
  • The Constitutional Convention
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    A Narrative History from the Notes of James Madison
    James Madison, Edward J. Larson, Michael P. Winship
    $19.00 US
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    Nov 08, 2005
  • Candide
    Candide
    or, Optimism
    Voltaire
    $13.00 US
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    Oct 11, 2005
  • The Sport of the Gods
    The Sport of the Gods
    and Other Essential Writings
    Paul Laurence Dunbar
    $23.00 US
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    Aug 09, 2005
  • The Kill
    The Kill
    Emile Zola
    $18.00 US
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  • The Wrong Side of Paris
    The Wrong Side of Paris
    Honoré de Balzac
    $17.00 US
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    Apr 12, 2005
  • The Sorrows of Young Werther
    The Sorrows of Young Werther
    Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
    $10.95 US
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    Feb 08, 2005
  • Essential Stories
    Essential Stories
    V. S. Pritchett
    $18.00 US
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    I Promise to Be Good
    The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud
    Arthur Rimbaud
    $19.00 US
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  • Peter Pan
    Peter Pan
    J.M. Barrie, F.D. Bedford
    $10.95 US
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  • The Haunted House
    The Haunted House
    Charles Dickens
    $14.00 US
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  • The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
    The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
    Laurence Sterne
    $19.00 US
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    Sep 21, 2004
  • The Knight of Maison-Rouge
    The Knight of Maison-Rouge
    A Novel of Marie Antoinette
    Alexandre Dumas
    $16.00 US
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    Sep 14, 2004
  • Jefferson Davis: The Essential Writings
    Jefferson Davis: The Essential Writings
    Jefferson Davis
    $18.00 US
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    Aug 10, 2004
  • The Book of Spies
    The Book of Spies
    An Anthology of Literary Espionage
    Anthony Burgess, John Steinbeck, Rebecca West, John le Carré
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 08, 2004
  • The Importance of Being Earnest
    The Importance of Being Earnest
    And Other Plays
    Oscar Wilde
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 08, 2004
  • The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
    The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
    or, Gustavus Vassa, the African
    Olaudah Equiano
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    May 11, 2004
  • The Red and the Black
    The Red and the Black
    Stendhal
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    May 11, 2004
  • Basic Writings of Existentialism
    Basic Writings of Existentialism
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 13, 2004
  • Wuthering Heights
    Wuthering Heights
    Emily Bronte
    $8.00 US
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    Dec 07, 2021
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    The Voyage Out
    Virginia Woolf
    $15.00 US
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    Jul 06, 2021
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    The Southern Woman
    Selected Fiction
    Elizabeth Spencer
    $18.00 US
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    May 11, 2021
  • The Squatter and the Don
    The Squatter and the Don
    Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton
    $17.00 US
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    Mar 02, 2021
  • Leaves of Grass
    Leaves of Grass
    Walt Whitman
    $14.00 US
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    May 28, 2019
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    The Mysterious Affair at Styles
    The First Hercule Poirot Mystery
    Agatha Christie
    $10.00 US
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    Apr 30, 2019
  • The War of the Worlds
    The War of the Worlds
    H. G. Wells
    $9.00 US
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    Nov 06, 2018
  • The Dark Interval
    The Dark Interval
    Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation
    Rainer Maria Rilke
    $22.00 US
    Hardcover
    Aug 14, 2018
  • The Greek Plays
    The Greek Plays
    Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides
    Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides
    $25.00 US
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    Sep 05, 2017
  • The Mayor of Casterbridge
    The Mayor of Casterbridge
    Thomas Hardy
    $11.00 US
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    Nov 08, 2016
  • Anne of Green Gables
    Anne of Green Gables
    L. M. Montgomery
    $19.99 US
    Hardcover
    Nov 25, 2014
  • The Scarlet Letter
    The Scarlet Letter
    A Romance
    Nathaniel Hawthorne
    $8.00 US
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    Aug 26, 2014
  • The Metamorphosis
    The Metamorphosis
    Franz Kafka
    $16.00 US
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    Nov 26, 2013
  • Madame Bovary
    Madame Bovary
    Gustave Flaubert
    $15.00 US
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    Aug 13, 2013
  • The Essential Prose of John Milton
    The Essential Prose of John Milton
    John Milton
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 12, 2013
  • Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, and the Complete Shorter Poems
    Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, and the Complete Shorter Poems
    John Milton
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Dec 04, 2012
  • King John & Henry VIII
    King John & Henry VIII
    William Shakespeare
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 10, 2012
  • Henry VI
    Henry VI
    Parts I, II, and III
    William Shakespeare
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 10, 2012
  • Pericles
    Pericles
    William Shakespeare
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 10, 2012
  • The Adventures of Amir Hamza
    The Adventures of Amir Hamza
    Special abridged edition
    Ghalib Lakhnavi, Abdullah Bilgrami
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Feb 14, 2012
  • The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
    The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
    Introduction by Jean-Marc Hovasse
    Victor Hugo
    $26.00 US
    Hardcover
    Feb 07, 2012
  • Panorama
    Panorama
    A Novel
    H. G. Adler
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 10, 2012
  • Titus Andronicus & Timon of Athens
    Titus Andronicus & Timon of Athens
    William Shakespeare
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 13, 2011
  • All's Well That Ends Well
    All's Well That Ends Well
    William Shakespeare
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 13, 2011
  • The Two Gentlemen of Verona
    The Two Gentlemen of Verona
    William Shakespeare
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 13, 2011
  • Cymbeline
    Cymbeline
    William Shakespeare
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 13, 2011
  • The Merry Wives of Windsor
    The Merry Wives of Windsor
    William Shakespeare
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 14, 2011
  • The Comedy of Errors
    The Comedy of Errors
    William Shakespeare
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 14, 2011
  • Coriolanus
    Coriolanus
    William Shakespeare
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 14, 2011
  • Julius Caesar
    Julius Caesar
    William Shakespeare
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 14, 2011
  • Measure for Measure
    Measure for Measure
    William Shakespeare
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 14, 2010
  • The Taming of the Shrew
    The Taming of the Shrew
    William Shakespeare
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 14, 2010
  • Richard II
    Richard II
    William Shakespeare
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 14, 2010
  • Troilus and Cressida
    Troilus and Cressida
    William Shakespeare
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 14, 2010
  • Ethics
    Ethics
    The Essential Writings
    $20.00 US
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    Aug 10, 2010
  • The Merchant of Venice
    The Merchant of Venice
    William Shakespeare
    $9.00 US
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    May 04, 2010
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    The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
    A Novel
    Mark Twain
    $9.00 US
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    Apr 06, 2010
  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    Mark Twain
    $9.00 US
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    Apr 06, 2010
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    The Canterbury Tales
    Geoffrey Chaucer
    $17.00 US
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    Nov 10, 2009
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    The Mystery of Edwin Drood
    Charles Dickens
    $12.00 US
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    Oct 06, 2009
  • The Journey
    The Journey
    A Novel
    H. G. Adler
    $17.00 US
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    Sep 08, 2009
  • Othello
    Othello
    William Shakespeare
    $10.00 US
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    Aug 25, 2009
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    Romeo and Juliet
    William Shakespeare
    $8.00 US
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    Aug 25, 2009
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    Henry IV, Part 1
    William Shakespeare
    $8.00 US
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    Aug 25, 2009
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    Henry IV, Part 2
    William Shakespeare
    $8.00 US
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    Aug 25, 2009
  • Les Misérables
    Les Misérables
    Victor Hugo
    $20.00 US
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    Jul 14, 2009
  • The Belly of Paris
    The Belly of Paris
    Emile Zola
    $16.00 US
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    May 12, 2009
  • Antony and Cleopatra
    Antony and Cleopatra
    William Shakespeare
    $8.00 US
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    Apr 14, 2009
  • The Winter's Tale
    The Winter's Tale
    William Shakespeare
    $8.00 US
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    Apr 14, 2009
  • The Sonnets and Other Poems
    The Sonnets and Other Poems
    William Shakespeare
    $10.00 US
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    Apr 14, 2009
  • Jane Eyre
    Jane Eyre
    Charlotte Bronte
    $9.00 US
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    Apr 07, 2009
  • The Travels of Marco Polo
    The Travels of Marco Polo
    Introduction by Colin Thubron
    Marco Polo
    $32.00 US
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    Oct 21, 2008
  • The Essential Writings of James Weldon Johnson
    The Essential Writings of James Weldon Johnson
    James Weldon Johnson
    $16.00 US
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    Oct 21, 2008
  • Paradise Lost
    Paradise Lost
    John Milton
    $12.00 US
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    Sep 09, 2008
  • Hamlet
    Hamlet
    William Shakespeare
    $10.00 US
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    Aug 12, 2008
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    The Tempest
    William Shakespeare
    $9.00 US
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    Aug 12, 2008
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    A Midsummer Night's Dream
    William Shakespeare
    $8.00 US
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    Aug 12, 2008
  • Richard III
    Richard III
    William Shakespeare
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Aug 12, 2008
  • Love's Labour's Lost
    Love's Labour's Lost
    William Shakespeare
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Aug 12, 2008
  • Georges
    Georges
    Alexandre Dumas
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 10, 2008
  • The Prince
    The Prince
    Niccolo Machiavelli
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    Feb 05, 2008
  • Siddhartha
    Siddhartha
    Hermann Hesse
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Dec 04, 2007
  • The Essential Feminist Reader
    The Essential Feminist Reader
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 18, 2007
  • Emma
    Emma
    Jane Austen
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 04, 2007
  • Life on the Mississippi
    Life on the Mississippi
    Mark Twain
    $13.00 US
    Paperback
    May 29, 2007
  • The Essential Writings of Machiavelli
    The Essential Writings of Machiavelli
    Niccolo Machiavelli
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 03, 2007
  • The Dhammapada
    The Dhammapada
    Verses on the Way
    Glenn Wallis, Buddha
    $13.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 09, 2007
  • The Memoirs of Catherine the Great
    The Memoirs of Catherine the Great
    Catherine the Great
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 13, 2006
  • The Murders in the Rue Morgue
    The Murders in the Rue Morgue
    Edgar Allan Poe
    $13.00 US
    Paperback
    May 23, 2006
  • The Gilded Age
    The Gilded Age
    Mark Twain, Charles Dudley Warner
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 14, 2006
  • The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects
    The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects
    Giorgio Vasari
    $19.00 US
    Paperback
    Feb 14, 2006
  • The American Transcendentalists
    The American Transcendentalists
    Essential Writings
    Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 10, 2006
  • The Constitutional Convention
    The Constitutional Convention
    A Narrative History from the Notes of James Madison
    James Madison, Edward J. Larson, Michael P. Winship
    $19.00 US
    Paperback
    Nov 08, 2005
  • Candide
    Candide
    or, Optimism
    Voltaire
    $13.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 11, 2005
  • The Sport of the Gods
    The Sport of the Gods
    and Other Essential Writings
    Paul Laurence Dunbar
    $23.00 US
    Paperback
    Aug 09, 2005
  • The Kill
    The Kill
    Emile Zola
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Jul 12, 2005
  • The Wrong Side of Paris
    The Wrong Side of Paris
    Honoré de Balzac
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 12, 2005
  • The Sorrows of Young Werther
    The Sorrows of Young Werther
    Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
    $10.95 US
    Paperback
    Feb 08, 2005
  • Essential Stories
    Essential Stories
    V. S. Pritchett
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 04, 2005
  • I Promise to Be Good
    I Promise to Be Good
    The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud
    Arthur Rimbaud
    $19.00 US
    Paperback
    Nov 09, 2004
  • Peter Pan
    Peter Pan
    J.M. Barrie, F.D. Bedford
    $10.95 US
    Paperback
    Oct 12, 2004
  • The Haunted House
    The Haunted House
    Charles Dickens
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 12, 2004
  • The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
    The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
    Laurence Sterne
    $19.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 21, 2004
  • The Knight of Maison-Rouge
    The Knight of Maison-Rouge
    A Novel of Marie Antoinette
    Alexandre Dumas
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 14, 2004
  • Jefferson Davis: The Essential Writings
    Jefferson Davis: The Essential Writings
    Jefferson Davis
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Aug 10, 2004
  • The Book of Spies
    The Book of Spies
    An Anthology of Literary Espionage
    Anthony Burgess, John Steinbeck, Rebecca West, John le Carré
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 08, 2004
  • The Importance of Being Earnest
    The Importance of Being Earnest
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    Oscar Wilde
    $12.00 US
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    Jun 08, 2004
  • The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
    The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
    or, Gustavus Vassa, the African
    Olaudah Equiano
    $15.00 US
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    May 11, 2004
  • The Red and the Black
    The Red and the Black
    Stendhal
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    May 11, 2004
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    Basic Writings of Existentialism
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    Apr 13, 2004

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