Showing results for "On Politics" in World Literature

British writer William Hazlitt was the most brilliant essayist of his day. He is now considered one of the greatest critics and essayists in the history of the English language, placed in the company of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell. During his last illness, Hazlitt wrote this essay on a topic that most people will recognize. Hazlitt did not fear his own demise, and in this thoughtful essay, he explains why no one needs to give in to such a fear.

On the Social Contract's appeal and influence has been wide-ranging and continuous. It has been called an encomium to democracy and, at the same time, a blueprint for totalitarianism. Individualists, collectivists, anarchists, and socialists have all taken courage from Rousseau's controversial masterpiece.

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) by Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was first published in 1849. The book is an account of the Thoreau brothers' river journey on the Concord River from Concord to Lowell, Massachusetts, where it connects with the Merrimack River. Arranged in seven chapters, one for each day of the boat trip, the book describes the rivers, islets and inlets, the woods, the plants, animals, and the people that they encountered on the journey.

David Shields’s The Trouble with Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power is an immersion into the perils, limits, and possibilities of human intimacy. All at once a love letter to his wife, a nervy reckoning with his own fallibility, a meditation on the impact of porn on American culture, and an attempt to understand marriage (one marriage, the idea of marriage, all marriages), The Trouble with Men is exquisitely balanced between the personal and the anthropological, nakedness and restraint.