Axplock ur idéhistorien II

I guess the theme so far in 2023 is “reading other people’s books.” I closed out 2022 with The Power of the Dog and then ended up reading Stick (twice! for translation’s sake!) straightaway in 2023, both at the recommendation of a friend. In between those, Axplock ur idéhistorien II arrived on my doorstep—a book I’d promised to babysit for a digital nomad friend who wanted to order it off Adlibris but had no Swedish address to ship to.

And one does not ask me to babysit a book without expecting me to read it.

It’s a tidy little collection spanning just about two hundred years of Western thought, with a focus on the major social ideas that continue to leave their mark on politics today. (This is a polite way to say that a few of the selections are nothing less than noxious.) The selections are abridged when necessary, with context for each selection as well as a short biography of each author:

  • Kant, “Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?”
  • Hegel, “Reason in History”
  • Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity
  • Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety
  • Marx & Engels, “The Communist Manifesto”
  • Gobineau, “An Essay on the Inequality of Human Races”
  • Bremer, Hertha
  • Darwin, On the Origin of Species
  • Mill, “The Subjection of Women”
  • Spencer, The Man Versus the State
  • Nietzsche, On the Geneaology of Morality
  • Freud, Introduction to Psychoanalysis
  • “Program of the NSDAP”
  • Mussolini, “The Doctrine of Fascism”
  • Beauvoir, The Second Sex
  • Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
  • Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition

If you took the above table of contents as a reading list it would probably keep you busy for a year, so collections like these with just The Hits and the central theses are great to have on hand and are much cheaper than, say, a first-year philosophy survey course textbook. (Did I keep mine because I knew I would want to revisit it later? Yes. Have I done so? Actually, also yes.)  I might buy my own copies of both volumes just to have around for reference, who knows.

Do I have a similar English recommendation? Not really. Passion of the Western Mind has a similar, if broader scope, but it’s entirely a secondary source. I had Ten Great Works of Philosophy in my library for years and kind of wish I still had it.

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katherine

Stockholm-based translator and copyeditor of American extraction.

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