These books sit at the heart of a conversation spanning three millennia about virtue, justice, duty, faith, and what it means to live well—revealing the moral and intellectual foundations of the West.
The line from Homer through to Tolkien feels almost unbroken — like the same long conversation has been going on for 3000 years.
If I could only add two more, they’d be these:
-The Bible, first. No other text has shaped the moral imagination of the West more deeply. Augustine’s City of God is indispensable, but it stands on ground the biblical narrative prepared. Without it, a lot of the later Christian synthesis and much of the moral vocabulary the whole list relies on becomes harder to fully understand.
-And Shakespeare’s King Lear. Hamlet is brilliant at showing a sharp mind paralysed by the knowledge that the world is rotten. But Lear goes further. It shows how the collapse of moral order inside one man vanity, failure of judgment, the inability to tell flattery from love unravels family, kingdom, reason, and even the natural world itself. It’s the great tragedy of what happens when the bonds that hold a civilisation together break from within.
Those two would sit very naturally with the seven you chose.
This article confuses " cultural" with " moral". Greek morals - and their Roman descendants- were precisely what Christianity fought. Today, the " Greek life" is common. The West can well be described, not at all flatteringly, as a Hellenistic society.
It is the abandonment of the most basic Biblical principles , beginning with the Hebrew Bible, that have resulted in moral inversion and collective thinking perversions of all sorts. No such moral foundational texts are mentioned here.
Plato's " Republic" was one of Hitler's models, as it extolled the totality of state power over all others .
Aristotelian thinking is what brought Maimonides to conclude that one couldn't say anything at all about God. All one could say, in a way, is that God exists. Imagine. Why not bring in Spinoza and his pantheism? It would better represent today's attitude about God, at least the intuition of non- atheists.
No single book in this list remotely reminds of the Enlightenment and the ideas that so single handedly inspired the American thinkers in their revolution towards freedom, which we today see as a moral necessity. America's thinking inspired the Declaration of the Rights of Man. It would take even the French a couple of decades,a very messy revolution, and a return to monarchy. Yet they take all the credit. Well, at least they were able to take down the nefarious power or the Church.
In these momentous 250 American Anniversary, it would have been timely to have a true and relevant list of books that cemented the moral foundations of the West. As Europe is self-destroying, these moral foundations are now corrosively disintegrating by a regression to primitive urges that would have suited Nietzsche better, and that seem mirrored in the totalitarianism exhibited by leftist ideologies that side with Islamism.
Really strong list.
The line from Homer through to Tolkien feels almost unbroken — like the same long conversation has been going on for 3000 years.
If I could only add two more, they’d be these:
-The Bible, first. No other text has shaped the moral imagination of the West more deeply. Augustine’s City of God is indispensable, but it stands on ground the biblical narrative prepared. Without it, a lot of the later Christian synthesis and much of the moral vocabulary the whole list relies on becomes harder to fully understand.
-And Shakespeare’s King Lear. Hamlet is brilliant at showing a sharp mind paralysed by the knowledge that the world is rotten. But Lear goes further. It shows how the collapse of moral order inside one man vanity, failure of judgment, the inability to tell flattery from love unravels family, kingdom, reason, and even the natural world itself. It’s the great tragedy of what happens when the bonds that hold a civilisation together break from within.
Those two would sit very naturally with the seven you chose.
Grateful for this.
What about Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions? a treatise on morality and economics…
Honey, you forgot the Bible, the one indispensable Book of Books.
One would have expected the Bible as surely one of the seven if not central.
This article confuses " cultural" with " moral". Greek morals - and their Roman descendants- were precisely what Christianity fought. Today, the " Greek life" is common. The West can well be described, not at all flatteringly, as a Hellenistic society.
It is the abandonment of the most basic Biblical principles , beginning with the Hebrew Bible, that have resulted in moral inversion and collective thinking perversions of all sorts. No such moral foundational texts are mentioned here.
Plato's " Republic" was one of Hitler's models, as it extolled the totality of state power over all others .
Aristotelian thinking is what brought Maimonides to conclude that one couldn't say anything at all about God. All one could say, in a way, is that God exists. Imagine. Why not bring in Spinoza and his pantheism? It would better represent today's attitude about God, at least the intuition of non- atheists.
No single book in this list remotely reminds of the Enlightenment and the ideas that so single handedly inspired the American thinkers in their revolution towards freedom, which we today see as a moral necessity. America's thinking inspired the Declaration of the Rights of Man. It would take even the French a couple of decades,a very messy revolution, and a return to monarchy. Yet they take all the credit. Well, at least they were able to take down the nefarious power or the Church.
In these momentous 250 American Anniversary, it would have been timely to have a true and relevant list of books that cemented the moral foundations of the West. As Europe is self-destroying, these moral foundations are now corrosively disintegrating by a regression to primitive urges that would have suited Nietzsche better, and that seem mirrored in the totalitarianism exhibited by leftist ideologies that side with Islamism.