100 Books Like Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely

This book has had a profound influence on my thinking. While I’m not sure I agree with absolutely everything the authors propose, their central idea is compelling: that as humans, awareness of our own death shapes everything we do in life (consciously or subconsciously)—whether we write symphonies, climb Everest, start a family or enter the local baking competition.

The book underscores my belief that, while knowing we have an expiration date is terrifying, if we use that knowledge in the right way, it can be empowering.

While The Swerve is not exactly a book about posterity, it nonetheless provides a wonderful case study of a text that remained on the verge of destruction for centuries, before going on to play a tremendously influential role in shaping our modern world. This book is none other than On The Nature of Things by Lucretius –one of the foundational texts of Western culture, whose impact was postponed to the fifteenth century, as it would not have seen the light of day without its serendipitous rediscovery in a German monastery by Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459). This gripping work offers a fascinating example of the delayed reception of a prominent cultural object, a proof of its extraordinary resilience, and, at the same time, an illustration of the role played by chance and accidents on the transmission of texts to posterity. 

Those Who Write for Immortality is, simply put, a remarkable book. It’s an in-depth study of British writers whose work was written with the goal of surviving what Horace called “the teeth of time.” It confronts the literary careers of authors who managed to be remembered after their deaths to the failed attempts of gifted, but ultimately unsuccessful rivals. This study illuminates both the romantic period and the quest for literary fame in our own time. A must-read for anyone interested in Austen, Keats, Blake, and Lord Biron, it is also indispensable for readers willing to explore the theoretical issues associated with the goal of writing for those who are yet to be born, people whose values and aesthetic preferences might very well become completely different from our own.

Antoine Lilti’s ground-breaking study about celebrity demonstrates that a phenomenon we generally associate with modern culture and cinema has much older roots: roots that go back to eighteenth-century Europe. Thanks to the rise of the press and the development of new advertising techniques, such figures as Voltaire, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Marie-Antoinette, or Napoléon saw their private lives on public display and learned to navigate the privileges and pitfalls of a new form of social prestige. Elegantly written and accessible to non-specialists, this book is particularly useful to differentiate between forms of public recognition that are connected but ultimately distinct, such as glory, reputation, celebrity, and posterity. The work of a major historian of eighteenth-century France, The Invention of Celebrity explains why the age of Enlightenment was a laboratory in which our modern sense of self was invented, while also uncovering the origins of our longing… show more.

I'll be honest, when I received Benoit Peeters' book on Derrida I was a little worried.

A 600-page tome about one of the most notoriously difficult philosophers. Fortunately, Peeters does not write in a Derridean manner and makes the life journey of the most influential thinker of postmodernism accessible and even entertaining.

Peeters covers Derrida's formative years in Algeria, his academic career, and his development of deconstruction—a philosophical approach that challenged traditional notions of language, meaning, and text interpretation. 

This is a book about being a celebrity’s biggest fan. In 16th Century France, eighteen-year-old Marie de Gournay reads the essays of the philosopher Montaigne, and is so overwhelmed that she faints. When she finally meets her idol, she stabs herself with a hairpin to prove her devotion. For two blissful months, she lives as his adopted daughter. When he dies four years later, de Gournay devotes herself to editing the writings he left behind, persisting even though she is despised both by the intellectuals of the time and by her own family. I know how it feels to be that intense, socially awkward, bookish girl and I found Marie’s story extremely moving.

How does an American biographer write about a French philosopher and public intellectual who published copious memoirs of her own life, from girlhood to old age? The multi-talented Deirdre Bair succeeded in gaining access to the extraordinary Simone de Beauvoir and, supplemented by lengthy interviews over a five-year period and research in Beauvoir’s unpublished papers, produced a biography for the ages. In contrast to the biographies recommended above, the author had almost too much material to sift through, plus the challenge of writing about a living person. This is necessarily a fat book but one that is a “must-read.”

The debate on the nature of time between Henri Bergson, one of the most important philosophers at that time, and Albert Einstein, happened on April 6, 1922. Although many people believe that Einstein gained the upper hand in this showdown, comparable perhaps only with the ‘rumble in the jungle’ between Foreman and Ali in 1974, matters are more complicated. Jimena Canales has written a thriller about this clash of cultures fighting about time. She opens up a cosmos of philosophy and physics embedded in culture and shows how one hour of talk in 1922 still has relevance 100 years later for what it means to be human.

No artist exists in a vacuum. Certainly, Vigée Le Brun had little interest in politics, but political events shaped her life and the world she inhabited. It is, therefore, essential to understand the times in which Vigée Le Brun lived.  

History and art history professor, documentarian, and cultural essayist, award-winning author Simon Schama’s Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution presents Louis XVI’s France as vibrant, dynamic, and innovative, its people fascinated by novelty and technology. Schama’s gripping style combines entertainment and scholarship to make this book a convincing social, cultural, and narrative account of the French Revolution.

The philosopher and polemicist Sala-Molins fired a bow shot across Enlightenment scholarship with this book in 1992. In an era when most French scholars of the Enlightenment continued to study (and valorize) the figureheads of the era, Sala-Molins attributed the supposed silence of the philosophes regarding the horrors of chattel slavery to deep-seated racism. More polemically he called out individual thinkers such as Voltaire and Montesquieu, the latter of whom Sala-Molins memorably called a négrier or slave trader. Peu importe or little does it matter that the book itself is rife with historical inaccuracies. The Dark Side of the Light was and is a powerful cri de coeur directed at scholars of the eighteenth century, a plea for them to look more carefully at the legacies – good and bad – that we now associate with the Enlightenment.