100 Books Like The Legitimacy of the Modern Age

My dad read sections of this book aloud to me when I was far too young to grasp anything inside. It is, after all, a book on Darwinism written by a paleontologist who specialized in macroevolutionary patterns. Such polysyllabic words were inscrutable to me. But, back then, I could look at the cover. The copy we had depicted a beautiful scene showing some of the earliest animals to appear on Earth. They are alien creatures—surprisingly unfamiliar—unlike anything alive today.

This left an impression on me: life was different in the past, shockingly different, which became an insight I extended to my study as a historian of ideas researching how human worldviews have also changed drastically over time.

It was fitting that when I returned to the book as a young adult—now old enough to understand it—it immediately became one of my all-time favorites. So, too, did Gould himself, who remains… show more.

Hacking writes in pellucid prose. Reading this book—in an old, dusty library many years ago—is what convinced me, for better or worse, that uncovering the history of ideas was something not only that could be viably done but could be done rigorously.

Hacking’s book tells the story of the emergence of one of the areas of mathematics that arguably shapes our world today more than any other: probability. It governs financial markets as much as military decisions, carving up the edges of our world.

Rewinding to the beginning of the modern age, Hacking tells the story of how an Italian gambler from the 1500s—one Gerolamo Cardano—haphazardly discovered the science of measuring chances and the art of taking them, unwittingly creating the fields of actuary and insurance that shape the foundation of our modern world.

It is riveting stuff: don’t let the mathematical topic put you off. Though this book is… show more.

One of my favorite living writers is Rachell Powell. She writes on animal ethics, genetic engineering, and invertebrate intelligence, among other topics.

Powell’s brilliant 2020 book can be seen as a spiritual sequel to Gould’s aforementioned 1989 Wonderful Life. Hence, it makes sense to include both on the list. Powell takes Gould’s experiment on “replaying the tape” and updates it, given modern knowledge, while also establishing its relevance for the cutting-edge scientific field of astrobiology.

Astrobiology is the study of what we should look for when we look for signs of life beyond Earth. It’s a burgeoning field at the frontier of human knowledge, poised to provide revelatory knowledge about our own fate and future, regardless of whether the results of the search for extraterrestrial life are positive or negative. 

Assessing the role of chance in governing the course of biological evolution—whether here or elsewhere in the universe—is, as… show more.

Given I study old books, I wanted to include at least one. I was tempted to recommend either Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, for its sheer strangeness, or Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, for including the best poetic lines ever written about a cat, or, otherwise, John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The latter can be read as an early declaration of human freedom in the face of the totalitarianism of nonhuman forces (be they demonic or divine), but, more importantly, one that is sensitive to the pitfalls of such self-assertion (“sufficient to have stood, though free to fall,” is how Adam and Eve are described). Now that thermonuclear weapons exist, this latter truth applies to humankind as a global collective.

But, numinous as Milton is, his work is familiar, so I decided to recommend a writer from his period who, albeit less famous today, is just as searingly good.

That would… show more.

If you think too much and you’re not religious, you may have bumped up against a question that troubled much of my existence: on the one hand, I want (and sometimes fail) to live a life I can call morally good, but on the other hand, I don’t have any sort of theories or transcendental claims to base my “morally good” on. It’s hard to say you believe in X when your answer to “Why do you believe in X?” is, “because it’s X!” Rorty (on my reading) reminds us we don’t need to be torn apart by the intrusion of intellectual skepticism into our desire to act in a moral manner. To borrow from Nike, just do it.

Apart from the existential fiction that I love (Dostoevsky, Kafka, Camus, etc.), this is one of my favorite books of all time. The editor, Walter Truett Anderson, gathered together the best collection ever of essays on the topics of postmodernism, deconstruction (and reconstruction), the wobbly nature of truth in the twentieth century (and now, the twenty-first century), and how we might go about reconstructing the truth now that we have so beautifully and mercilessly deconstructed it.

Authors included are Umberto Eco, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Richard Rorty, Bell Hooks, and a ton of other great thinkers on the subject of our postmodern malaise and the difficulties of belief … in anything. If you don’t know this book, you will really, really want to get to know it.

This brilliant piece of scholarship examines thousands of early medieval saints to paint a picture of a particular form of life for medieval women that allowed them in some ways to transcend their gender – to “forget their sex”. Early medieval women could be recognized for their sanctity and social contributions through their commitment to virginity, but also as mothers, nuns, siblings, and friends. Schulenberg is particularly attentive to how gender operated in the saints’ lives and tells marvelous stories about real human beings.

I first read this book a dozen times in junior high, borrowed it on interlibrary loan several times in adulthood, and eventually bought a second-hand copy. Leighton's 1960 book was rather eye-opening after a steady diet of girl power books, as it features a princess who doesn't take up a sword or rebel against society. And yet, I absolutely adored Elstrid, thrilling as she learned to navigate the complexities of her medieval world. This is by far the most historical and political book on this list, based on real people. The only drawback to this book is that the princess never scrubs a floor. But you certainly believe she knew each one of her scullery maids by name!

Much of the fiction set in the Middle Ages follows landmark historical moments and infamous individuals. But just as today, nothing is more complex than the inner life of a teenage girl, so it was in 1290. Written as a personal diary, this book follows Catherine, nicknamed ‘Birdy,’ as she trudges through her lessons on becoming a lady (sewing, spinning, soap making), her fears of an arranged marriage to a gnarly old nobleman, the importance of friendship and the heartbreak of unrequited love. Universal truths, all comically relatable and sprinkled with amusing details of picking off fleas and using the privy. As a preteen and teen, I read, re-read, and re-re-read Catherine's diary, escaping into her daily life as I easily imagined myself in it. This book was a friend I knew I could always return to for comfort and understanding.

In this book, Chris Wickham surveys the passage from Antiquity to the Middle Ages in a lucid and engaging manner that challenges past scholarship on the matter. Unlike Edward Gibbon (d. 1794) and his followers, who argue that the fall of Rome initiated a new age–the Middle Ages–marked by the triumph of barbarism and religion, Wickhams stresses the transformations that swept Europe and the Mediterranean World from the fifth century onwards and consequently re-shaped it.

I particularly like Wickham’s account because it gives Gibbon’s thesis on the decline and fall of the Roman empire the proper burial it deserves. Wickham is extremely revealing how profoundly effective and dynamic were the shifts that marked the transformation of the Roman world–shifts that laid the foundations for modern society and civilization.