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Emma Goldman was initially supportive of Russias Bolshevik revolution. This 1918 pamphlet was published in elucidation of the revolution and in justification of the Bolsheviks. Goldman reversed her opinion in the wake of the Kronstadt rebellion and denounced the Soviet Union for its violent repression of independent voices.
The English philosopher and physician John Locke (1632 – 1704) is widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. His work had a significant effect on the development of epistemology and political philosophy. The Second Treatise on Civil Government places sovereignty in the hands of the people, as Locke’s fundamental argument is that people are equal and invested with natural rights in a state of nature in which they live free from outside rule.
Ernest Belfort Bax (1854-1926) was an English barrister, journalist, philosopher, rights advocate, and historian. In this essay, after dismissing St. Simonism, Fourierism, Owenism, and Continental Nihilists, Bax attempts to explain what modern socialism, taken broadly, really means, as well as what it implies. He outlines the three bases of modern socialism as the direction of industry by a democratic state instead of by private capitalists; as a universal Federal Republic to take the place of the present nationalist system; and in religion, a human ideal to take the place of theological cults.
Robert Benjamin Lewis (1802 – 1858) was an African American and Native American author, inventor, and entrepreneur. In the ethnological work Light and Truth, Lewis claims that Adam and Eve were people of color, as were the Egyptians and many great figures of the ancient world, including Julius Caesar and Plato. Denouncing notions of white superiority, he asserts that all humans have a common origin, and pointed to a shared cultural history between Africans and Native Americans. Based on information gleaned from the Bible and from secular sources, Lewis spirited account of the history of the colored race is considered an early example of black liberation theology.
Bushido: The Soul of Japan is a seminal study on the way of the samurai by the Japanese educator Inazo Nitobe. From 1868, the beginning of the Meiji Era, Japan rapidly transformed itself from an isolated feudal society into a modern, industrialised nation state, influenced by Western philosophical and scientific ideas. Nitobe wrote Bushido in English to explain the samurai way to a western audience; it was later translated into Japanese.
A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies is the story of the Spanish Dominican priest Bartolome de las Casas, who came to the Americas in the 16th century. Immediately he was struck by the inhumane ways in which the native peoples were treated by the European explorers and conquerors, Las Casas went on to be a leading opponent of slavery, torture, and genocide of the Native Americans by the Spanish colonists. A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies is his personal account, with chapters covering Cuba, Nicaragua, Hispaniola, Guatemala, Venezuela, Florida, and many other areas conquered by the Spaniards.
Lysander Spooner was one of slaverys fiercest enemies. As a lawyer, he offered free legal services to escaped slaves, defending them in court. He advocated smuggling guns to slaves, with which to overthrow their masters, and take possession of their property. Give the Slave-holders, then, a taste of their own whips.
With the first world war raging across Europe, Shackleton’s expedition to cross the South Pole became trapped by ice. Their ship, the Endurance, was crushed and the men were forced to survive in and escape from one of the world’s most hostile environments.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is remembered as the father of psychoanalysis. Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) is one of his key works. In it he considers the conflict between the needs of the individual acting both egotistically and altruistically in the pursuit of happiness and the myriad demands of civilised society and the ensuing tensions this clash of needs and demands generates.
Aristotles writings cover many subjects, including aesthetics, biology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, poetry, theater, music, rhetoric, linguistics, politics and government. They constitute the first comprehensive system of Western philosophy. “On Sleep and Sleeplessness” attempts to explain the reasons for sleeping. He argues that sleep and wakefulness are both affections of the activity of the primary faculty of sense-perception.