This semester we ask the question, “How should we live?,” in conversation with thinkers of our own time. This is the age of Western (European and American) hegemony over the world, the age of modernity’s full flowering after the American, French, and Industrial Revolutions. Our everyday lives are now determined by the secular nation-state, multinational corporations, ceaseless technological innovation, and consumerist society.

The Great Conversation Volume IV features excerpts from the following texts and authors alongside insightful introductions and necessary context for the new reader:

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right

Karl Marx’s On the Jewish Question

Søren Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments

Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism

Friedrich Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols

T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Malcolm X’s The Ballot or the Bullet

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail

Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, “Right of Death and Power over Life”

Judith Butler’s The Force of Nonviolence

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Commencement Address, 1978