The Fact and the Argument · 1600–1970

Five hundred and eighteen authors and seven hundred and thirty-one works: the Western prose of fact, argument and testimony from Bacon's Novum Organum to Beauvoir's Second Sex. It is the third of three shelves, and it holds everything the other two deliberately excluded — the philosophy, history, science, law, economics, exploration, memoir and criticism that the literary shelves kept sending onward.

Three doors in

Non-fiction earns its place differently from a novel, so the Standing filter asks a different question. Some of these books are still read for themselves — Pascal, Browne, Boswell, Gibbon, Thoreau, Kinglake, Strachey; you would read them for the writing if they had no consequences at all. Some are read for what they did: Quesnay, Jomini, Böhm-Bawerk, Wegener, Gödel. Most of the shelf is both at once, which is what makes the great works of non-fiction great. Running that filter against the Field filter is the quickest way to see the difference between a discipline's founding documents and its literature.

What the source list was strong and weak at

The list this grew from was outstanding on the nineteenth century, on British and American writing, on travel and exploration, and on the social investigation of poverty — Mayhew's successors, Chadwick, Booth, Rowntree, Riis, Addams, Tarbell. It was very thin before 1780. Fourteen entries covered the whole seventeenth century, which meant no Pascal, no Leibniz, no Bayle, no Bossuet, no Browne, no Burton, no Milton's prose, no Areopagitica, no Leeuwenhoek. Nor was there any Linnaeus, Buffon, Winckelmann, Herder, Laplace, Condorcet or Encyclopédie. Roughly a hundred and seventy entries have been added, and most of them are Continental: the shelf as found was about seventy per cent Anglophone, and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were not.

Elsewhere the gaps were startling for their size. There was no Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, Renan, Newman, Proudhon, Frege, Husserl, Wittgenstein or Heidegger. Weber appeared twice with Economy and Society and not at all with The Protestant Ethic. Keynes appeared with two pamphlets and not The General Theory. There was no Herzl, no Lenin, no Trotsky, no Gramsci, no Hayek, no Braudel, no Bloch, no Toynbee, no Auerbach, no Orwell, no Woolf's essays, no Mead, no Mauss, no Turing.

The post-war extension

The shelf originally stopped at 1950 to match the fiction shelf. It now runs to 1970, which adds a hundred and twenty-seven entries and about two hundred and thirty works — the largest single block on it after the Victorians. The two post-war decades are the period in which non-fiction did most of the century’s intellectual work: Arendt on totalitarianism, Kuhn on paradigms, Lévi-Strauss and Barthes and Foucault, Carson and Watson, Friedman and Galbraith arguing across a table, Baldwin and Fanon and King, Jacobs against the planners, Friedan and Goffman and McLuhan. A few entries dated slightly before 1950 have come in with them — Myrdal, C. L. R. James, Kenyatta, Hersey, Rebecca West, Popper, Scholem — because they were genuine omissions that the extension made obvious.

1970 is a real boundary and not only an arbitrary one: it is roughly where the arguments on this shelf stop being finished and start being ones we are still inside. Rawls, Foucault’s prison book, Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag, Said, Wilson’s sociobiology and second-wave feminism’s major texts all fall in the following three years, and each would need a shelf that could see its consequences.

Where it ends, and why later than the list

The source sheet stopped in 1928. This shelf runs to 1950, to match the fiction shelf and to close what would otherwise be a twenty-two-year hole in the middle of the century. That decision brings in the books this project has been deferring: Primo Levi's If This Is a Man, Anne Frank's diary, Beauvoir's Second Sex, Paz's Labyrinth of Solitude, Zweig's World of Yesterday, Orwell's reportage, Hayek and Polanyi, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Braudel and Bloch, Auerbach and Adorno. A few works are listed under a later publication date than their composition — Gramsci's notebooks, Casanova's memoirs, Pepys's diary — because that is when they entered the world.

Books that did harm

Four entries are here because of the damage they did, not despite it. Gobineau's Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, Chamberlain's Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, Lombroso's criminal anthropology and Hitler's Mein Kampf are among the most consequential non-fiction ever published in Europe, and a shelf that explains how the West arrived at the twentieth century without them is not describing the same civilisation. They are marked read for what it did, their entries say plainly what they are, and the Standing filter will isolate them. If you would rather they were not on the shelf at all, they can be removed in one instruction — but the argument for keeping them is the same argument that keeps Marx and Malthus.

Corrections and merges

Hakluyt's Principal Navigations and Cellini's autobiography were on the source sheet at 1600 and are already on the 300–1600 shelf; they have been removed here rather than duplicated. Weber's Economy and Society was listed twice under two different domains and is now listed once. The sheet's five broad domains have been broken into sixteen fields, because putting Newton, Euclid's successors, Semmelweis and Darwin in a single bucket called Science/Math/Medicine conceals more than it shows — mathematics, physical science, medicine and natural history are four separate traditions with four different literatures.

The Harvard Classics

Charles Eliot’s fifty-one-volume Five Foot Shelf of 1909 was audited against all seven shelves in this project. Ninety-odd of its authors were already present; fourteen were not, and have been added. Nine belong here — Drake’s circumnavigation, Penn, Woolman, Dana, Oliver Wendell Holmes senior on puerperal fever, Sainte-Beuve, Mazzini, Lowell and Newcomb — and the rest went to the 300–1600 shelf. Eliot’s list is a period document with its own biases, heavily Anglo-American and almost without women, but it is a useful check: the things it contains that a modern list forgets are mostly the practical and the didactic.

Absences that were harder to defend

Gandhi's autobiography is not here, on the same principle that kept Sōseki and Lao She off the fiction shelf: he deserves a shelf that can hold him properly. Sermons, encyclicals, legal codes and parliamentary reports appear only where a single author's book stands behind them. And there is no attempt at completeness in the sciences after about 1900, where the significant work moved into journal papers and stopped being books — which is itself one of the more important facts this shelf records.

Nothing here is settled. Argue with it; the list is meant to be argued with.