The Best Philosophy Books: 5 Novels That Argue Big Ideas
This list gathers five of the best philosophy books that work as novels first. Each one puts an argument into the hands of a character and lets the story test it. Dostoevsky attacks rational self-interest through a bitter retired clerk. Sartre tracks a man whose world stops making sense. Rand builds whole economies to prove a point about individualism.
The selection is based on critical standing and on what our own readers look at most. Four of the five appear on the Modern Library 100 Best Novels list, two on TIME's 100 Novels, and they are ordered here by how much interest our readers show in them.
Every entry below says what the book is about and what idea it is wrestling with, so you can judge which one suits you before you start.
Notes From Underground
Dostoevsky's 1864 novella is a first-person confession from an unnamed retired civil servant in St Petersburg, known to critics as the Underground Man. The first part is a sustained attack on determinism and on the enlightened self-interest proposed by Nikolay Chernyshevsky in What Is to Be Done?, arguing that a person may always choose to act against their own interests simply to prove they exist. Mikhail Bakhtin found that in the narrator's confession "there is literally not a single monologically firm, undissociated word", every sentence anticipating a reply from an imagined reader.
Atlas Shrugged
Rand's longest novel, published in 1957, was the one she considered her magnum opus and the fullest statement of the philosophical system she later developed as Objectivism. Railroad executive Dagny Taggart and steel magnate Hank Rearden try to keep their companies running in a dystopian United States of shortages and tightening regulation, while a figure called John Galt persuades other industrialists to walk away. The book sets out Rand's positions on reason, property rights, individualism, rational egoism and laissez-faire capitalism.
Siddhartha
Hesse's ninth novel, written in German and published in 1922, follows a Brahmin's son who leaves home to seek enlightenment during the time of the Gautama Buddha. Siddhartha tries asceticism, meets the Buddha himself and declines to join his order, then swings to the other extreme as a wealthy merchant and lover of the courtesan Kamala before returning to a river and a ferryman named Vasudeva. The central argument is that wisdom cannot be handed over by a teacher and must be realised individually. It was published in the United States in 1951 and became widely influential during the 1960s.
Nausea
Sartre's first novel, published in 1938, takes the form of the diary of Antoine Roquentin, a melancholic and isolated intellectual living in the town of Bouville and supposedly writing a biography. As his alienation deepens, he experiences what he calls "the Nausea", in which ordinary people and objects shed their familiar qualities. Sartre's working title before publication was Melancholia.
The Fountainhead
Rand's first major literary success, published in 1943, follows architect Howard Roark, who is expelled from the Stanton Institute of Technology for refusing to design in historical styles and then struggles for years to find clients in New York. Ranged against him are Peter Keating, who prospers by copying popular taste, the socialist critic Ellsworth Toohey, who sets out to wreck his career, and the newspaper publisher Gail Wynand. Roark embodies what Rand saw as the ideal man, and the conflict dramatises her belief that individualism beats collectivism.
Five books, five different routes into the same set of questions about freedom, identity and what a person owes themselves. Any of them can be read as a novel without prior knowledge of philosophy, though each rewards a second pass.