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Wow, now there's some flame bait to rise to.
I've been through various phases of thought ever since I started in college. I was just thinking about my home library today, which I've collected ever since and the worlds the books represent. For example Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia just happens to be half pulled out of a shelf next to my desk computer. I think that was the work that made me bust out laughing, as I followed its early chapters. These authors write like Burroughs, except their characters are various disembodied concepts that rattle around like loosely moored boats tied to some floating system of piers. The rest of that shelf covers most of my `postmodern' collection and a reading anthology designed as course intro to the subject. Strangely Doug Henwood's Wall Street is on this shelf, next to an analysis of the Cuban medical system.
The self above starts with Jameson's Marxism and Form, Postmodernism and the cultural logic of late capitalism, then Harvey, the Condition of Postmodernity, then Ferenc Feher, The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity. Perry Anderson's The Origins of Postmodernity is setting on top of the others. Then there is a break, with an old book of mine, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, The French Student Revolt. After that is a textbook collection of American historical documents used in an Intro to Poli Sci course from long ago. It contains the Federalist Papers, the Constitution, Bills of Rights, and the important Supreme Court decisions. After that are the Horkheimer and Adrono books, Dialectic of the Enlightenment and Critical Theory, then Domkoff's Who Rules American, another Harvey, The New Imperialism. After those follows most of my Arendt collection starting with The Origins of Totalitarianism, and most of the rest of her works, including her correspondence with Karl Jaspers. I am slowly working through this correspondence to follow the preamble to my world.
The shelf above that is almost all Marx. The space isn't full, so Marcuse, Ortega y Gasset, C.Wright Mills and Adorno's Negative Dialectics fill in the space. I can't bring myself to read Marx in any systematic fashion, so I pull him out more or less based on my understanding of where I'll find something applicable.
The rest of my library is sorted out around my apartment in personal groupings. Some make sense, for example putting mathematics with physics, and their histories. Or what I see as a more poetical tradition running from Omar Khayyham to Allen Ginsberg. Nobody will understand that arrangement but me. From my point of view, these are the great social critics from within the worlds of poetic vision. They include Valery, Malraux, Sartre, de Bouvier, Camus, Paz, Eliot, Rumi, Hoelderlin, Goethe, Malarme, Verlane, Whitman and others. (I sold my first student library in despair of economic circumstance and had to reconstruct it after I got out of school. I'll never do that again.)
Below this seven and half foot running shelf of essays and poetry are my collection of religious works with two copies each of the Torah, Bible and Koran. One is annotated and the other is not. It follows a reader's logic, that if I want to mediate on these works, personally I don't want to be interrupted with a bunch of notes. On that shelf I also have some reference works on the ancient world and the strange collection of errant OT Pseudepigrapha by Charlesworth. My weakest period is the middle ages, represented by The Shorter Cambridge Medieval History which is a classic rare book over here and a couple of newer compendia. Below are most of my classical antiquity stuff starting with the Greek plays, going through the Cary and Bury histories of Rome and Greece (forays to Dante and Machiavelli) and ending with several versions of classical mythology (Graves to Grimal).
Anyway I won't go on. What I am I saying? We live in an entirely relativistic world of cultural forms at the popular, middle brow, and high end. There simply is no hegemony in these worlds, no matter how much Anglo-American capital wants to insist on it. And no matter how much various rising and falling academic elites assure us.
My library, and I didn't get to the the philosophy section or the fiction stuff on another wall in the hall (I have twelve foot ceilings), or the pop culture commentary or any of the sci-fi paperbacks in the bathroom, or my collection of science textbooks and references, or a single section to background Strauss of some thirty books... is a reflection of where I have lived, lo these many years (see biblical reference). Indeed, I have followed the intellectual commandments and they have yielded a strange world that is poignantly not about any reconciliation but an abject circus of difference.
I return to my beginning entries with Cassirer as the example. He had access to the Warburg library and it made a tremendous impact on his thought. While Gombrich and others stressed the library's classical selection, Cassirer wandered into its non-western selections and re-discovered the worlds of magic, myth, languages, and multiple realities. That's where I want to be.
CG