Reading across three lists, you'll encounter books from intersecting academic disciplines and navigate distinct yet overlapping spheres of interest. 

Section 1 opens with the 18th Century - an intense period of reconfiguration on every possible front - religious, scientific, political, arts. We can recognise quite easily, in embryo, the times we're living in, and it makes for a good vantage point to look backwards in history as well as to look forward - much as the active participants of the century themselves self-consciously did. That theme of looking back to look forward runs through the rest of section 1: through the survey of major Utopian thinkers in the western world; in the Bible where two major civilisations meet, the Judeo-Greek, and generate the single most important common reference point in politics, education and culture for the next two millennia. There's Karl Marx examining the unfolding of history and, in the same messianic mode, identifying the agency to usher in the new dawn of human liberation. Then Freud the historian and technician of the human soul and its desires. And lastly the Modernists who take it upon themselves to grasp this whole legacy, desperate for horizons in the midst of global war. These six lists thus establish the "founders, foundations" of our epoch. 

Most of the lists in Section 2 are anchored in the novel, which is for me the most vibrant and the least restrictive form of text. Authors are licensed to convey their own vision of just how it is that people strive to fulfil themselves in particular circumstances. Though "invented", fiction often gives us the most astute and sophisticated representations of psychology, history and philosophy interweaving in life as it is actually lived: exerting a material influence on readers that undoubtedly reshapes the present for the future. I've dubbed this section 'The Octagon of Agon' - housing eight laboratories of conflict/antagonism, naming strife, competition and emulation as generative forces in literature as in human relations. 

Section 3, part-evolved in trying to place the rest of my library (at it then stood) into a structure, and I think the result works. In my longer framings, written to capture an exalted, manic burst of received coherences which shaped all these lists, you can read more. But structurally, I've called this section 'applications, articulations'; disseminations might have worked too. They're some of the main facets that should be represented in a socially-oriented curriculum; studied and acted upon: Education, adult education in particular, and the psycho-social dynamics of groups & groupwork. Theatre, as auditorium for the body, language and semiotics. Libraries, of course, together with readers and reading, the production, translation and distribution of books. Race, Nation, Empire - the broad frameworks within which we still exist. Most idiosyncratic of the lists, 3.5 would generally be dubbed the "esoteric" shelf in the bookshop/library; it can make its presence felt for itself. Lastly, the spectrum of comedy-drama-tragedy, which is in the end, how we perceive and stage the arc of our lives.

The French Connection: I've written a meandering whimsical essay on that. In short: France has a self-reflexive national culture which treats refined thinking and literary expression as an art with a serious function; even over two centuries of political decline, French figures have still held the ascendant in the social sciences and humanities. So, on these reading lists you'll find a few hundred French texts in English translation, and a fair number in the original.