Penguin Great Ideas is a series of largely

non-fiction Nonfiction, or non-fiction, is any document or media content that attempts, in good faith, to provide information (and sometimes opinions) grounded only in facts and real life, rather than in imagination. Nonfiction is often associated with b ...

books published by

Penguin Books Penguin Books is a British publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year.philosophy,

politics Politics (from , ) is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The branch of social science that stud ...

science Science is a systematic endeavor that Scientific method, builds and organizes knowledge in the form of Testability, testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earli ...

and

war War is an intense armed conflict between states, governments, societies, or paramilitary groups such as mercenaries, insurgents, and militias. It is generally characterized by extreme violence, destruction, and mortality, using regular o ...

. The texts for the series have been extracted from previously published

Penguin Classics Penguin Classics is an imprint of Penguin Books under which classic works of literature are published in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Korean among other languages. Literary critics see books in this series as important members of the West ...

and Penguin Modern Classics titles and purged of all editorial apparatus, making them appear as standalone texts. The concept of repurposed extracts was inspired by an earlier Penguin series produced in the mid-1990s, the Penguin's 60 Classics, which were extracts of classic texts published in a small book format at the time of Penguin's 60th anniversary. The typographic cover designs of the series have been highly praised, winning prizes such as a

D&AD Design and Art Direction (D&AD), formerly known as British Design and Art Direction, is a British educational organisation that was created in 1962 to promote excellence in design and advertising. Its main offices are in Spitalfields in London. I ...

award in 2005. The overall series is divided into six series of twenty books, each about one hundred and twenty pages long. Most books contain a notable

essay An essay is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument, but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of a letter, a paper, an article, a pamphlet, and a short story. Essays have been sub-classified as formal a ...

, often by a very well known writer. Some of these are slightly shortened. The third series features additional works by the previous series' most popular writers: Albert Camus, Sigmund Freud, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, George Orwell and John Ruskin. The fourth series includes a third essay by Orwell, and additional works by Michel de Montaigne, Arthur Schopenhauer, Karl Marx and Virginia Woolf. The fifth series was announced as the last in 2010, but after a decade long hiatus a new sixth series was set for release on 24 September 2020. Series six is notable for including a more diverse group of authors. The mission statement of series one to five was: "GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are." The mission statement of series six is: "One of twenty new books in the bestselling Penguin Great Ideas series. This new selection showcases a diverse list of thinkers who have helped shape our world today, from anarchists to stoics, feminists to prophets, satirists to Zen Buddhists."

Books

Series One (2004)

All books in this series, published 9 February 2004, have red spines. 01. '' On the Shortness of Life'' -

Seneca Seneca may refer to: People and language * Seneca (name), a list of people with either the given name or surname * Seneca people, one of the six Iroquois tribes of North America ** Seneca language, the language of the Seneca people Places Extrat ...

02. ''

Meditations ''Meditations'' () is a series of personal writings by Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor from AD 161 to 180, recording his private notes to himself and ideas on Stoic philosophy. Marcus Aurelius wrote the 12 books of the ''Meditations'' in Koine ...

'' -

Marcus Aurelius Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (Latin: áːɾkus̠ auɾέːli.us̠ antɔ́ːni.us̠ English: ; 26 April 121 – 17 March 180) was Roman emperor from 161 to 180 AD and a Stoic philosopher. He was the last of the rulers known as the Five Good ...

03. '' Confessions'' -

Augustine Augustine of Hippo ( , ; la, Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis; 13 November 354 – 28 August 430), also known as Saint Augustine, was a theologian and philosopher of Berber origin and the bishop of Hippo Regius in Numidia, Roman North A ...

04. '' The Inner Life'' -

Thomas à Kempis Thomas à Kempis (c. 1380 – 25 July 1471; german: Thomas von Kempen; nl, Thomas van Kempen) was a German-Dutch canon regular of the late medieval period and the author of '' The Imitation of Christ'', published anonymously in Latin in the ...

05. ''

The Prince ''The Prince'' ( it, Il Principe ; la, De Principatibus) is a 16th-century political treatise written by Italian diplomat and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli as an instruction guide for new princes and royals. The general theme of ''The ...

'' -

Niccolò Machiavelli Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli ( , , ; 3 May 1469 – 21 June 1527), occasionally rendered in English as Nicholas Machiavel ( , ; see below), was an Italian diplomat, author, philosopher and historian who lived during the Renaissance. ...

06. '' On Friendship'' - Michel de Montaigne
07. ''

A Tale of a Tub ''A Tale of a Tub'' was the first major work written by Jonathan Swift, composed between 1694 and 1697 and published in 1704. It is arguably his most difficult satire, and perhaps his best. The ''Tale'' is a prose parody divided into sections o ...

'' -

Jonathan Swift Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745) was an Anglo-Irish satirist, author, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whigs, then for the Tories), poet, and Anglican cleric who became Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dubl ...

08. ''

The Social Contract ''The Social Contract'', originally published as ''On the Social Contract; or, Principles of Political Right'' (french: Du contrat social; ou, Principes du droit politique), is a 1762 French-language book by the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques ...

'' - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
09. ''The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The Christians and the Fall of Rome'' - Edward Gibbon
10. ''Common Sense (pamphlet), Common Sense'' - Thomas Paine
11. ''A Vindication of the Rights of Woman'' - Mary Wollstonecraft
12. ''On the Pleasure of Hating'' - William Hazlitt
13. ''The Communist Manifesto'' - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
14. ''Parerga and Paralipomena, On the Suffering of the World'' - Arthur Schopenhauer
15. ''On Art and Life'' - John Ruskin
16. ''The Origin of Species, On Natural Selection'' - Charles Darwin
17. ''Ecce Homo (book), Why I Am So Wise'' - Friedrich Nietzsche
18. ''A Room of One's Own'' - Virginia Woolf
19. ''Civilization and Its Discontents'' - Sigmund Freud
20. ''Why I Write'' - George Orwell

Series Two (2005)

All books in this series, published 25 August 2005, have blue spines. 21. ''Analects, The First Ten Books'' - Confucius
22. ''The Art of War'' - Sun Tzu
23. ''Symposium (Plato), The Symposium'' - Plato
24. ''On the Nature of Things, Sensation and Sex'' - Lucretius
25. ''Philippicae, An Attack on the Enemy of Freedom'' - Cicero
26. ''Book of Revelation, The Revelation of St John the Divine'' and ''Book of Job, The Book of Job''
27. ''The Travels of Marco Polo, Travels in the Land of Kublai Khan'' - Marco Polo
28. ''The Book of the City of Ladies, The City of Ladies'' - Christine de Pizan
29. ''The Book of the Courtier, How to Achieve True Greatness'' - Baldassare Castiglione, Baldesar Castiglione
30. ''Essays (Francis Bacon), Of Empire'' - Francis Bacon
31. ''Leviathan (Hobbes book), Of Man'' - Thomas Hobbes
32. ''Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, Urne-Burial'' - Thomas Browne, Sir Thomas Browne
33. ''Dictionnaire philosophique, Miracles and Idolatry'' - Voltaire
34. ''Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, On Suicide'' - David Hume
35. ''On War, On the Nature of War'' - Carl von Clausewitz
36. ''Fear and Trembling'' - Søren Kierkegaard
37. ''Walden, Where I Lived, and What I Lived For'' - Henry David Thoreau
38. ''The Theory of the Leisure Class, Conspicuous Consumption'' - Thorstein Veblen
39. ''The Myth of Sisyphus'' - Albert Camus
40. ''Eichmann in Jerusalem, Eichmann and the Holocaust'' - Hannah Arendt

Series Three (2008)

All books in this series, published 7 August 2008, have green spines. 41. ''Moralia, In Consolation to his Wife'' - Plutarch
42. ''The Anatomy of Melancholy, Some Anatomies of Melancholy'' - Robert Burton (scholar), Robert Burton
43. ''Pensées, Human Happiness'' - Blaise Pascal
44. ''The Wealth of Nations, The Invisible Hand'' - Adam Smith
45. ''Reflections on the Revolution in France, The Evils of Revolution'' - Edmund Burke
46. ''Nature (essay), Nature'' - Ralph Waldo Emerson
47. ''The Sickness Unto Death'' - Søren Kierkegaard
48. ''The Lamp of Memory'' - John Ruskin
49. ''Human, All Too Human, Man Alone with Himself'' - Friedrich Nietzsche
50. ''A Confession'' - Leo Tolstoy
51. ''Useful Work versus Useless Toil'' - William Morris
52. ''The Significance of the Frontier in American History'' - Frederick Jackson Turner
53. ''Days of Reading'' - Marcel Proust
54. ''An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted Peoples of Europe'' - Leon Trotsky
55. ''The Future of an Illusion'' - Sigmund Freud
56. ''The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'' - Walter Benjamin
57. ''Books v. Cigarettes'' - George Orwell
58. ''The Rebel (book), The Fastidious Assassins'' - Albert Camus
59. ''The Wretched of the Earth, Concerning Violence'' - Frantz Fanon
60. ''Discipline and Punish, The Spectacle of the Scaffold'' - Michel Foucault

Series Four (2009)

All books in this series, published 27 August 2009, have purple spines. 61. ''Tao Te Ching'' - Laozi, Lao-Tzu
62. ''Writings from the Zen Masters'' - Various
63. ''Utopia (book), Utopia'' - Thomas More
64. ''Essays (Montaigne), On Solitude'' - Michel de Montaigne
65. ''Shakespeare's plays, On Power'' - William Shakespeare
66. ''Of the Abuse of Words'' - John Locke
67. ''Consolation in the Face of Death'' - Samuel Johnson
68. ''What Is Enlightenment?, An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?'' - Immanuel Kant
69. ''The Executioner'' - Joseph de Maistre
70. ''Confessions of an English Opium-Eater'' - Thomas de Quincey
71. ''The Horrors and Absurdities of Religion'' - Arthur Schopenhauer
72. ''Gettysburg Address, The Gettysburg Address'' - Abraham Lincoln
73. ''Revolution and War'' - Karl Marx
74. ''The Grand Inquisitor'' - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
75. ''On A Certain Blindness in Human Beings'' - William James
76. ''An Apology for Idlers'' - Robert Louis Stevenson
77. ''The Souls of Black Folk, Of the Dawn of Freedom'' - W. E. B. Du Bois
78. ''Thoughts of Peace in an Air Raid'' - Virginia Woolf
79. ''Decline of the English Murder'' - George Orwell
80. ''Why Look at Animals?'' - John Berger

Series Five (2010)

All books in this series, published 26 August 2010, have orange spines. 81. ''Zhuangzi (book), The Tao of Nature'' - Zhuang Zhou, Chuang Tzu
82. ''Discourses of Epictetus, Of Human Freedom'' - Epictetus
83. ''Discourses on Livy, On Conspiracies'' -

84. ''Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditations'' - René Descartes
85. ''Dialogue Between Fashion and Death'' - Giacomo Leopardi
86. ''On Liberty'' - John Stuart Mill
87. ''On the Origin of Species, Hosts of Living Forms'' - Charles Darwin
88. ''Night Walks'' - Charles Dickens
89. ''Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Some Extraordinary Popular Delusions'' - Charles Mackay (author), Charles Mackay
90. ''The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, The State as a Work of Art'' - Jacob Burckhardt
91. ''Silly Novels by Lady Novelists'' - George Eliot
92. ''The Painter of Modern Life'' - Charles Baudelaire
93. ''Sergei Pankejeff#Der Wolfsmann .28The Wolfman.29, The 'Wolfman''' - Sigmund Freud
94. ''Der Judenstaat, The Jewish State'' - Theodor Herzl
95. ''Nationalism'' - Rabindranath Tagore
96. ''Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism'' - Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
97. ''We shall fight on the beaches, We Will All Go Down Fighting to the End'' - Winston Churchill
98. ''The Perpetual Race of Achilles and the Tortoise'' - Jorge Luis Borges
99. ''Some Thoughts on the Common Toad'' - George Orwell
100. ''An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness", An Image of Africa'' - Chinua Achebe

Series Six (2020)

All books in this series, published 24 September 2020, have teal spines. 101. ''Nicomachean Ethics, One Swallow Does Not Make a Summer'' - Aristotle
102. ''Being Happy'' - Epicurus
103. ''How To Be a Stoic'' -

and Epictetus
104. ''Three Japanese Buddhist Monks'' - Yoshida Kenkō, Kamo no Chōmei and Saigyō, Saigyō Hōshi
105. ''Ain't I A Woman?'' - Sojourner Truth
106. ''The Conquest of Bread, Anarchist Communism'' - Peter Kropotkin
107. ''God is Dead'' - Friedrich Nietzsche
108. ''The Decay of Lying'' - Oscar Wilde
109. ''Suffragette Manifestos'' - Suffragette, Various
110. ''Bushido: The Soul of Japan'' - Nitobe Inazō, Inazo Nitobe
111. ''The Freedom to Be Free'' - Hannah Arendt
112. ''What Is Existentialism?'' - Simone de Beauvoir
113. ''The Power of Words'' - Simone Weil
114. ''Reflections on the Guillotine'' - Albert Camus
115. ''The Narrative of Trajan's Column'' - Italo Calvino
116. ''A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart'' - Martin Luther King Jr.
117. ''Steps Towards a Small Theory of the Visible'' - John Berger
118. ''When I Dare to Be Powerful'' - Audre Lorde
119. ''Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One's Books'' - Georges Perec
120. ''Why Vegan?'' - Peter Singer

References

External links

Publisher site
{{Authority control Lists of books Penguin Books book series Series of non-fiction books