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Select > Who • What • When • Where • Which |
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Great Ideas, Works of the Great Thinkers > 
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.
Simon Winder, Editor: "It was incredibly difficult and anyone looking at the list really should feel immediately annoyed at some important omission. These are 20 really major works and they all in effect talk to each other: later writers in the series revered - or reviled - earlier writers in interesting ways. Orwell and Hazlitt, Freud, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Montaigne and Seneca, etc. etc. The intention with each book was to isolate it and represent it to modern readers so that they can relive in some measure just what made the writing so urgent and astonishing at the time."
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More on this Website >
• http://www.penguin.ca/static/c ... tideas/excerpts.html
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Seneca, Philosopher
Seneca, Roman philosopher, dramatist, and statesman, who was one of the most eminent writers of the Silver Age of Latin literature. He was born Lucius Annaeus Seneca in C... |
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Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor
Marcus Antoninus the Philosopher, Roman Emperor from 161 to his death in 180. It is this quality of Marcus' character which has made him a unique figure in Roman history,... |
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Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo
He was named the Christian bishop of Hippo (Annaba, Algeria) in 396, and devoted the remaining decades of his life to the formation of an ascetic religious community. Aug... |
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Thomas a Kempis
Thomas is the great author of the world famous book, "The Imitation of Christ." His name will be remembered until the end of time, because of this famous work. Priests, n... |
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Niccolò Machiavelli
In 1498, Niccolò Machiavelli began his career as an active politician in the independent city-state of Florence, engaging in diplomatic missions through France and German... |
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Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
French humanist whose motto was "Que sais-je?" ["What do I know?"]. Montaigne's Essais (Essays) (1580, 1588) drew attention to the vain pretensions of human rationality a... |
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Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift was an Anglo-Irish writer who is famous for works like Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal, and A Tale of a Tub. Swift is probably the foremost prose sat... |
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau
As a brilliant, undisciplined, and unconventional thinker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau spent most of his life being driven by controversy back and forth between Paris and his n... |
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Thomas Paine, Founding Father USA
Thomas Paine, intellectual, scholar, revolutionary, and idealist, is widely recognized as one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A radical pamphleteer, Paine a... |
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Edward Gibbon
English historian and scholar, the supreme historian of the Enlightenment, who is best-known as the author of the monumental 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire', o... |
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Mary Wollstonecraft, Feminist
Wollstonecraft's lasting place in the history of philosophy rests upon A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). In this classical feminist text, she appealed to egali... |
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William Hazlitt
William Hazlitt was an English writer remembered for his humanistic essays and literary criticism, often esteemed the greatest English literary critic after Samuel Johnso... |
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Arthur Schopenhauer
German philosopher. Rejecting the idealism of Hegel, Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung employed Kant's notion of the noumenal self as the foundation for a... |
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Charles Darwin, Evolution Theory
Charles Robert Darwin was an English naturalist whose revolutionary theory laid the foundation for both the modern theory of evolution and the principle of common descent... |
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Karl Marx, Founder Communism
Karl Marx, with Friedrich Engels, a founder of modern socialism and communism. The son of a lawyer, he studied law and philosophy; he rejected the idealism of Hegel but w... |
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John Ruskin
John Ruskin was an English author, poet and artist, although more famous for his work as art critic and social critic. Ruskin's thinking on art and architecture became th... |
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Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche sharply criticized the Greek tradition's over-emphasis on reason in his Die Götzendämmerung (Twilight of the Idols) (1889). Reliance on abstract concepts in a q... |
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Sigmund Freud
Austrian physician and psychoanalyst. Freud offered a series of extended accounts of the mechanism of repression, by means of which the motives of human behavior are unre... |
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Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf, British novelist, also distinguished feminist essayist, critic, and a central figure of the Bloomsbury group.
During the inter-war period Woolf was at... |
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George Orwell
English novelist, essayist and critic, famous for his political satires ANIMAL FARM (1945), an anti-Soviet tale, and NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949), which shows that the des... |
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