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Great Books of the Western World

Contents of the 60-Volume Set (1990 Edition)

 

1. The Syntopicon: An Index to the Great Ideas

2. The Syntopicon (cont.)

3. Homer, The Iliad, The Odyssey

4. Aeschylus, Plays
   
Sophocles, Plays
   
Euripides, Plays
   
Aristophanes, Plays

5. Herodotus, The History of the Persian Wars
   
Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War

6. Plato, Dialogues, The Seventh Letter

7. Aristotle, Works

8. Aristotle, Works (cont.)

9. Hippocrates, Works
   
Galen, On the Natural Faculties

10. Euclid, Elements
     
Archimedes, Works
     
Nicomachus, Introduction to Arithmetic

11. Lucretius, The Way Things Are
     
Epictetus, Discourses
     
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
     
Plotinus, The Six Enneads

12. Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, The Aeneid

13. Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans

14. Tacitus, The Annals, The Histories

15. Ptolemy, The Almagest
     
Nicolaus Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
     
Johannes Kepler, Epitome of Copernican Astronomy (Books IV-V), The Harmonies of the World (Book V)

16. Saint Augustine, The Confessions, The City of God, On Christian Doctrine

17. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica

18. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (cont.)

19. Dante, The Divine Comedy
     
Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, The Canterbury Tales

20. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion

21. Nicolo Machiavelli, The Prince
     
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

22. François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel

23. Desiderius Erasmus, Praise of Folly
     
Michel de Montaigne, Essays

24. William Shakespeare, Plays

25. William Shakespeare, Plays (cont.), Sonnets

26. William Gilbert, On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies
     
Galileo, Dialogues Concerning the Two New Sciences
     
William Harvey, On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, On the Circulation of the Blood,
           On the Generation of Animals

27. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

28. Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning, Novum Organum, New Atlantis
     
René Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Discourse on the Method, Meditations on First Philosophy,
           Objections Against the Meditations and Replies, The Geometry
     
Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics

29. John Milton, English Minor Poems, Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, Areopagitica

30. Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters, Pensées, Scientific Treatises

31. Molière, The School for Wives, The Critique of the School for Wives, Tartuffe, Don Juan, The Miser,
           The Would-Be Gentleman, The Would-Be Invalid
     
Jean Racine, Berenice, Phaedra

32. Isaac Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Optics
     
Christiaan Huygens, Treatise on Light

33. John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, Second Essay on Civil Government, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
     
George Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge
     
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

34. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
     
Voltaire, Candide
     
Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew

35. Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws
     
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, A Discourse on Political Economy, The Social Contract

36. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

37. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

38. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (cont.)

39. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, The Critique of Practical
           Reason, Preface and Introduction to the Metaphysical Elements of Ethics, General Introduction to the Metaphysic of Morals,
           The Science of Right, The Critique of Judgment

40. American State Papers (Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, Constitution of the United States of America)
      Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, The Federalist Papers
     
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Representative Government, Utilitarianism

41. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson

42. Antoine Lavoisier, Elements of Chemistry
     
Michael Faraday, Experimental Researches in Electricity

43. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, The Philosophy of History
     
Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
     
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

44. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

45. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
     
Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

46. Jane Austen, Emma
     
George Eliot, Middlemarch

47. Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

48. Herman Melville, Moby Dick
     
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn

49. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, The Descent of Man

50. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party
     
Karl Marx, Capital (Vol. 1)

51. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

52. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
     
Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House, The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder

53. William James, The Principles of Psychology

54. Sigmund Freud, Major Works (including Selected Papers on Hysteria, The Interpretation of Dreams, A General Introduction
           to Psychoanalysis, Civilization and Its Discontents, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
)

55. 20th Century Philosophy and Religion:
     
William James, Pragmatism
     
Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics
     
John Dewey, Experience and Education
     
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World
     
Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy
     
Martin Heidegger, What Is Metaphysics?
     
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
     
Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man

56. 20th Century Natural Science:
     
Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis
     
Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers
     
Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics
     
Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory
     
Arthur Eddington, The Expanding Universe
     
Niels Bohr, Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature (selections), Discussion with Einstein on Epistemological Problems
           in Atomic Physics
     
G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology
     
Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy
     
Erwin Schr
ödinger, What is Life?
     
Theodosius Dobzhansky, Genetics and the Origin of Species
     
C.H. Waddington, The Nature of Life

57. 20th Century Social Science (I):
     
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class
     
R.H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society
     
John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

58. 20th Century Social Science (II):
     
James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (selections)
      Max Weber, Essays in Sociology (selections)
      Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages
     
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (selections)

59. 20th Century Imaginative Literature (I):
     
Henry James, The Beast in the Jungle
     
George Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan
     
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
     
Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya
     
Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author
     
Marcel Proust, Swann in Love (from Remembrance of Things Past)
      Willa Cather, A Lost Lady
     
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
     
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

60. 20th Century Imaginative Literature (II):
     
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
     
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
     
D.H. Lawrence, The Prussian Officer
     
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
     
Eugene O’Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra
     
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
     
William Faulkner, A Rose for Emily
     
Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children
     
Ernest Hemingway, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber
     
George Orwell, Animal Farm
     
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot


Note: The Bible should also be considered as part of this list. It is indexed in The Syntopicon. The editors explain that it was not included in the Great Books set because it was assumed that any literate person would already have a copy.

The editors also note that the twentieth-century selections are just a provisional sampling: It remains to be seen which of them, in the perspective of time, will prove to be as enduring as the earlier works.

 



Table of contents of the Great Books of the Western World (2nd edition, 1990), edited by Mortimer Adler et al., published by Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.

The second edition is significantly larger than the first (1952). It dropped Apollonius’s Conics, Fielding’s Tom Jones, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and J.B. Fourier’s Analytical Theory of Heat, but it added the works by Calvin, Erasmus, Molière, Racine, Voltaire, Diderot, Austen, Balzac, Dickens, Tocqueville, Kierkegaard, George Eliot, Twain, Ibsen and Nietzsche, plus the six volumes of twentieth-century authors.


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