Penguin Great Ideas

Penguin Great Ideas is a series of largely non-fiction books published by Penguin Books. Titles contained within this series are considered to be world-changing, influential and inspirational. Topics covered include philosophy, politics, science and war. The texts for the series have been extracted from previously published Penguin Classics 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 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, 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."

Series One (2004)
All books in this series, published 9 February 2004, have red spines.

01. On the Shortness of Life - Seneca

02. Meditations - Marcus Aurelius

03. Confessions - Augustine

04. The Inner Life - Thomas à Kempis

05. The Prince - Niccolò Machiavelli

06. On Friendship - Michel de Montaigne

07. A Tale of a Tub - Jonathan Swift

08. The Social Contract - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

09. The Christians and the Fall of Rome - Edward Gibbon

10. 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. On the Suffering of the World - Arthur Schopenhauer

15. On Art and Life - John Ruskin

16. On Natural Selection - Charles Darwin

17. 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. The First Ten Books - Confucius

22. The Art of War - Sun Tzu

23. The Symposium - Plato

24. Sensation and Sex - Lucretius

25. An Attack on the Enemy of Freedom - Cicero

26. The Revelation of St John the Divine and The Book of Job

27. Travels in the Land of Kublai Khan - Marco Polo

28. The City of Ladies - Christine de Pizan

29. How to Achieve True Greatness - Baldesar Castiglione

30. Of Empire - Francis Bacon

31. Of Man - Thomas Hobbes

32. Urne-Burial - Sir Thomas Browne

33. Miracles and Idolatry - Voltaire

34. On Suicide - David Hume

35. On the Nature of War - Carl von Clausewitz

36. Fear and Trembling - Søren Kierkegaard

37. Where I Lived, and What I Lived For - Henry David Thoreau

38. Conspicuous Consumption - Thorstein Veblen

39. The Myth of Sisyphus - Albert Camus

40. Eichmann and the Holocaust - Hannah Arendt

Series Three (2008)
All books in this series, published 7 August 2008, have green spines.

41. In Consolation to his Wife - Plutarch

42. Some Anatomies of Melancholy - Robert Burton

43. Human Happiness - Blaise Pascal

44. The Invisible Hand - Adam Smith

45. The Evils of Revolution - Edmund Burke

46. Nature - Ralph Waldo Emerson

47. The Sickness Unto Death - Søren Kierkegaard

48. The Lamp of Memory - John Ruskin

49. 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 Fastidious Assassins - Albert Camus

59. Concerning Violence - Frantz Fanon

60. 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 - Lao-Tzu

62. Writings from the Zen Masters - Various

63. Utopia - Thomas More

64. On Solitude - Michel de Montaigne

65. On Power - William Shakespeare

66. Of the Abuse of Words - John Locke

67. Consolation in the Face of Death - Samuel Johnson

68. 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. 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. 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. The Tao of Nature - Chuang Tzu

82. Of Human Freedom - Epictetus

83. On Conspiracies - Niccolò Machiavelli

84. Meditations - René Descartes

85. Dialogue Between Fashion and Death - Giacomo Leopardi

86. On Liberty - John Stuart Mill

87. Hosts of Living Forms - Charles Darwin

88. Night Walks - Charles Dickens

89. Some Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Charles Mackay

90. 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. The 'Wolfman' - Sigmund Freud

94. The Jewish State - Theodor Herzl

95. Nationalism - Rabindranath Tagore

96. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism - Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

97. 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 - Chinua Achebe

Series Six (2020)
All books in this series, published 24 September 2020, have teal spines.

101. One Swallow Does Not Make a Summer - Aristotle

102. Being Happy - Epicurus

103. How To Be a Stoic - Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and Epictetus

104. Three Japanese Buddhist Monks - Yoshida Kenkō, Kamo no Chōmei and Saigyō Hōshi

105. Ain't I A Woman? - Sojourner Truth

106. Anarchist Communism - Peter Kropotkin

107. God is Dead - Friedrich Nietzsche

108. The Decay of Lying - Oscar Wilde

109. Suffragette Manifestos - Various

110. Bushido: The Soul of Japan - 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