Penguin’s Great Ideas: the sixth series
Hannah Arendt
2004 saw the launch by Penguin Books of Great Ideas, a selection of twenty slim, yet substantial, non-fiction titles by a range of influential writers. According to the publisher, these works by “great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries” have “changed the world” and “transformed the way we see ourselves – and each other”. For once we could believe the hype. These writings had a profound effect on readers in their day and they continue to spark debate and stimulate the mind.
Some were complete texts (The Communist Manifesto, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents); some were self-contained extracts from greater wholes (Darwin’s On Natural Selection, Edward Gibbon’s The Christians and the Fall of Rome, St Augustine’s Confessions of a Sinner); some were made up of a handful of short-form essays by notable practitioners (Hazlitt, Ruskin, Montaigne). There was something for everyone: a neat assortment of politics, philosophy, religion, history, science, ethics and what could be termed insightful personal ruminations.
If there was a mission statement then it was to present perennial works which provoke, inspire, enrage and enlighten. If there was a unique selling point then it was the size which mattered and the reading experience which was unmediated. For instead of a weighty academic tome packed with introductions, bibliographies, footnotes and endnotes, we got a portable book of around 120 pages, devoid of all clutter of editorial interference.
The project, like many in publishing, wasn’t entirely original. Simon Winder, Publishing Director at Penguin, came across the Piccola Biblioteca series while in Italy and was immediately taken by its no-frills, pocket-sized non-fiction titles, aimed not at students but everyday readers. An idea was born and a gap in the UK market filled. So successful was the series that it spawned five more, adding the likes of Plutarch, Confucius, Voltaire, Hume, Locke and Kant to its ranks. The third series was notable for including another selection of works from the most popular writers of the first two series: Camus, Freud, Ruskin, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Orwell. (To date, Orwell is the best-selling author on the list, and the one to appear the most, popping up four times in five series.) The fourth and fifth series incorporated political and ideological treatises (Marx’s Revolution and War, Lenin’s Imperialism, Rabindranath Tagore’s Nationalism), keynote speeches from Lincoln and Churchill, plus essays from eminent Victorians such as Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson and George Eliot.
Eliot is the only female writer mentioned here thus far. There aren’t many to highlight. In the first series, two out of twenty titles are by women (Mary Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woolf). In the second series there are another two (Cristine de Pizan and Hannah Arendt). In series four, Woolf reappears as a token offering, while Eliot is the sole woman in series five. In the third series, all twenty titles are by men. This makes for a sobering reckoning: a mere six out of one hundred Great Ideas books are by women.
We could of course attribute this to centuries of male hegemony. We could also take the publisher to task for not trying harder. Why keep trotting out the usual male suspects, especially four-time recidivist Orwell? Where are the likes of Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Germaine de Staël, Margaret Fuller, Florence Nightingale, Zora Neale Hurston, Iris Murdoch and Susan Sontag? And if series four included John Berger, a male author who was still alive at the time of publication, then why not take advantage of the rich pickings of female equivalents? Springing immediately to mind: Germaine Greer, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler and Naomi Klein.
Ten years on from the fifth and supposedly final instalment of Great Ideas comes a new series consisting of the most diverse group of writers yet. Out of the twenty books only six are by women, but this is still a considerable improvement on what has gone before. This time around, the authors comprise anarchists and stoics, feminists and prophets, satirists and Zen Buddhists. By rights, at this stage in the game, we should get diminishing returns in the form of substandard views from third-rate thinkers who wouldn’t have made the cut in earlier series. However, for the most part, Penguin has assembled an impressive roll call of voices whose words remain vital and relevant.
Orwell, as fine an essayist as he was, is mercifully denied a fifth look-in. Instead Arendt makes a welcome return, not with essays on Eichmann and the banality of evil, but rather the meaning of liberty. In the second of three pieces taken from the collection Thinking Without a Banister, she argues that “One cannot speak about politics without also speaking about freedom; and one cannot speak about freedom without also speaking about politics.” Elsewhere Simone de Beauvoir grapples with existentialism and examines how we should think and act in the world. The philosopher and activist Simone Weil explores the use and misuse of language by those wielding power, the nature of human suffering, and the intrinsic needs of the soul such as equality, security and responsibility. In an inspired move, this series also includes a variety of Suffragette manifestos – speeches, pamphlets, letters, articles – from the Pankhursts and lesser known (and more militant) campaigners, from aristocrats and artists to teachers and trade unionists.
Two of the best books allow us to hear a remarkable pair of women speaking out. Ain’t I A Woman? brings together the impassioned lectures and letters of Sojourner Truth (1797-1883), who was forty years a slave and then forty years a campaigner fighting for equal rights for Black women. In the speeches and songs delivered at numerous conventions across America, Truth relays her hardships, affirms her faith in God and her belief in humanity, proclaims her singular abilities (“I can’t read a book, but I can read the people”) and persuasively makes her case by way of captivating, crowd-pleasing rhetoric: “If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again!” And in the essays that make up Audre Lorde’s When I Dare to Be Powerful, the self-styled “Black woman warrior poet” battles against the “reality force” in her life that is racism, rails against those who seek to silence her, and analyses her righteous anger (“a molten pond at the core of me”) and her reasons for directing it at “Blackwomanness.”
The new series also gives us, among others, Aristotle on ethics, Oscar Wilde on aesthetics, and Peter Singer on veganism and animal rights (the last essay in that volume being the most topical yet, in its discussion of Covid-19 and its appeal for the permanent ban of “hell on earth” wet markets). Several titles feel like wasted opportunities. Camus’ Reflections on the Guillotine is a cogent, urgent argument against the death penalty (“But what then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders?”), but it is still a lazy addition as it marks the author’s third reappearance in the series. Seneca also returns with “On the Shortness of Life”, one of three pieces in a book of Stoic wisdom. However, it is a clumsy choice as it has featured before: the same piece formed the basis of the very first book in the Great Ideas series.
Fortunately, this excellent sixth instalment hits far more than it misses. Each book may be no more than a bite-sized sampler but it provides ample food for thought and serves as a perfect introduction or reintroduction to a writer, a movement or a way of viewing the world. If a seventh series is planned then it could do with taking more risks and opening up even further. For the moment, though, we can relish these great ideas from various great minds which, refreshingly, don’t think alike.
For more information on the series go to Penguin.
A Message from TheArticle
We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout the pandemic. So please, make a donation.
