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

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

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.