Simon Winder, Editor of the Penguin Great Ideas books, give us a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the selection and publishing this series.
What criteria did you use when selecting which books to include in the Great Ideas series?
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.
Do you have a particular favourite?
Oh definitely the Ruskin. The pieces in ON ART AND LIFE are brilliantly vivid calls to action: for the importance of culture, the crucial role of morality in art and how to value the past. This little book created the Arts and Crafts movement, gave generations the key to loving Gothic art and architecture, changed ideas on education and was the first great anti-globalisation tract. Anyone who feels uncomfortable today kicking around a football made by Pakistani child labour will see the roots of their moral revulsion in Ruskin.
Have you ever turned to one of them in times of trouble as Bill Clinton turned to Thomas a Kempis and Marcus Aurelius during Monicagate?
In times of stress I always wind up reading Gibbon oddly. But to be honest that stress tends to be provoked more by anxiety over whether to repaint our hallway than by the rigours of leading the Free World whilst mishandling interns.
The books are full of advice. Would there be a book to help a person in each of these scenarios?
a) As a regular user of public transport you're coming to hate your fellow commuter and dark thoughts of violence are edging closer to becoming a reality ...
Well, on the public transport front my original idea was that we should use our marketing money to surround Victoria Station with armed guards during the rush hour and seal it off until everyone had at least read the Ruskin. They'd be a bit shaken by the time they had correctly answered the guards' few simple questions but I could decisively say that they would be intellectually better off.
… yes - there were legal problems I understand - we could have offered counseling, but there was a good argument that the commuters involved would have been so spiritually buoyed up that it would not have been needed.
But to answer the question: Hazlitt definitely and Schopenhauer - two great haters and very funny in their despair…
b) You feel undervalued at work and feel your colleagues are conspiring to hold you back ...
It would depend what point of horror you had reached. If you still felt able to lash out and claw your way past your colleagues then it's Machiavelli all the way: THE PRINCE is jammed with top tips for being the last employee left standing. If you are beyond that then THE SOCIAL CONTRACT brilliantly explains why things are as bad as they are, which is some solace - and if you are at your last gasp in the work-place then rather than sobbing in the toilet it would be far better to read Seneca's ON THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE and get a bit of Stoical backbone.
c) You are frustrated with the mass market, dumbed down culture that is suppressing true art and talent ...
Nothing better than Virginia Woolf's A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN or Ruskin's ON ART AND LIFE - two marvelous books that show that though life may be a veil of tears (or at least a veil of reality TV tie-ins) art has a bullet-proof, magical place at the heart of our world.
d) You have low self-esteem, life seems dull and you find it hard to make friends ...
Well, that does sound awful. You should steer clear of these books. Reading Schopenhauer might actually tip you over the edge. Seneca could offer some help but of a rather illusory kind.
There are books in the series that contributed to the French Revolution and the American War of Independence, are there equivalent books that contributed to the Russian Revolution and the English Civil War?
Definitely a key point of this series is that these are Great Ideas rather than necessarily Good Ideas and they have caused as much damage as pleasure. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT is perhaps the best example - a wonderful, immensely wounding critique of 18th century Europe, it was both an inspiration and a disaster for the French Revolution: a call to action but also used to provoke ruthlessness and disregard for human life.
Perhaps the most influential of all these books has to be THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO - anything that has sent so many people over so many years to man barricades, change their lives and lose their lives has to be viewed as completely remarkable, however much its ideas now may briefly seem discredited.
Which do you think comes first? The political revolution of a society or the revolution of an individual's self perception?
The latter no question - every revolution has been led by disturbingly well-read people stuffed with Great Ideas which they have want to put into practice. I'm sure people are reading books now (ideally published by Penguin) which are sowing the seeds of all the major flashpoints of the future. |
