The Great Books
The books that shaped our world, and why they still matter
The Great Books as a concept has a long history.
Inspired by the study of the classics (texts from Ancient Greece and Rome), it was institutionalized in the early 20th century in the US by John Erskine and Mortimer Adler who believed reading seminal texts—from Homer and Plato to Dante and Shakespeare—was essential for a comprehensive understanding of Western civilization.
Several universities still offer a Great Books program, most famously the University of Chicago and Columbia’s University’s Core Curriculum (where Erskine and Adler taught), and St. John’s College offers a whole degree based on the Great Books.
For me, this is not an academic exercise about creating a Definitive List of Great Books as that in itself could be a lifelong endeavor if taken seriously. I’m sure there’s an academic somewhere who’s working on this as we speak.
I’m inspired by some of this but I will do it my own way.
My approach
This is an absolutely subjective list, let’s not kid ourselves—there's no objective way to do this. I’ll show you my rationale, though. It’s a mix of what I find interesting, what is relevant today and what is timeless.
Timeless Insight
I want to focus on the Great Books because they have withstood the test of time. If there is evergreen content, the great books are 4,000-year-old-bristlecone-pine-level content (ever heard of Methuselah?).
They are timeless because they deal with universal themes of the human experience—love, ambition, power, death, morality. They grapple with existential questions and moral quandaries. What does it mean to be human? How to deal with the passing of time? How to have a good life?
And it’s not only how timeless the ideas are, but how fresh the insights feel. I was so surprised when reading Nietzsche by how current his perspective felt, how he describes the problems of our contemporary culture so well, yet he didn’t know anything about wokeism or critical theory—obviously— as he wrote On the Genealogy of Morality 140 years ago.
That’s the beauty of great books. No matter how old you are, where you’re from, or in what year you read them, these ideas will always be relevant and important.
Contemporary Challenges
There are a myriad of big questions, but some are fundamental to ask today.
We are experiencing a series of global crises: Crisis of meaning. The end of a unipolar order. The polarization of culture. The redefinition of work. The end of laissez-faire globalization. The questioning of democracy as the best governance system. People from all sides want to dismantle the system that has provided so much prosperity.
It’s easy to criticize democracy—it’s slow, messy, and full of career bureaucrats with unchecked power. But before we tear it down, we should ask: what system gives ordinary people more freedom and power?
Churchill put it best: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried."
The same goes for capitalism, technology, globalization, family values, etc. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. These systems aren’t perfect, but they didn’t emerge by accident—they evolved for a reason. If we want something better, we first need to understand how we got here.
Personal Curiosity
I’m obviously scratching my own itch. No one held a gun to my head and forced me to create this very ambitious niche project.
It all started with a recommendation from my husband to read all of Paul Graham’s essay and review them. I really liked the idea but I added a slight twist: why focus on Paul Graham (no offense to Paul, I really like his stuff) when I can consider the foundational texts of civilization?
In all seriousness, I massively enjoy learning about our world. I actually have a list of big questions that guide my thinking and reading process. This is a more intentional way to think about them.
Some of the questions and ideas that keep me up at night:
How does culture influence our thoughts, values, and behaviors?
How can we empower people to take control of their lives?
How do I create a community of like-minded friends that withstands the test of time and location?
Is democracy still the best governance system?
What is the next evolution of the nation state?
Institutions no longer work for our current techno-social paradigm (rise of AI, multipolar order, polarization, climate weirding), how can we transform them to better address the pressing issues of our time?
Jobs are where we spend one third of our lives. How can we make them more exciting and meaningful?
Schooling is mandatory in over 165 countries. How do we improve education so that kids learn how to be independent thinkers, learners and doers?
How can we grow our economy and lift people out of poverty in a more regenerative way, without completely destroying the world’s biodiversity?
With that in mind, here’s what I want to read and write about.
My Great Books List V1
I will start with Nietzsche’s book, but all others are in no particular order.
On the Genealogy of Morality by Friedrich Nietzsche
Seeing Like a State by James Scott
Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle
A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander
The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
The Odyssey by Homer
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
Utopia by Thomas More
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton et al.
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
Two Treatises of Government by John Locke
The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber
Human Action by Ludwig von Mises
The Logic of Scientific Discovery by Karl Popper
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
Essays by Michel de Montaigne
History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
This is important, I swear
My aim is to show you why these books and these ideas matter—how relevant they are in our everyday life.
You might say, Santi, it’s cool that you want to explore the origins of the nation state but how does that help me pay my mortgage or buy a birthday gift for my significant other?
Well, maybe if we understood the power the state holds over us, we’d see our lives differently. When we realize that we hand nearly half of what we earn in taxes, we start to grasp just how deeply these systems shape our choices.
We tend to think the world has always been like this—and by this, I mean the last 100 years. Oh, the state has always had all the power. Education has always been in a school with 30 other children and a set of subjects. Agriculture has always been enormous monocrop plantations.
But history tells a different story. There is no single way to organize society, no perfect system or institution. Everything—governments, economies, technologies—was designed by people, which means it can be redesigned.
That’s why I want to ground our big questions in the books that have time and time again proved to be insightful. Not to follow them blindly, but use them as tools for thinking and shaping our own points of view.
Our world is not set in stone, it is shaped by our choices and actions. We can transform institutions and systems to create a better future.
Let’s just first understand how we got here and why.
postscript 📮
What other thinkers, books, essays, manifestos, should I add?
What are the questions or ideas that keep you up at night?
How’s it going?
It's great to follow this adventure with you, Santi! Based on your questions, I would suggest adding the following books:
- Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed* by Jared Diamond (I’d love to read it alongside you if you decide to!)
- The Archaeology of Knowledge by Michel Foucault - offers a method for investigating how knowledge systems (culture, collective behavior...) emerge and shape us. Foundational book for sure.