Great Books of The Western World - Second Edition

Second Edition

In 1990 a second edition of Great Books of the Western World was published, with updated translations and six more volumes of material covering the 20th century, an era of which the first edition was nearly devoid. A number of pre-20th century books were also added, and four were dropped: Apollonius' On Conic Sections, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, and Joseph Fourier's Analytical Theory of Heat. Adler later expressed regret about dropping On Conic Sections and Tom Jones. Adler also voiced disagreement with the addition of Voltaire's Candide, and said that the Syntopicon should have included references to the Koran. He addressed criticisms that the set was too heavily Western European and did not adequately represent women and minority authors.

The pre-20th century books added (volume numbering is not strictly compatible with the first edition due to rearrangement of some books—see the complete table of contents for the second edition):

Volume 20

• John Calvin
  • Institutes of the Christian Religion (Selections)

Volume 23

• Erasmus
  • The Praise of Folly

Volume 31

• Molière
  • The School for Wives
  • The Critique of the School for Wives
  • Tartuffe
  • Don Juan
  • The Miser
  • The Would-Be Gentleman
  • The Imaginary Invalid
• Jean Racine
  • Bérénice
  • Phèdre

Volume 34

• Voltaire
  • Candide
• Denis Diderot
  • Rameau's Nephew

Volume 43

• Søren Kierkegaard
  • Fear and Trembling
• Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Beyond Good and Evil

Volume 44

• Alexis de Tocqueville
  • Democracy in America

Volume 45

• Honoré de Balzac
  • Cousin Bette

Volume 46

• Jane Austen
  • Emma
• George Eliot
  • Middlemarch

Volume 47

• Charles Dickens
  • Little Dorrit

Volume 48

• Mark Twain
  • Huckleberry Finn

Volume 52

• Henrik Ibsen
  • A Doll's House
  • The Wild Duck
  • Hedda Gabler
  • The Master Builder

The six volumes of 20th century material consisted of the following:

Volume 55

• 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

Volume 56

• Henri Poincaré
  • Science and Hypothesis
• Max Planck
  • Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers
• Alfred North Whitehead
  • An Introduction to Mathematics
• Albert Einstein
  • Relativity: The Special and the General Theory
• Arthur Eddington
  • The Expanding Universe
• Niels Bohr
  • Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature (selections)
  • Discussion with Einstein on Epistemology
• G. H. Hardy
  • A Mathematician's Apology
• Werner Heisenberg
  • Physics and Philosophy
• Erwin Schrödinger
  • What Is Life?
• Theodosius Dobzhansky
  • Genetics and the Origin of Species
• C. H. Waddington
  • The Nature of Life

Volume 57

• 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

Volume 58

• Sir James George Frazer
  • The Golden Bough (selections)
• Max Weber
  • Essays in Sociology (selections)
• Johan Huizinga
  • The Autumn of the Middle Ages
• Claude Lévi-Strauss
  • Structural Anthropology (selections)

Volume 59

• 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
  • Remembrance of Things Past: "Swann in Love"
• Willa Cather
  • A Lost Lady
• Thomas Mann
  • Death in Venice
• James Joyce
  • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Volume 60

• 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