‘A pile of rocks ceases to be a rock pile when somebody contemplates it with the idea of a cathedral in mind.’
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
It is sometimes said that love or perhaps money makes the world go round, but ideas have a much better claim to keeping us all spinning on our axis. Ideas are the great currency of life, driving progress and nurturing understanding – of ourselves and of the world around us – and, arguably, are the defining characteristic that elevates our species above all others. We may not be the only creature to entertain ideas – one need only glimpse a squirrel striving to liberate a feast of nuts from a bird feeder to see that – but we have the biggest and best ideas, not to mention the wherewithal to bring them to fruition. As the great architect Frank Lloyd Wright put it ‘An idea is salvation by imagination.’
This book explores 150 of the most significant ideas of all time, those that have moulded societies and epochs, many of them as relevant today as they ever were. Over eight parts covering different aspects of science, art, politics, economics, philosophy and religion, we will immerse ourselves in the thoughts of great minds spanning antiquity to the present day. Some are ideas that evolved slowly, sometimes over a period of millennia – for example, the idea of democracy – while others represent dramatic paradigm shifts – think Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. It is also notable how many great ideas emerged from or fed off others. Human thought clearly thrives by cross-fertilization. In the words of the American writer Ursula K. Le Guin: ‘It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.’