Cover: A World of Ideas, 11th Edition by Lee A. Jacobus
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A World of Ideas

Essential Readings for College WritersEleventh Edition ©2020 Lee A. Jacobus

The first and bestselling reader of its kind, A World of Ideas engages students with the big ideas that have shaped society and are reshaping it today. Readings by essential authors – from Aristotle and Mary Wollstonecraft to bell hooks and Marilynne Robinson – help students trace the or...

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ISBN:9781319213527

ISBN:9781319194444

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Cover: A World of Ideas, 11th Edition by Lee A. Jacobus

Great ideas spark great writing

The first and bestselling reader of its kind, A World of Ideas engages students with the big ideas that have shaped society and are reshaping it today. Readings by essential authors – from Aristotle and Mary Wollstonecraft to bell hooks and Marilynne Robinson – help students trace the origins of central cultural concepts and respond to them. A World of Ideas asks such crucial questions as, What defines good government? What forces shape our society? What does it mean to be educated?

A World of Ideas helps students respond to these questions by providing the guidance they need to understand, analyze, and write. Substantial, supportive apparatus helps students focus on both the content of the readings as well as the rhetorical moves that writers use to achieve their purposes, providing instruction and models as students join in the important conversations continuing today. New chapters on Education and Gender, and new readings throughout, speak to today’s urgent concerns. Improved writing instruction includes more scaffolding and examples that provide greater support for students.

Features

Forty-eight readings from the world’s greatest thinkers introduce students to the ideas that have shaped our culture. Writers such as Aristotle, Lao-Tzu, Karl Marx, Franz Fanon, and Judith Butler,examine ideas across seven themes: Government, Culture, Wealth, Education, Ethics, Gender, and Science.
 
Supportive editorial apparatus helps students handle the challenging material.

  • Thorough introductions to critical reading and writing. Two chapters, “Evaluating Ideas” and “Writing about Ideas,” introduce students to best practices for critical reading, thinking, and writing, and include a complete model annotated reading and student essay.
  • Support for reflection and transfer. An introduction to the theme, prereading and reflection questions, and headnotes for each selection, all ground students in the history of each idea and help students transfer what they’ve learned across themes and beyond the course.
  • Questions to help students focus their reading and produce thoughtful writing. Pre-reading questions, abundant discussion and connections questions, and writing prompts for each selection help students focus their reading and hone their understanding.
  • Even more context. Glosses and introductory quotations provide additional context for themes and readings.

A comprehensive Instructors Manual provides support for teaching. This exceptionally thorough resource includes sentence outlines to support student comprehension, further background on the selections, suggestions for classroom discussion and additional writing assignments, brief bibliographies for every author, and sample syllabi.

New to This Edition

50% new readings by thinkers who have influenced – and are influencing – our world today. Highlights include:

  • Writer and teacher Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “The Gift of the Strawberry” (from her award-winning 2013 book Braiding Sweetgrass) explores the intersection of indigenous gift economies and modern capitalism, calling into question how we understand the concept of wealth.
  • Psychiatrist and philosopher Franz Fanon’s “On Violence” (from his essential 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth) considers the impact of violence on the psychology of colonizers and colonized.
  • Pulitzer prize-winning writer Marilynne Robinson’s “What Are We Doing Here?” (from her 2018 book of the same name) reflects on the role of the humanities and religion in today’s polarized and politicized world.
     
    Two new foundational ideas explore enduring themes that affect students’ lives:
  • Education. With selections from Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Maria Montessori, Diane Ravitch, Marilynne Robinson, Howard Gardner, Martha Nussbaum, and bell hooks, this theme explores how our society has developed its concept of education and what the purpose of education is today.
  • Gender. With selections from Mary Wollstonecraft, Karen Horney, Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Lorber, Molly Haskell, Catharine MacKinnon, and Judith Butler, this theme considers the development of the category of gender and how this category is being reconceived.

More support makes great ideas accessible for all student writers.

  • To help all levels of students succeed with the readings and writing assignments in A World of Ideas, Chapters One and Two include a greater number of stepped-out examples and scaffolded instruction; coverage that is more modular so that students can find help quickly; and additional coverage of strategies to help students engage with what they’re reading, including deeper coverage of annotation and peer discussions.
  • To help students connect the reading they are doing both within and beyond each theme, the “Connections” questions after each reading have been expanded and are now a separate section, helping students to apply the ideas of one thinker to other readings and to the broader world.

“Teaching at the community college, I notice some students dont feel like ‘real’ students. When they discuss writings that challenge their minds, they rise to the occasion.”

--Kenneth Chacon, Fresno City College       

 
“A World of Ideas challenges readers to scrutinize not only diverse ideas presented by writers throughout history, but also to recognize the ideas that shape their own patterns of thinking.”

--Susan Sainato, Kent State University


“Jacobus provides brief but clear and useful criteria for understanding, evaluating, and generating ideas about texts. The book is clearly not just about absorbing the ideas of the past, but using them to create new ideas for the future.”

--John OHara, University of North Carolina, Wilmington


“Clearly, a great deal of thought goes into the selection of readings. The editorial commentary is always useful for instructors and students alike, and the range and variety of complexity in the questions following each reading constitutes a wonderful pedagogical tool...The fact that readings offer contrasting, or even opposing views, very often, strengthens students ability to hone their critical thinking skills, so essential for an advanced education.”

 – Colin Innes, University of California, Riverside

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Table of Contents

Preface for Instructors
Note to Students
 
EVALUATING IDEAS: An Introduction to Critical Reading
WRITING ABOUT IDEAS: An Introduction to Rhetoric
 
PART ONE: GOVERNMENT 
Some Considerations about the Nature of Government
Lao-Tzu, Thoughts from the Tao Te Ching
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Qualities of the Prince
Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence
*José Ortega y Gasset, The Greatest Danger, the State
*Francis Fukuyama, Why Did Democracy Spread?
*Cornel West, The Deep Democratic Tradition in America
Benazir Bhutto, Islam and Democracy
Reflections on the Nature of Government

PART TWO: CULTURE 
Some Considerations about the Nature of Culture
Frederick Douglass, from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Sigmund Freud, The Oedipus Complex
Carl Jung, The Personal and the Collective Unconscious
Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare’s Sister
Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail
*Frantz Fanon, On Violence
*Barbara Ehrenreich, Is the Middle Class Doomed?
Reflections on the Nature of Culture
 
PART THREE:   WEALTH
Some Considerations about the Nature of Wealth
*Adam Smith, The Value of Labor
Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
Andrew Carnegie, The Gospel of Wealth
F.A. Hayek, Economic Control and Totalitarianism
Robert Reich, Why the Rich Get Rich and the Poor Get Poorer
*Robin Kimmerer, The Gift of the Strawberry
*Dambisa Moyo, Economic Growth Matters to Ordinary People
Reflections on the Nature of Wealth
 
PART FOUR:   EDUCATION 
Some Considerations about the Nature of Education
*Michel Eyquem De Montaigne, Of the Education of Children *Maria Montessori, The Montessori Method
*Diane Ravitch, The Essentials of a Good Education
*Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?
*Howard Gardner, A Rounded Version: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences
*Martha Nussbaum, Education for Democracy
*Bell Hooks, Educating Women
Reflections on the Nature of Education
 
PART FIVE:   ETHICS 
Some Considerations about the Nature of Ethics
 Aristotle, The Aim of Man
Hsun Tzu, Man’s Nature is Evil
*W. E. B. Du Bois, The Soul of White Folks
*Mary Midgely, Trying Out One’s Sword
*Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices
Michael Gazzaniga, Toward a Universal Ethics
*Kwame Anthony Appiah, If You’re Happy and You Know It
 Reflections on the Nature of Ethics
 
PART SIX:   GENDER 
Some Considerations about the Nature of Gender
Mary Wollstonecraft, Pernicious Effects Which Arise from the Unnatural Distinctions Established in Society
Karen Horney, The Distrust Between the Sexes
*Simone De Beauvoir, If Man and Woman Were Equal
*Judith Lorber, Paradoxes of Gender
*Molly Haskell, Who Has It Better, Men or Women?
*Catherine A. MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment: Its First Decade in Court
Judith Butler, From Undoing Gender
Reflections on the Nature of Gender
 
PART SEVEN: SCIENCE
Some Considerations about the Nature of Science
Plato, The Allegory of the Cave
Francis Bacon, The Four Idols
 Charles Darwin, Natural Selection
*Rachel Carson, The Obligation to Endure
Michio Kaku, The Theory of the Universe?
*Ruth Moore, Evolution Revised
*James Gleick, What Is Time?
Reflections on the Nature of Science
 
Acknowledgements
Index of Rhetorical Terms

Headshot of Lee A. Jacobus

Lee A. Jacobus

Lee A. Jacobus is professor emeritus of English at the University of Connecticut and the author/editor of popular English and drama textbooks, among them The Bedford Introduction to Drama and A World of Ideas. He has written scholarly books on Paradise Lost, on the works of John Cleveland, and on the works of Shakespeare, including Shakespeare and the Dialectic of Certainty. He is also a playwright and author of fiction. Two of his plays — Fair Warning and Long Division — were produced in New York by the American Theater of Actors, and Dance Therapy, three one-act plays, was produced in New York at Where Eagles Dare Theatre.  His book Hawaiian Tales: The Girl With Heavenly Eyes (TellMe Press 2014) is a collection of short stories set in Hawaii.

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