The pages of Great BooJ(s of the Western World are printed in either one or two columns. The upper and lower halves of a one-column page are indicated by the letters a and b. When the text is printed in two columns, the letters a and b refer to the upper and lower halves of the lefthand column, the letters c and d to the upper and lower halves of the right-hand column. These half and quarter page sections are based on divisions of a full text page.
Page xxxv (b), Section 5: Page Sections
Great Book of Western World 10 Years Reading Plan<br /> by [[zhex.dev]]<br /> accessed on 2025-08-09T10:50:17
found via u/Shot-Consequence-57 at https://www.reddit.com/r/ClassicalEducation/comments/1mafa6t/comment/n5q778g/
DownLOEBables<br /> http://www.edonnelly.com/loebs.html
Utopian Civic-Mindedness: RobertMaynard Hutchins, MortimerAdler, and the Great BooksEnterprise
Born, Daniel. “Utopian Civic-Mindedness: Robert Maynard Hutchins, Mortimer Adler, and the Great Books Enterprise.” In Reading Communities from Salons to Cyberspace, edited by DeNel Rehberg Sedo, 81–100. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230308848_5.
Adler’s start-up of the Paideia group led to hisousting from the Great Books Foundation’s board of directors in 1987,on grounds of conflict of interest.
Many intellectuals of that generation were deeply influenced by thatprogram – Saul Bellow, Susan Sontag, and Joseph Epstein, just to namea few.
University of Chicago's great books program
Only at St John’s College, where Adler’s friend Scott Buchananbecame president, was there instituted what Harry Ashmore calls a‘hundred-proof Great Books curriculum’.
St. John's College had a solid great books program in large part because of Buchanan and his relationship with Adler.
in the very early 1930s, academic news;their Great Books seminar was enough of a novelty both in substanceand method that celebrities on transcontinental train trips began tostop off in Chicago to take a look. Among these were Hollywood starsLillian Gish and Orson Welles, and Eugene Meyer, publisher of theWashington Post (and father of Katherine Graham, a student enrolled inthe seminar).18 The most famous visitor of all was Gertrude Stein.
visitors of Adler & Hutchins' great books seminars
what mightbe taken as the symbolic passing of the torch from Mortimer Adler toOprah Winfrey, a number of the Penguin classics chosen by Oprah forher Book Club have carried on their covers the seal with the words,‘Recommended for Discussion by the Great Books Foundation’.
Daniel Born places Oprah and her book club into the tradition of Adler & Hutchins' The Great Books of the Western World.
reframing a crucial question: is commitmentto the Great Books the enemy of progressive education (the scholarlyconsensus that has largely followed Dewey), or in fact a foundation forit?
As some research shows, knotty life questions without clear answers can evoke a dark mood without any clear biological explanation. This can be particularly difficult for adolescents, pondering for the first time big questions about fate and death, emptiness and meaninglessness, guilt and condemnation.
Is this a possible reason why reading great books in youth is so useful?
he two groups making most use of librarieswere “students and housewives” (women users outnumbered men by twoto one), but neither group was well served; and among employed men,6 percent of whites borrowed books, but only 0.1 percent of Black min-ers.18 These were dreadful numbers.
reading as a leading indicator of cultural shift to help provide power to women and non-whites.
Was the Great Books idea being pressed towards "men" a means of pushing back against this in some sense?
There is for himno royal road to order. Knowledge andright will a r e indispensable. This doesnot mean that the world will heed, andeducate its feelings and thoughts forthe sake of self-preservation. But quiteproperly, Mr. Wells should not care.He has diagnosed the ailment and pre-scribed the sensible dose. The patientis always a t liberty to pass out in self-conceit or with the aid of quacks.PRODUCED 2005 BY UNZ.ORGELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED
relationship to Eric Hoffer's The True Believer and modern politics?
relationship to the Great Books idea in 1942-1952 and beyond?
repeating history...
Kurutz, Steven. “Now You Can Read the Classics With A.I.-Powered Expert Guides.” The New York Times, June 13, 2024, sec. Style. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/13/style/now-you-can-read-the-classics-with-ai-powered-expert-guides.html.
What enabled these high aspirations in the 1940s?
also, what impact did these programs in the late 40s and early 50s have on subsequent events in the 60s and 70s as these cohorts continued to age?
In Chicago, one catalyst for that growth—as a kind of public sym-bol and tacit approval from the business community—was “the FatMan’s Class,” which had begun meeting in 1942–1943 at Chicago’sUniversity Club. The moniker derived, according to some, from thegroup’s “affluence rather than the girth of its members.” Membersof this class included Chicago notables such as Harold and CharlesSwift, Marshall Field, Jr., Walter Paepcke, Hermon Dunlap Smith,William Benton, Hughston McBain (president of Marshall Field andCompany), and Laird Bell. This group caught the “fancy” of thepopulace, causing the University of Chicago’s University College topartner with the Chicago Public Library in 1944 to set up great bookscourses around the city.43
An anonymous review in The Atlantic touched on the samesnobbish fear addressed by Barzun:Mr. Adler’s notion that “almost all of the great books in every fieldare within the grasp of all normally intelligent men” seems to usto need a deal of sifting. We do not know what he means by “nor-mally intelligent,” but if he means the average run of intelligencein our population, or in the student body of our schools and col-leges, we believe he is deplorably wrong. So also . . . the book’s sub-title, “The Art of Getting a Liberal Education,” savors strongly ofquackery. 39
Compare this with the ideas of intelligence and eugenics of the time as well as that of class in Isenberg's White Trash.
Presumably this anonymous author would have been seeing things from a more dominant eugenics viewpoint at this time period of 1940.
See also: The Eugenics War (American Experience) https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/eugenics-crusade/
Adler first came into contact with the great books idea whenhe took John Erskine’s General Honors course at Columbia Universityin 1920.
It is Woodberry who bringsus to Columbia University and John Erskine.27
Those larger goals highlighted edu-cation for good citizenship; to them great books were more of anantidote than a contributor to that bland, conformist mass culturefeared by mid-century critics (left and liberal and conservative) anddescribed by cultural historians.
How, if at all, did the great books idea contribute to the idea of Manufacturing Consent for the 20th century?
To understand elitism in relation to the great books idea, one mustconsider the meaning and existence of cultural hierarchies in litera-ture.
cultural democratization as a sometimes contentious process.
some of the cultural democratization at that time presumed free time as well as conscious choice to make the effort... what about those who have patience for neither?
what about the economic choices to participate or not?
Adler’s communityof discourse is a crucial part of this story about the great books idea
Jacques Barzun
Jacques Barzun wrote a review of of the Great Books when they came out in 1952.
Barzun, Jacques. “The Great Books.” The Atlantic, December 1952. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1952/12/the-great-books/642341/.
See notes at: https://hypothes.is/a/8o-z3DHLEe6_PMtDOvwCmg
still building the Culture Wars politicalteleology.
did the tension inherent in the cultural evolution of the great books idea versus vocational and other forms of education set up the culture wars of the late 1900s/early 2000s?
The foregoing examples illustrate various forms topics take according to thedifferent kinds of subjects they propose for discussion. Some deal with the natureof a thing or its definition, some with its qualities or attributes, some with itscauses, and some with its kinds; some deal with distinctions or differences, andsome with comparisons or contrasts; some propose a general theory for considera-tion, some present a problem, and some state an Issue. Some— such as the lastthree above —are difficult to characterize by any formula.
The complexity of the topic is determined by the content of the discussion the topic is about.
It is easier to say what a topic is not, than what it is or should be. If it mustalways be a less determinate expression than a sentence, and if it must usually be amore complex expression than a single word or pair of words (which are theverbal expression of terms, such as the great ideas), it would seem to follow thatthe proper expression of a topic is a phrase— often, perhaps, a fairly elaboratephrase involving a number of terms and signifying a number of possible relationsbetween them. This general description of the grammatical form of a topic docsnot, however, convey an adequate notion of the extraordinary variety of possi-ble phrasings.
To me, it seems that Adler et al., are arguing that a topic should be stated as a phrase with varying degrees of complexity, determined by ?
For example, “The ideal of the educated man’"(Education la) is a simple topic; “The right to property: the ownership of themeans of production” (Labor 7b) is a complex topic; and “The use and criticismof the intellectual tradition: the sifting of truth from erroi; the reaction againstthe authority of the past” (Progress 6c) is a more complex topic.
Some examples of topics that are formulated and used in the original syntopicon.
The topics are the basic units of the Syntopicon. They perform a doublefunction. The Outline of Topics in each chapter is the analysis of a great idea,setting forth its various meanings, its themes and problems; and the individualtopics serve as the immediate headings under w^hich are assembled the referencesto the discussion of each particular subject in the great books. The topics are themajor subdivisions of the discussion in the sphere of each of the great ideas, as theideas are the main divisions of the whole discussion in the great books. As eachidea represents a general field of discourse— a domain of learning and inquiry—covering a variety of related themes and problems, so, under each idea, the varioustopics represent the themes and problems which are the particular subjects ofdiscussion in that field.
It seems as though an idea is very broad and a "sub-topic" is more granular, though also determined based on the overall content and related to the primary idea.
The two mfasi^rfs of intrinsic greatness — scope and significance
It seems that most of the ideas were chosen based on scope and significance.
The reason which operated against such multiplication of chapters was(as already stated) the desire to avoid excessive duplication among topics andreferences.
Adler et al. operated from a state of efficiency in the sense that they did not want the book to become too long (even though, or maybe because of, the fact that the end result became already two volumes each more than a thousand pages)
Both the great books and the great ideas were chosen to represent the unity andcontinuity of the tradition of western thought. The great l^ks are those whichdeal imaginatively or intellectually with the ideas which arc fundamental through-out this whole tradition. Any important work -ancient, mediaeval, or modern-will necessarily be concerned with these ideas in some uay. What distinguishes thegreat books is the originality, the profundity, and the scope of their treatment ofthese ideas. Other books, important in some special field of learning, may havethese qualities with respect to one idea or even to several related ideas, but thegreat books possess them for a considerable range of ideas, covering a variety ofsubject matters or disciplines; and among the great books the greatest arc thosewith the greatest range of imaginative or intellectual content.
Adler explains the distinctive factor determining which authors and works were included in the list of the Great Books of the Western World.
Basically, they were works that were influential, written excellently, and had applicability to a considerable amount of ideas processed by the whole.
The great majority of terms eliminated were those which did not appear to ,receive extensive or elaborate treatment in the great books. They were terms thatdid not seem to have a lively career —a continuous and complex developmentthroughout the three-thousand-year tradition of the great books.The editors usedthe actual content of the great books as the test whereby to separate a small set oftruly great ideas from a much larger number of important concepts or notions.The reader can apply this test himself by comparing the 1800 concepts listed inthe Inventory of Terms, with the 102 ideas that are treated as the principalterms in the Syntopicon.
The ideas were chosen on the basis of coverage within the Great Works.
The “great books idea” becomes, then, a singular theoretical tool fordealing with change over time.
The phrase “great books idea” arose to capture the evident diversityin thinking about the topic—the who, what, where, when, and howassociated with the notion of a great book and great books. The word“idea” allows for the abstraction from material circumstances: lists,institutions, book production, particular debates, people, et cetera.
Lacy, Tim. The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer J. Adler and the Great Books Idea. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. https://amzn.to/3R2rCox.
"The great books are the inexhaustible books. The books that can sustain a lifetime of reading."
"The great books are the books that never have to be written again. They are so good no-one can try to write them again."
"The great books are the books that everyone wants to have read but no-one wants to read."
What did not stand out to me before while reading the book, but does now when watching this, is the fact that the greatest books are subjective to each individual... Meaning my list might not be the same for others.
Very fascinating thought experiment. Out of the 140+ books I have read so far only a few, less than a handful, would fit the list of "growth" books; the greatest, that I would take to the deserted island for 10 years...
No other book, to my mind, that I have read so far would cut it to my list.
Inthe case of good books, the point is notto see how many of them you can getthrough, but rather how many can getthrough you—how many you can makeyour own
This is not only a nice quote by itself, but seems to be saying something deeper to me about productivity.
There's a difference in productivity for it's own sake, but being both productive in the send of time spent efficiently and productive in the sense of producing something of greater value with your time than you might have spent doing something else which was less valuable, but which might still have been time well spent.
Theindexer will want a feel, before they begin, for the concepts that willneed to be flagged, or taxonomized with subheadings. They mightskim the book – reading it in full but at a canter – before tackling itproperly with the software open. Or they may spend a while, as apreliminary, with the book’s introduction, paying attention to itschapter outline – if it has one – to gain a sense of what to look outfor. Often, having reached the end of the book, the indexer will returnto the first few chapters, going over them again now that they havegained a conceptual mapping of the work as a whole.
It's no wonder that Mortimer J. Adler was able to write such a deep analysis of reading in How to Read a Book after having spent so much time indexing the ideas behind The Great Books of the Western World.
Indexing requires a solid inspectional read at minimum, but will often go deeper into contexts which require at least some analytical reading. To produce the Syntopicon, one must go even further into analytical reading to provide the proper indexing of ideas so that they may be sub-categorized and used for deeper analysis for things such as comparison and contrast of those ideas.
https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Democratic-Culture-Mortimer-Intellectual/dp/0230337465
The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer J. Adler and the Great Books Idea (Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History) by Tim Lacy
Syntopical Construction by [[Dan Allosso]]
Adler & Hutchinson's Great Books of the Western World was an encyclopedia-based attempt to focus society on a shared history as their common ground. H. G. Wells in his World Encyclopedia thesis attempts to forge a new "moving" common ground based on newly evolving knowledge based on distilling truth out of science. Shared history is obviously much easier to dispense and spread about compared to constantly keeping a growing population up to date with the forefront of science.
How could one carefully compose and juxtapose the two to have a stronger combined effect?
How could one distribute the effects evenly?
What does the statistical mechanics for knowledge management look like at the level of societies and nations?
very carefully assem-bled with the approval of outstandingauthorities in each subject, carefully col-lated and edited, and critically presented.It would be not a miscellany but a con-centration, a clarification and a synthesis.
Compare this with Hutchins and Adler's solution undertaken just a few years following this beginning in the early 1940s and finally published in 1952: The Great Books of the Western World.
These books speak toward the idea of living well and understanding mankind, but don't have the same deeply edited and critical synthesis viewpoint.
The Syntopicon Vault by Dan Allosso
Maybe this will help: [Great Books of the Western World SYNTOPICON changes in 1986 (more info in comments) : ClassicalEducation](https://www.reddit.com/r/ClassicalEducation/comments/hlvnkv/great_books_of_the_western_world_syntopicon/)
reply to u/Paddy48ob at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/17jscyk/comment/k80z1nn/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Thanks for this pointer. As a note, when I compare my 1954 version against the photo of the 1990 edition (which has fewer pages), it's obvious that the "1. The ends of education" section in the 1954 edition is significantly more thorough with more references (and supplementary data) which don't exist in the 1990 edition. The 1990 edition presumably removes the references for the books which they may have removed from that edition (though it may have actually been even more--I didn't check this carefully).
Just comparing the two pages that I can see, I don't see any references to the added texts of the 1990 edition appearing in that version of the Syntopicon at all.
I took a quick look at the Syntopicon V1 (1990) via the Internet Archive and of the added texts that year I sampled searches for Voltaire, Erasmus, and John Calvin and the only appearances of them to be found are in the Addition Bibliography sections which is also where they appeared in the 1952 editions. My small sampling/search found no added references of any of these three to the primary portions of the main References sections, so they obviously didn't do the additional editorial work to find and insert those.
As a result, it appears that the 1952 (and reprint editions following it) have a measurably better and more valuable version of the Syntopicon. The 1990 (2nd Edition) is a watered down and less useful version of the original. It is definitely not the dramatically improved version one might have hoped for given the intervening 38 years.
Alter’s commentary benefits from his allusions to, among others, Freud, Gilgamesh, Herodotus, Hesiod, Homer, Josephus, Joyce, Kafka, Melville, Milton, Molière, Nabokov, Shakespeare, Shelley, and Sophocles. But technical words and phrases often appear without explanation: aleatory device, autochthonous, collocation, deictic, diachronic collage, dittography, durance vile, emphatic anaphora, gnomic, haplography, metonymy, and threnody. (To my knowledge, there is no readily available glossary containing all these words—so you will just have to google one word at a time, dear reader.) Even when Alter offers a definition as an aside, I wonder how many people will benefit from his explanations., e.g., “This pairing is virtually a zeugma, the syntactic yoking together of disparate items” (Isaiah 44:15).
Is it really incumbent on the author to translate every word he's using with respect to the language in which he's writing. He's already doing us a service by translating the Hebrew. Are modern readers somehow with out a dictionary? I might believe they've not been classically educated to capture all the allusions, but the dictionary portion is a simple fix that is difficult to call him out on from a critical perspective, especially in a publication like "Law & Liberty" whose audience is specifically the liberally educated!?!
Our Journey, Day 83 by Dan Allosso
And with that puerile quarrel between stubborn warlords over the right to own and to rape a girl, Western literature begins.
A stark statement that lays bare the original sin of Western thought.
The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education. 27th Printing. Vol. 1. 54 vols. The Great Books of the Western World. 1952. Reprint, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1984.
I read the first edition.
Hutchins, Robert M. The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education. Edited by Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler. 1st ed. Vol. 1. 54 vols. Great Books of the Western World. Chicago, IL: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.
urn:x-pdf:0ce8391ed9f9f1cfc78c28b6c923abac<br /> Annotation search: https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?user=chrisaldrich&max=100&exactTagSearch=true&expanded=true&addQuoteContext=true&url=urn%3Ax-pdf%3A0ce8391ed9f9f1cfc78c28b6c923abac
Underlines and margin notes in an unknown hand are interspersed throughout the texts. Volume I includes a daily devotional page that has been used as a bookmark. The back endpapers of Volume IV has been copiously annotated.
Jack Kerouac followed the general advice of Mortimer J. Adler to write notes into the endpapers of his books as evidenced by the endpapers of Volume IV of the 7th Year Course of The Great Books Foundation series with which Adler was closely associated.
Wills, Garry. “After 54 Great Books, 102 Great Ideas, Now—Count Them !—Three Revolutions.” The New York Times, June 13, 1971, sec. BR. https://www.nytimes.com/1971/06/13/archives/the-common-sense-of-politics-by-mortimer-j-adler-265-pp-new-york.html
It's not super obvious from the digitized context (text), but this review is in relation to The Common Sense of Politics (1971) by Mortimer J. Adler.
Wills criticizes Adler and his take in the book as well as the general enterprise of the Great Books of the Western World.
There seem to be interesting sparks here in the turn of the Republican party in the early 70s moving into the coming Reagan era.
RECOMMENDED READING LIST
Compare this list to what ultimately became the Great Books of the Western World in 1952. Lots more 20th century writing on it to begin...
Although not all of the books listed are "great" in any of the commonly accepted meanings of the term, all of them will reward you for the effort you make to read them.
This book was published originally in 1940 and apparently the Great Books of the Western World was hatched in 1943, so this book isn't necessarily a stepping stone to pitching/selling those, though obviously it informs the ideas which led up to its creation.
Note that it is roughly contemporaneous to his article a year later:
Adler, Mortimer J. “How to Mark a Book.” Saturday Review of Literature, July 6, 1941.<br /> https://stevenson.ucsc.edu/academics/stevenson-college-core-courses/how-to-mark-a-book-1.pdf
In general the professors of the humanities and the socialsciences and history, fascinated by the marvels of experi-mental natural science, were overpowered by the idea thatsimilar marvels could be produced in their own fields by theuse of the same methods. They also seemed convinced thatany results obtained in these fields by any other methods werenot worth achieving. This automatically ruled out writerspreviously thought great who had had the misfortune to livebefore the method of empirical natural science had reachedits present predominance and who had never thought ofapplying it to problems and subject matters outside the rangeof empirical natural science.
Hutchins indicates that part of the fall of the humanities was the result of the rise of the scientific method and experimental science. In wanting fields from the humanities—like social sciences and history—to be a part of this new scientific paradigm, professors completely reframed their paradigms in a more scientific mode and thereby erased the progenitors and ideas in these fields for newer material which replaced the old which was now viewed as "less than" in the new paradigms. This same sort of erasure of Indigenous knowledges was also similarly effected as they were also seen as "less than" from the perspective of the new scientific regime.
One might also suggest that some of it was the result of the acceleration of life brought on by the invention of writing, literacy, and the spread of the printing press making for larger swaths of knowledge to be more immediately available.
This set of books is offered not merely as an object uponwhich leisure may be expended, but also as a means to thehumanization of work through understanding.16
Purpose of the Great Books of the Western World
Barzun, Jacques. “The Great Books.” The Atlantic, December 1952. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1952/12/the-great-books/642341/.
Barzun heaps praise on Great Books of the Western World with some criticism of what it is also missing. He finds more than a few superlative words for the majesty of the Syntopicon.
I he fact is that there arc some three thousand subheadings. So persons who feel that an official ceiling of 102 ideas would cramp their style can breathe freely.
According to Jacques Barzun (and possibly written in the volumes itself), while the Syntopicon has 102 ideas, there are "some three thousand subheadings."
It is not quite a five-foot shelf: 1 make it four feet eight-and-a-half — standard railroad gauge.
the five-foot shelf reference is to the Harvard Classics competitor
The late John Erskine, Professor of English in Columbia College, was in charge of an American study center at Dijon (where there is now a memorial library named after him) and there he drew up for the doughboys the first list of great books considered as a body of secular scripture. When he came back to his post at Columbia, he persuaded the faculty to establish a two-year course in which selected upperclassmen would read and dismiss these great books, one each week, withr a minimum of scholarly apparatus and a maximum of attention to the author’s words.
Brief story of John Erskine's creation of "Great Books" study program.
I like their simplicity and cloth texture, but family members seem to think that my 1952 set of The Great Books of the Western World are a bit on the "dreary looking side" compared with the more colorful books in our home library. (It says something that the 12 year old thinks my yellow Springer graduate math texts are more inviting...) Has anyone else had this problem and solved it with custom printed dust jackets?
In doing something like this for fun, I might hope that the younger kids in the house might show more interest in some more lively/colorful custom covers.
I'm partially tempted to use a classical painting as a display across the spines (a la Juniper Books collections) perhaps using:
Other thoughts? suggestions?
Syndication link: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClassicalEducation/comments/15gv2cz/custom_dust_jackets_for_the_great_books_of_the/
I regret that the ideal of a home or family library has pretty much vanished along with door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen and sets of the “Great Books of the Western World.”
Margin Shopping suggestions?
I've browsed through dozens of publishers who reprint translations of popular classics to find ones that have good broad margins to more easily be able to annotate in them. I've often considered self-publishing nice hardcover copies of out of copyright versions so that I could make nice wide margins or even interleave the books so that every other page was blank for taking notes.
Notes on some publishers I've been contemplating:
Does anyone who marks up their books have particular publishers they like best for their ample margins, preferably in hard cover at a reasonable prices?
Other than reprinting things myself, what other options are there for physical books? (For digital books, I often rely on my Kindle or I use Hypothes.is which offers endless margins digitally.)
syndication link: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClassicalEducation/comments/15clwfd/margin_shopping_suggestions/
The Editors wish especially to mention their debt to thelate John Erskine, who over thirty years ago began the move-ment to reintroduce the study of great books into Americaneducation, and who labored long and arduously on thepreparation of this set.
We attach importance to making whole works, as distin-guished from excerpts, available; and in all but three cases,Aquinas, Kepler, and Fourier, the 443 works of the 74 auth-ors in this set are printed complete.
There are 443 works by 74 authors in the Great Books of the Western World. All of them are printed in their entirety except for Aquinas, Kepler and Fourier.
In many cases, all or some of an author'sworks included in this set were unavailable.
One of the primary goals of The Great Books, was to make some of the (especially ancient writers) more accessible to modern audiences with respect to ready availability of their works which were otherwise much more expensive.
This certainly says something about both publishing and reading practices of the early 20th century.
The final decision on the list wasmade by me.
Robert Hutchins takes sole responsibility for the final decision on the selection for the books which appear in The Great Books of the Western World series.
One wonders what sort of advice he may have sought out or received with respect to a much broader diversity of topics and writers with respect to his own time. I reminded a bit of the article The 102 Great Ideas (Life, 1948) which highlights a more progressive stance with respect to women and feminism in the examples used.
See: LIFE. “The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog.” January 26, 1948. Https://books.google.com/books?id=p0gEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA92&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false. Google Books.
They now have the chance to understandthemselves through understanding their tradition.
It feels odd that people wouldn't understand their own traditions, but it obviously happens. Information overload can obviously heavily afflict societies toward forgetting their traditions and the formation of new traditions, particularly in non-oral traditions which focus more on written texts which can more easily be ignored (not read) and then later replaced with seemingly newer traditions.
Take for example the resurgence of note taking ideas circa 2014-2020 which completely disregarded the prior histories, particularly in lieu of new technologies for doing them.
As a means of focusing on Western Culture, the editors here have highlighted some of the most important thoughts for encapsulating and influencing their current and future cultures.
How do oral traditions embrace the idea of the "Great Conversation"?
democracyrequires liberal education for all.
Two of the driving reasons behind the Great Books project were improvement of both education and democracy.
The democracy portion was likely prompted by the second Red Scare from ~1947-1957 which had profound effects on America. Published in 1952, this series would have considered it closely and it's interesting they included Marx in the thinkers at the end of the series.
We may havemade errors of selection.
A great admission to make upfront in such a massive endeavor which one hopes to shape the future.
What does this mean for ars excerpendi writ large? Particularly when it may apply to hundreds of thousands?
Great books alone will not do the trick; for the peoplemust have the information on which to base a judgment aswell as the ability to make one.
The men who crafted Great Books programs, most prominently John Erskine, Mortimer Adler, and Scott Buchanan, promoted the idea that the reading of classics was a task meant for all students, at all levels, even if the works were translated from their original language. At several colleges, the curricula of undergraduate programs came to be based upon the reading of these Great Books.
Hutchins, Robert M., Mortimer J. Adler, and William Gorman, eds. The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon of Great Books of the Western World, Volume II, Man to World. 1st ed. Vol. 3. 54 vols. The Great Books of the Western World. Chicago, IL: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1952.
Hutchins, Robert M., Mortimer J. Adler, and William Gorman, eds. The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon of Great Books of the Western World, Volume I, Angel to Love. 1st ed. Vol. 2. 54 vols. Great Books of the Western World. Chicago, IL: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1952.
Frank Capra
LIFE. “The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog.” January 26, 1948. https://books.google.com/books?id=p0gEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA92&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false. Google Books.
Provides an small example of "the great conversation" on the equality of men and women.
Amidst a number of very gendered advertisements in issue 4 of volume 24 of LIFE magazine from 1948 is a short piece on the pending release of The Encyclopædia Britannica's Great Books of the Western World.
The piece starts out talking about the 432 classical works written by 71 men and highlights the fact that "Woman, not a main idea, is included [with] in [the topical category] Family Man and Love." The piece goes on by way of example of the work to excerpt portions on Idea number 51: "Man". To show the flexibility of the included Syntopicon categorization they elaborate with 15 excerpted passages from authors from Plato to Freud on Idea 51, subdivision 6b: "Men and Women: their equality or inequality".
It provides a fantastic mini-study on the emerging conversation on gender studies as seen in a mainstream magazine in 1948.
Were there any follow up letters to the editor on this topic in subsequent issues? How was this broader piece received with respect to the idea of gender at the time?
A staff of at least 26 created the underlying index that would lay at the heart of the Great Books of the Western World which was prepared in a rented old fraternity house on the University of Chicago campus. (p. 93)
Oakeshott saw educationas part of the ‘conversation of mankind’, wherein teachers induct their studentsinto that conversation by teaching them how to participate in the dialogue—howto hear the ‘voices’ of previous generations while cultivating their own uniquevoices.
How did Michael Oakeshott's philosophy overlap with the idea of the 'Great Conversation' or 20th century movement of Adler's Great Books of the Western World.
How does it influence the idea of "having conversations with the text" in the annotation space?
In 1886, during a lecture on the "pleasure of reading," the British scientist, politician, and man of letters John Lubbock spoke of his wish for "a list of a hundred good books"; in the absence of such, he offered his own selection.
Lubbock's List: http://www.greaterbooks.com/lubbock.html
University of Adelaide digital collection of the Great Books of the Western World using public domain sources within their collection.
https://www.logos.com/product/55052/great-books-of-the-western-world
A digital (app?) version of The Great Books of the Western World with cross references.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ebooks/comments/eao9c8/great_books_of_the_western_world_ebook_collection/
Someone's collected digital copies of most of the Great Books of the Western World collection here.
In a postwar world in which educational self-improvement seemed within everyone’s reach, the Great Books could be presented as an item of intellectual furniture, rather like their prototype, the Encyclopedia Britannica (which also backed the project).
the phrase "intellectual furniture" is sort of painful here...
This is the Deluxe edition of the Great Books of the Western World. There are three versions of the set. the least expensive was cloth-bound. That was the original version published in 1952. In the 1970's a tan edition was issued that was more expensive. The problem is that the binding tends to chip and crack unless it was kept in a dark, refrigerated closet. This set, which is half bound in black Fabricoid (imitation Morocco leather) and half in cloth was the most expensive of the three, costing upwards of $1800 in the mid-Eighties, and the most durable with gilt tops.
1952, 1970s, 1980s editions and their differences.
https://press.princeton.edu/series/ancient-wisdom-for-modern-readers
This appears like Princeton University Press is publishing sections of someone's commonplace books as stand alone issues per heading where each chapter has a one or more selections (in the original language with new translations).
This almost feels like a version of The Great Books of the Western World watered down for a modern audience?
https://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-nonfiction/
What a solid looking list of non-fiction books.
http://www.greyroom.org/issues/60/20/the-dialectic-of-the-university-his-masters-voice/
“The Indexers pose with the file of Great Ideas. At sides stand editors [Mortimer] Adler (left) and [William] Gorman (right). Each file drawer contains index references to a Great Idea. In center are the works of the 71 authors which constitute the Great Books.” From “The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog,” Life 24, no. 4 (26 January 1948). Photo: George Skadding.
Photos from
"The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog," Life, 26 January 1948, 92–3.
https://occidental.substack.com/p/the-adlernet-guide-part-ii?sd=pf
Description of a note taking method for reading the Great Books: part commonplace, part zettelkasten.
I'm curious where she's ultimately placing the cards to know if the color coding means anything in the end other than simply differentiating the card "types" up front? (i.e. does it help to distinguish cards once potentially mixed up?)
But the real goal of a Great Books reading program is to experience the minds of these authors (something the Schoolmen called connatural knowledge) and imprint whatever value we find there on our souls (i.e. will and intellect). This can only be done through a process of intentional re-reading.
Louis Menand had an interesting article on great books courses recently: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/20/whats-so-great-about-great-books-courses-roosevelt-montas-rescuing-socrates.
If you look closely at those photos of Adler, you'll notice that one is in context and the other is the same image of him cut and pasted onto a set of books.
Those who are into this broader topic may also appreciate Alex Beam's book "A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books". A while back I remember going though Lawrence Principe's Great Courses lecture series on the History of Science to 1700 which I suspect might help contextualize a tour through the great courses.
I'm curious if you're adding any other books that Adler et al left off their list?
https://github.com/sajjad2881/NewSyntopicon
Someone's creating a new digitally linked version of the Syntopicon as text files for Obsidian (and potentially other platforms). Looks like it's partial at best and will need a lot of editing work to become whole.
found by way of
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>Has anyone made a hypermedia rendition of the Syntopicon, i.e. with transcluded windows or "parallel pages" into the indexed texts?<br><br>Many of Adler's Great Books are public domain, so it wouldn't require *so* titanic a copyright issue… pic.twitter.com/UmWiyn5aBC
— Andy Matuschak (@andy_matuschak) August 17, 2022
https://occidental.substack.com/p/my-adler-antinet
Cross posted at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/wromeb/the_antinet_as_an_aid_to_analytical_reading_a_la/<br /> with additional commentary.
when Britannica conducted followup research on whether or not the books were actually being read, they found that buyers who really read the books were the exception. The two largest sub-categories among buyers who were more likely to have read the books were housewives and men trained in some sort of technical profession.
Research by Britannica (source?) indicated that the Great Books of the Western World sold well but were not often read.
Link to: A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking Owen Gingerich Copernicus
certain sub-currents in their thought. One being the proposition that the original (or translated) texts of the most influential Western books are vastly superior material to study for serious minds than are textbooks that merely give pre-digested (often mis-digested) assessments of the ideas contained therein.
Are some of the classic texts better than more advanced digested texts because they form the building blocks of our thought and society?
Are we training thinkers or doers?
Mortimer J. Adler's slip box collection (Photo of him holding a pipe in his left hand and mouth posing in front of dozens of boxes of index cards with topic headwords including "law", "love", "life", "sin", "art", "democracy", "citizen", "fate", etc.)
Though if we roughly estimate this collection at 1000 cards per box with roughly 76 boxes potentially present, the 76,000 cards are still shy of Luhmann's collection. It'll take some hunting thigs down, but as Adler suggests that people write their notes in their books, which he would have likely done, then this collection isn't necessarily his own. I suspect, but don't yet have definitive proof, that it was created as a group effort for the 54-volume Great Books of the Western World and its two-volume index of great ideas, the Syntopicon.
Most of the world's great books are available today, in reprint editions.
Published in 1941, this article precedes the beginning of the project of publishing the Great Books of the Western World for Encyclopedia Britannica, so Adler isn't just writing this from a marketing perspective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World
Discussion is led by an instructor, but the instructor’s job is not to give the students a more informed understanding of the texts, or to train them in methods of interpretation, which is what would happen in a typical literature- or philosophy-department course. The instructor’s job is to help the students relate the texts to their own lives.
The format of many "great books" courses is to help students relate the texts to their own lives, not to have a better understanding of the books or to hone methods of interpreting them.
This isn't too dissimilar to the way that many Protestants are taught to apply the Bible to their daily lives.
Are students mis-applying the great books because they don't understand their original ideas and context the way many religious people do with the Bible?
The idea of the great books emerged at the same time as the modern university. It was promoted by works like Noah Porter’s “Books and Reading: Or What Books Shall I Read and How Shall I Read Them?” (1877) and projects like Charles William Eliot’s fifty-volume Harvard Classics (1909-10). (Porter was president of Yale; Eliot was president of Harvard.) British counterparts included Sir John Lubbock’s “One Hundred Best Books” (1895) and Frederic Farrar’s “Great Books” (1898). None of these was intended for students or scholars. They were for adults who wanted to know what to read for edification and enlightenment, or who wanted to acquire some cultural capital.
Brief history of the "great books".
Though firmly rooted in Renaissance culture, Knight's carefully calibrated arguments also push forward to the digital present—engaging with the modern library archives where these works were rebound and remade, and showing how the custodianship of literary artifacts shapes our canons, chronologies, and contemporary interpretative practices.
This passage reminds me of a conversation on 2021-11-16 at Liquid Margins with Will T. Monroe (@willtmonroe) about using Sönke Ahrens' book Smart Notes and Hypothes.is as a structure for getting groups of people (compared to Ahrens' focus on a single person) to do collection, curation, and creation of open education resources (OER).
Here Jeffrey Todd Knight sounds like he's looking at it from the perspective of one (or maybe two) creators in conjunction (curator and binder/publisher) while I'm thinking about expanding behond
This sort of pattern can also be seen in Mortimer J. Adler's group zettelkasten used to create The Great Books of the Western World series as well in larger wiki-based efforts like Wikipedia, so it's not new, but the question is how a teacher (or other leader) can help to better organize a community of creators around making larger works from smaller pieces. Robin DeRosa's example of using OER in the classroom is another example, but there, the process sounded much more difficult and manual.
This is the sort of piece that Vannevar Bush completely missed as a mode of creation and research in his conceptualization of the Memex. Perhaps we need the "Inventiex" as a mode of larger group means of "inventio" using these methods in a digital setting?
Book review (and cultural commentary) on Alex Beam's A Great Idea at the Time, (Public Affairs, 2008).
Soon enough the Great Books were synonymous with boosterism, Babbittry, and H. L. Mencken’s benighted boobocracy. They were everything that was wrong, unchic and middlebrow about middle America.”
what a lovely sentence
When asked for his views on which classic works to include among the Great Books, the science historian George Sarton pronounced the exercise futile: “Newton’s achievement and personality are immortal; his book is dead except from the archaeological point of view.”
How does one keep the spirit of these older books alive? Is it only by subsuming into and expanding upon a larger body of common knowledge?
What do they still have to teach us?
In “A Great Idea at the Time,” Alex Beam presents Hutchins and Adler as a double act
Just the title "A Great Idea at the Time" makes me wonder if this project didn't help speed along the creation of the dullness of the humanities and thereby attempt to kill it?
What might they have done differently to better highlight the joy and fun of these works to have better encouraged it.
Too often reformers reform all the joy out of things.
system of books,
English professors, because literature provided teachable content, something to write about other limn oneself or arbitrarily chosen subjects in which the teacher was not an expert.
Side note: would the Great Books theory include books of composition instruction like Strunk & White's Elements of Style or any of the books Nathaniel passed out on Thursday?
but this edu-cation did not include classical learning, literacy in Greek and Latin, or formal training in rhetoric, except in a few elite schools for boys destined for the univer-sity
I do wonder what the reasoning was for this (I mean, besides the blatant "women and the lower class are too stupid to understand our Great Books and/or will lead lives that do not require a 'polite' education"). We've already read arguments that the "polite" education supposedly improved the virtues as well as the mind, right? Wouldn't all of society benefit if women and the lower class were virtuous, as much as possible?
read the Bible and keep reflective journals
A little Great Books/Latour notebooks action going on?
But allow him to acquire experience in those objects, his feeling becomes more exact and nice: He not only perceives the beauties and defects of each part, but marks the distinguishing species of each quality, and assigns it suitable praise or blame.
Sounds a lot like the Great Books theory–simple exposure to good art will yield a good critic.