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.

visitors of Adler & Hutchins' great books seminars

A young man named Marshall McLuhan, having glimpsed the photo shoot in Life, wrote with scathing insight in his first book, The Mechanical Bride (1951):

The services of Dr. Hutchins and Professor Adler to education are justly celebrated. They have by their enthusiasm put education in

McLuhan analogizes the tabbed dividers of a card index to tombstones and the card indexes to coffins!

link to: https://hypothes.is/a/RB4YdNUQEe2NLDvcEZtdKw

reply to michaljjwilk at https://hypothes.is/a/rwiI4rJYEe62aaN50r2zzQ to ensure it's properly indexed:

Most following my argument will have likely read The Two Definitions of Zettelkasten which may cover some of your initial question, or at least from my perspective. (Others certainly have different views.)

Some of your questions relate to what Robert Hutchins calls "The Great Conversation" (1952) and efforts over time to create Summa or compilations of all knowledge.

Variations of your remark about Plato can be seen in later Greeks' aphorism that "Everywhere I go in my head, I meet Plato coming back." or more recently in A.N. Whitehead's statement that everything is "a footnote to Plato".

Is the cohesive nature of Hutchins and Adler's enterprise for the humanities and the Great Conversation, part of the kernel of the rise of interdisciplinarity seen in the early 2000s onward in academia (and possibly industry).

Certainly large portions are the result of uber-specialization, particularly in spaces which have concatenated and have allowed people to specialize in multiple areas to create new combinatorial creative possibilities.

A bulk of America was stuck in a form of economic slavery in the 1950s. See description of rural Texans in Robert Caro's LBJ biography for additional context --- washing/scrubbing, carrying water, farming, etc. without electricity in comparison to their fellow Americans who did have it.

In the 21st century there is a different form of economic slavery imposed by working to live and a culture of consumption and living on overextended credit.

Consider also the comedic story of the capitalist and the rural fisherman and the ways they chose to live their lives.

This is an extreme statement which bundles together a lot without direct evidence.

Written in an era in which there was a lot of pro-Democracy and anti-Communist discussion, Hutchins is making an almost religious statement here which binds education and democracy in the ways in which the Catholic church bound education and religion in scholasticism. While scholasticism may have had benefits, it also caused a variety of ills which took centuries to unwind into the Enlightenment.

Why can't we separate education from democracy? Can't education of this sort live in other polities? Hasn't it? Does critical education necessarily lead to democracy?

What does the explorable solution space of admixtures of critical reasoning and education look like with respect to various forms of government? Could a well-educated population thrive under collectivism or socialism?

The definition of "natural slavery" here is contingent and requires lots of context, particularly of the ways in which Aristotle used it versus our current understanding of chattel slavery.

Hutchins indicates that John Dewey was misunderstood as a philosopher of education.

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.

p xxvi

Hutchins closes his preface to his grand project with Mortimer J. Adler by giving pride of place to Adler's Syntopicon.

Adler's Syntopicon isn't just an index compiled into two books which were volumes 2 and 3 of The Great Books of the Western World, it's physically a topically indexed card index of data (a grand zettelkasten surveying Western culture if you will). It's value to readers and users is immeasurable and it stands as a fascinating example of what a well-constructed card index might allow one to do even when they don't have their own yet.

Adler spoke of practicing syntopical reading, but anyone who compiles their own card index (in either analog or digital form) will realize the ultimate value in creating their own syntopical writing or what Robert Hutchins calls participating in "The Great Conversation" across twenty-five centuries of documented human communication.

See also: https://hypothes.is/a/WF4THtUNEe2dZTdlQCbmXw

The way Hutchins presents the idea of "Adler's achievement" here seems to indicate that Hutchins didn't have a direct hand in compiling or working on it directly.

1952 variation of C. P. Snow's Two Cultures thesis (1959).

See also earlier comment on p xxi: https://hypothes.is/a/2BGWXiIAEe6WZyd5bbGl3g

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.

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.

"caviar factories" brings to mind the OCD doodling of lots of small compact circles, which is what I suspect Hutchins was occupying himself with...

Book review (and cultural commentary) on Alex Beam's A Great Idea at the Time, (Public Affairs, 2008).

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.