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Some of the search engine results that end up leading folks to my GBWW vs. HC series are “why should I read the harvard classics” and “why should I read the great books of the western world.” Since there seems to be considerable demand for an answer to these questions, I figured I would take the time to give my two cents. I will start with the Harvard Classics (HC).
I have already said that the HC is lacking in the way of multicultural literature. A quick look at the list of readings tells you so much. In my view, there really is room for an edition of great books of the world, or a world classics series, given how bad the HC is on this. Someone like Harold Bloom would disagree with me, of course; but I have very particular reasons that I am open to a much more multicultural root, reasons I don’t think Bloom would disagree with. Primarily, cultures see the world in different ways. A sufficiently observant American visiting England would notice so much, aep ky online bill pay by the way the English reserve every possible space in urban areas for greenery, and by the way their grocery stores are stocked —there is an evident, possibly subconscious, appeal to naturalism, in terms of respect for (and the room in great books of the western world list of titles way of life made for) natural foods and natural settings. Now, if we are talking about the sentiments of progress in Victorian England, such sentiments buoy up like the cream in non-homogenized milk. It is this cream that we want to taste from different nations in different times of history. To say that nothing in Mongolian literature —or Venezuelan, or African descent, or whomever’s literature— existed, ever, worth including in something like the HC is like saying that these cultures never had cream. Even Eastern Europe has been excluded. In admitting this shortcoming, there are fantastic reasons for reading the Harvard Classics. Let me begin with literacy.
The swathe of literature offered by the HC might be the most concentrated set of works, in terms of challenging the reader to higher and higher levels of comprehension, that I have ever come across. I have always been a big supporter of reading philosophy for increased reading comprehension, even if you have only a slight interest in philosophy. The reason is that conveying ideas requires craftsmanship with the English language, and the adequate reception of those ideas is dependent upon reading ability. That is, the more complex the thoughts being conveyed are, the more ability that the reader requires in taking the raw materials (the words and sentences) and putting them into their intended form (the ideas). To a very great extent, ideas deconstructed into linguistic components and reconstructed from them, by the reader, back into the original form, ideas. It is in the work do playstation store gift cards expire the reader must to that constitutes the capacity called “literacy.” But “Why the Harvard Classics?,” you might say. I think the collection has some of the best sets of concepts to achieve the development of higher degrees of literacy, whether these concepts are imagery, plots, and suggestive undertones of a fictional story, the deep spiritual inquiry of religious texts, the emotion-plumbing quality of poetry, and the abstruse ideas of philosophical thought. Even in presenting these examples, I have marked that there are additional cognitive processes that benefit from reading the HC, not just the more abstract modes that philosophy is associated with. That is, even if you are very much interested in philosophy, as I am, a stroll through the HC will do you some good. It is very difficult, maybe impossible, to overstate the value the HC have in advancing literacy. One of the things I have found to be problematic among educator in American (K-12) schools is that they intend students to get better at reading by doing the same level of reading continually. They make it look like an impossible mission to teach a child to read, lowering standards at every chance, because their method is not working; and it goes without saying that the problem is the student, not the method, or so they seem to think. It has been my experience that it is not that the reading is too hard for youths, but that it is not hard enough. What’s more, the readings that tend to be given to the youths are vapid and meaningless, and the young develop an aversion to reading altogether. I simply think that the works found in the Harvard Classics should be imposed at a younger age. That many adults haven’t read them (though many wish they had) is a product of the education system; but, rest assured, it is never too late to reap the benefits of the HC. Summary of reason number one: Literacy!
Since I hit upon the relevance of philosophy in this discussion, let me say something about why one may want to read the HC, even though they are heavily into philosophy (or something similar that is very demanding of comprehension, e.g., law) and an outstanding reader. As I touched on above, there are certainly different kinds of cognitive processes that one will engage in, when reading various kinds of literature. Coming from the more abstract fields of study (physics, math, Kantian philosophy, logic, etc.), I, and my compatriots, have naturally less exposure to aesthetics. This is an area that, especially, the Harvard Classics is strong in. With three volumes dedicate to English poetry, I think there can be no doubt about it, and the judgment is only reinforced by the actual selection. Additionally, there is something very, very different in the cognitive processes of following an argument or following a complex storyline, where many characters (depth of character included) come together in an ordered chaos of interactions. In all of these respects, and many more, I think the HC is a wonderfully chosen compilation.
There is something very refreshing about the Harvard Classics, in terms of how it orients the mind. The place that each of us occupies in a human tradition cannot go without consideration. I think this is a part of living an examined life. Though we are individuals, we have this genetic heritage to people, events, and cultures past. I think the HC provides the appropriate context for developing this more holistic perspective of ourselves, allowing us to examine who we are and in what ways we are truly unique (and a part of something much bigger, too). This is, to my mind, precisely what people lack when we see them acting in absurd and destructive ways, regardless the destructiveness of scale, regardless of whether inflicted upon the self or upon society. One’s orientation toward humanity and Cosmos is as much a part of mental and spiritual health —the individual’s health— as it is social, communal, national, and the species’ health. This may seem like a big task for so modest a set of books to fulfill, but it really isn’t. Literary tradition past is really a fossilization of human experience brought to life by the mind of the reader. How many times I have read Beowulf, and forgot that what I was reading was hundreds and hundreds of years old. When we read these works and remind ourselves of human triumphs, defeats, pleasure, and pains, we stand in their stead for a moment because they also stand in ours. “Fossils” to a point, but very much alive in the sense that the common bonds between people over times, if we care to recognize them, tell us more about ourselves than some of us can say on our own; these works give a basis and a perspective that we could not otherwise begin to grasp; and this is a basis that, to some extent, transcends the idiosyncrasies of cultural histories (my reason for ranting about the value of Greek literature and arts in Part III of this series). By the way, one can extend much of this to the arts, as well.
Finally, I would like to make a push in advocation of reading all of the Harvard Classics, not just selecting a few. The great books of the western world list of titles hotels near university at buffalo that the set presents such a wonderful blend of different aspects of literature. There are scientific treatises, classic literary fiction, poetry, spiritual texts, travelogues, biographies, and many others. While the ratios are not quite what I would have them be, this is, nonetheless, a wonderful spread of works that are too good to pass on, granted the benefit of personal perspective that they may yield.
I could say much of the same about the Great Books of the Western World, but the Great Books are much more for the later-in-life crowd and scholars. This makes sense, though. The Harvard Classics were compiled to give a “complete undergraduate education,” though few undergraduates read as much, these days. Moreover, I recommend the HC to most people, if I am going to recommend either wholesale, because the HC are designed to give that much more holistic and balanced, slightly less cerebral plenum of literature. For those having read the HC, looking for something a bit more, I usually suggest the ancient Greek works in the GBWW. I just think they are that important. Besides, so much of our modern intellectual verbiage includes endless references to these works. In the everyday, you may hear someone called a “Cassandra”; one of Freud’s complexes was called “Oedipal”; one Nobel Laureate and philosopher referred to “Sisyphus.” Who were these folks, anyways? Reading the Greeks gives you the insight —or you can just read the Wikipedia pages, gleaning atomic facts, no understanding, and a superficial usage (dare I say, “waste”?) of time. I just want to be clear that, while I have quietly pushed the GBWW, Us bank activate credit card phone number do think that the HC are more accessible and probably more productive for the average and slightly above average thinker and reader.
I would say that the one group of people that are neither advanced in age, or in scholarship, who I would recommend the GBWW to is the group interested especially in philosophy. Nearly all of the works are chosen for the philosophical value. Just take a look at the non-philosophy titles. The Miser is quite a philosophical play; The Brothers Karamazov is deeply great books of the western world list of titles The Principles of Psychology is philosophical; and Gulliver’s Travels is philosophical. There are some that aren’t really philosophical, but they are far and few between.
There are a great many books to read in this world. Certainly, there is a case to be made that there are many other great books to read than the ones on these lists, the HC and GBWW. However, I would say that, unless you are really sure you have a good plan to get a very high quality blend of books, especially a holistic blend, I would say that sticking with the Harvard Classics and Great Books of the Western World is among the top ways to go. Some selections will be a mere matter of taste. There is no need to read them all, and I have never heard of anyone reading all of them straight through; so going back and forth between these sets and other selections, not included in these sets (perhaps, more modern), is a good way to go. That’s what I have done (and am still doing). I hope you feel I have given you a few good reasons to dig into the Harvard Classics and the Great Books of the Western World. Happy reading!
Note: For folks particularly interested in the importance of a classical education, take a look at Jeffrey Brenzel’s lecture on the topic by clicking this sentence.
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Great Books of the Western World is an act of piety. Anyways, these are the fictitious works that extend beyond the ambit of my ability to comment. 46 books Gulliver’s Travels is yet another mystery, to my mind. This is just my thought on the Great Books of the Western World. Great Books of the Western World Great Books of the Western World is a series of books originally published in the United States in 1952, by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., to present the Great Books in a 54-volume set. I once read a three-hundred page abridged version of Don Quixote, and, after finding that it was an abridged edition, feeling dirty over the matter, I quickly picked up the unabridged version. A financial debacle loomed, until Encyclopædia Britannica altered the marketing strategy and sold the set (as Hutchins had feared) through experienced door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen. If I remember correctly, the reason some choices seem odd is that they were not selected based upon their greatness, per se. It was presented at a gala at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City on April 15, 1952. (ISBN: 9780852295311) from Amazon's Book Store. The Harvard Classics are not susceptible to similar claims. A prominent feature of the collection is a two-volume Syntopicon (meaning "a collection of topics") that includes essays written by Mortimer Adler on 102 "great ideas." The first two volumes would be presented to Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom and U.S. President Harry S. Truman.Sales were initially poor. The Odyssey was included. Of the Harvard Classics, at the time of writing this, I have not read Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana Jr., Minna von Barnhelm by Gotthold Lessing, and The Destruction of Dá Derga’s Hostel. Publisher's Web page (Encyclopædia Britannica) That note should have been written in the item description. One work that makes me wonder is Moby Dick, not because it isn’t among the best works of fiction ever written, but because I wonder what it was about the work that earned it a spot over, say, The Count of Monte Cristo. Let me preface this post by saying that I will not too strongly impose my opinions upon the two sets of books, in the sense that I will only criticize selections on the basis of what I think is within the realm of acceptability. This is the West. Because so many people have a different definition of what a great book is, can we truly define what a great book is? Why reading the great books is a lifelong project, and not a bucket list item The set was designed as an introduction to the Great Books of the Western World, published by the same organization and editors in 1952. Great Books of the Western World by Great Books Foundation. Thanks for the feedback. I’m reading the essay in the topic Angels found in the book Syntopicon I of the Great Books of the Western World series. The Britannica Librarys Great Books of the Western world, by contrast, is much more heavily tilted in favor of philosophy and science — especially philosophy. The College’s syllabus is composed exclusively of the seminal texts that have, for good or for ill, animated Western civilization. Great Books Of The Western World Kant. For example, the works chosen to represent Austen, Dickens and Dostoevsky are other than what I would have picked, but that is no matter, though I might ask readers to comment on whether they think Little Dorrit is better than Great Expectations, for one. The only other comment I have for the Harvard Classics’ fiction is that they were exceptionally well chosen, but I do wish that there would have been more novels included. The second edition is significantly larger than the first (1952). Welcome to E-books Great Books of the Western World. There are many books that people consider to be great books, but what does this truly mean? For example, the book Histories pay my chase mortgage payment online by Herodotus (which is on our list of Great Books of the Western World to read) is about the origins of the Greco-Persian Wars.As seen in the Kahn Academy videos above, we see that the Greco-Persian Wars occurred because the Hellensitic (i.e. This phrase struck me with an urgency to be discussed. Great Books of the Western World is a series of books originally published in the United States in 1952, by Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., to present the Great Books in a 54-volume set; the second edition of the series comprises 60 volumes. Among the original students was William Benton, future US Senator and later CEO of the Encyclopædia Britannica. At the end of the day, I can’t complain too much, except to air the minor grievance that cutting the story in half leaves out some key elements in understanding the Western perspective, as it capital one bank routing number bronx ny instantiated. Beginning with Homer, 3000 years ago through to Freud and on to 20th century authors, covering the sciences, maths, philosophy, arts, literature greats etc. Great Books of the Western World (COMPLETE 54 VOLUME MATCHED SET) PLUS "The Great Ideas Today" for the years 1981-88 and 1991 (9 books). Great Books of the Western World contains 517 works from 130 of the most renowned minds throughout hist Encyclopædia Britannica is proud to offer one of the most acclaimed publishing achievements of the 20th century, Great Books of the Western World. Get Free Great Books Of The Western Yes bank premia credit card lounge access Kant Textbook and unlimited access to our library … I cannot begin to tell you on what basis this work was chosen, other than the fact that it contains an incredible amount of philosophical and religious ideas. The syntopicon, II -- v. The Great Books of the Western World is a hardcover great books of the western world list of titles collection (originally 54 volumes) of the books on the Great Books list (517 individual works). However, I do have this feeling that some other works were excluded on the basis that they had to be translated, and, therefore, would have been lacking in the prose department. TOTAL OF 63 BOOKS. This is probably because the editor of the Britannica Library set, Mortimer Adler, was himself a philosopher and historian of philosophy. One major leg up that the Harvard Classics have over the Great Books of the Western World is the inclusion of (at least) an excerpt of Émile. I cannot begin to tell you on what basis this work was chosen, other than the fact that it contains an incredible amount of philosophical and religious ideas. GREAT BOOKS OF THE WESTERN WORLD 1 GREAT BOOKS OF THE WESTERN WORLD A Collection of the Greatest Writings in Western History Author/Title List by Volume: VOLUME 1 and 2 The Syntopicon This unique guide enables you to investigate a particular idea, such as courage or democracy, and compare the perspectives of different authors. The Great Conversation book. During the last couple decades, I’ve occasionally started the Ten Year Reading Plan, but never got very far. Nowhere, It Seems…, Chess Coaching Services (and Reasons for Doing So), Reflection on a First-Year Professorship: The Problem with Ethics Courses. That this is an important element of the human condition, I do no doubt; but I don’t think it merits the choosing of this particular work for the GBWW. Moreover, I think Beowulf possesses glimpses great books of the western world list of titles the human condition that arise from an underrepresented period in Western literary history, making it all the more important. Through this method 50,000 sets were sold in 1961. Great Books of the Western World is a series of books originally published in the United States sarah banks com 1952 by Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. in an attempt to present the western canon in a single package of 54 volumes. After 1,863 were sold in 1952, less than one-tenth that number were sold the following year. The makers of Encyclopaedia Britannica bring you the Great Books of the Western World. It’s been a while, so I’m not exactly sure. For all that I took the Harvard Classics to the woodshed in the first part of this series, the Great Books of the Western World shall get their fill in this one. I still remain open to being convinced that Gargantua and Pantagruel is a worthy selection, but I found it insufferable, and very few books, especially true classics, make me feel as though I can’t make it through the entire work, as this one did. Unfortunately, the Great Books of the Western World, once again, dropped the ball on this one, but the Harvard Classics contain it. "Great Books of the Western World is a series of books originally published in the United States in 1952 by Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. to present the western canon in a single package of 54 volumes. Page 1 of 50 - About 500 Essays Meaning Of A Great Book. I am not sure why the Harvard Classics contained the What is the routing number for first interstate bank but not the Odyssey; it’s sort of like great books of the western world list of titles a story in half, great books of the western world list of titles missing the point that Rome had a tremendous amount of respect for the Greeks, especially in the historical sense in which Rome declared Greece to be under the protectorate, and virtually equal to Rome. Following each essay is an extensive outline of the idea with page references to relevant passages throughout the collection. Comprising 60 volumes containing 517 works written by 130 authors, these texts capture the major ideas, stories, and discoveries that shaped Western culture. Filed under Great Books and Harvard Classics Series, Literature. I thought to myself ‘how nice would it be if I could compare the selections in the Great Books to that in the Classics.’ I do a quick search and come across your site, wow. ( Log Out / - Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_B.http://britannicashop.britannica.co.u.http://www.thegreatideas.org/index.html. Great Books of the Western World set: 1st edition (1952) and 2nd edition (1990) - The Great Books Index has both lists with links to online texts (mirror.org) 2nd edition (1990) [Included in indexes below]. This is the first time I have visited your site but certainly not the last. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. The Odyssey was included. At the heart of the Thomas Aquinas College curriculum are the great books, the original works of the greatest minds in our tradition, both ancient and modern. The syntopicon, I -- v. 2. Unfortunately, the Great books of the western world list of titles Books of the Western World, once again, dropped the ball on this one, but the Harvard Classics contain it. The other reason for seeking another edition is that the construction of the edition included, which is probably as rough as the original, untranslated text, is absolutely horrible: iIn some places, you aren’t quite sure who is speaking, where the narration begins, ends, and so forth. University president Robert Hutchins collaborated with Mortimer Adler to develop a course, generally aimed at businessmen, for the purpose of filling in gaps in education, to make one more well-rounded and familiar with the "Great Books" and ideas of the past three millennia. On the matter of notes, the work is supposed to be a comedic work, and, as any who has read Candide knows, the difference between getting the jokes and not, is a good set of notes explaining the contemporary reference. Download and Read online Great Books Of The Western World Kant ebooks in PDF, epub, Tuebl Mobi, Kindle Book. Thanks again. Aside from this, there is not too much to complain about, as the fiction selected makes for very good reading. Part of the reason for this inclusion, no doubt, is to be fair to all sides of religion, which includes natural religion. As far as Western foundational literature goes, it would be a bit of alienation to exclude the Iliad, Odyssey, the Aeneid, and The Divine Comedy. On top of this, there is no real continuous plot, and many scholars, while enjoying the book as I do, say that they don’t really know what the mission was, after all is said and done; but as E. E. Cummings once noted, a great book never ends, and so we turn Don Quixote back to the first page and read it again. Greek) regions of the Ionian Penisula had revolted against the Achaemenid Empire of Persia. The heading of this item says: "Great Books of the Western World (54 Volumes)". Certainly, I have no formal complaint against Moby Dick, and the masterful prose attests to its just inclusion. I should note that it is not just by virtue of the fact that I am physicist, and consequently have not read these works, rather, it is because these two works, in particular, were taken out, in the printing of the second edition; and I have had access only to the second edition, and was not previously aware of this ad hoc omission. The story is enjoyable, but as far as being among the top one hundred works of fiction, I would doubt that I have amazon universal registry a dozen people who would claim such. (I hate how so many books do not note that they are abridged!) Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. Let me know if there is any particular set of aspects you would like to know about or comparisons you’d like to see done. In his speech, Hutchins said "This is more than a set of books, and more than a liberal education. The work does contain an important trope, that of man as a wanderer, which is thematic in everything from The Wanderer to Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein. Change ), The Impossibility of Precisely Measuring Positions of Particles in Quantum Physics, Comparing the Great Books of the Western World to the Harvard Classics (Part II): Assessing the Fiction Selections, Response to Pigliucci on Metaphysics and Interpretation of Data, A Superficial Reflection on Nagel’s “Mind and Cosmos”, Quo Vadis, Materialism? The only complement that I could desire is that of Beowulf, which, I would argue, is equally important to understanding the development of the language. It truly is one of the most extraordinary expressions of Romanticism, in all of the history of literature. ” I am not sure why the Harvard Classics contained the Aeneid but not the Odyssey; …” I think you meant to say that the Great books of the western world list of titles Classics omitted the Iliad. At any rate, the point should be clear: if you are interested in a taste and the gist, this is a work that can be contracted without offense. Nevertheless, he agreed to the project and paid $60,000 for it.After debates about what to include and how to present it, with an eventual budget of $2,000,000, the project was ready. Other articles where Great Books of the Western World is discussed: Mortimer J. Adler: …Hutchins in editing the 54-volume Great Books of the Western World (1952) and conceived and directed the preparation of its two-volume index of great ideas, the Syntopicon. Table of contents of the Great Books of the Western World (2nd edition, 1990), edited by Mortimer Adler et al., published by Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. After reading it, I can honestly say that very little was lost. In sum, I think it is egregious that Adler included this work, and I can only think that he did so out of some bizarre personal penchant, or because of the political/philosophical elements of the work that appealed to him. I wish I knew what the philosophy was in selecting the fiction for the GBWW, so feel free to comment on this, if you have any suspicions (or you know why). He proposed selecting the greatest books of the canon, complete and unabridged, having Hutchins and Adler edit them for publishing by Encyclopædia Britannica. This is its meaning for mankind." Hutchins, Robert Maynard (editor) Published by William Benton, Publisher, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. (1952) The aura of light which surrounds them {angels} signifies, according to established conventions of symbolism, the spirituality of angels. In 1963 the editors published Gateway to the Great Books, a ten-volume set of readings designed as an introduction to the authors and themes in the Great Books series. One contraction made by the Harvard Classics, which I feel acceptable, was only including part I of Don Quixote. The collection was available from Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., w… This is a collection of some of public domain books considered by many to represent the greatest works of Western civilization. Coup d’oeil, the list may appear significant, but, in reality, the overlap between the editions is miniscule. Of these, the choice of Lessing’s work strikes me, because I had not previously heard of it, while I often hear reference after reference to his Nathan the Wise. Great Books of the Western World - 54 Volumes by Collective - Robert Maynard Hutchins ( Editor in Chief ) and a great selection of related books, art and collectibles available now at AbeBooks.co.uk. Great Books of the Western World is a series of books originally published in the United States in 1952, by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., to present the Great Books in a 54-volume set. Each one speaks to the reality at the core of human experience, a reality that transcends time or place. To begin with, Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais has to be the worst choice of fiction title in the Great Books of the Western World. The inclusion of The Metamorphosis over The Trial is another minor irritation, which I won’t belabor, except to say that there may be no better allegorical work ever written than the latter; but The Metamorphosis has certainly been en vogue (and is much shorter), so Adler can’t be begrudged on the matter of, as Thomas Jefferson said, “swimming with the fish” in matters of fashion.
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The Lessons of History by Will Durant
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I’m having trouble articulating the complex mix of opinions and emotions that I’ve formed around Durant. Several times I have come away from his books disappointed; and yet I continue to read them. One reason he fascinates me is that he is a species of American which is now almost entirely extinct: a product of the ‘Great Books’ paradigm in American higher education.
As far as I can tell, this paradigm in education was first popularized in 1909, when Charles W. Eliot released his Harvard Classics—the so-called Five-Foot Shelf—which consisted of 51 volumes of classic works from western history. The spirit of this idea was later epitomized in the Book-of-the-Month club, about which Bertrand Russell, writing in 1930, penned his famous line: “There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.”
It was certainly a different time. The philosopher George Santayana and the historian Arnold Toynbee were bestselling authors, both featured on the cover of Time magazine. Will Durant, whose prose style strikes the modern ear as purple and grandiloquent, created a publishing sensation with his Story of Civilization, a series which totals four million words and ten thousand pages. And the monstrously big, 54-volume Great Books of the Western World sold thousands of copies—thousands!—even though it included works of Alexandrian astronomy, Greek mathematics, and German metaphysics, among other difficult material. One suspects that the bragging motive was the operative one in the majority of these purchases.
The spirit of the ‘Great Books’ paradigm is that of idolatry towards European intellectual history. The tone of its advocates often sound ludicrously reverential, such as this excerpt from a speech delivered on the occasion of the release of the Great Books series: “This is more than a set of books, and more than a liberal education. Great Books of the Western World is an act of piety. Here are the sources of our being. Here is our heritage. This is the West. This is its meaning for mankind.” (I got that from Wikipedia, by the way.) As two World Wars wracked the European continent, and as the fear of communism and nuclear war covered the Western world with gloom, perhaps it is unsurprising to see American intellectuals and laypeople positioning themselves as the heirs of European civilization.
This idea held sway for a long time in American Universities, and perhaps isn’t altogether dead. The swan songs of this pedagogical philosophy can be heard in Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and in Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon (1994), wherein both authors lament and eulogize the disappearance of the ‘Great Books’ from American universities.
Educated at Columbia during the heyday of this phenomenon, Durant was formed by the ‘Great Books’ ethos, and perhaps was one of its most eloquent proponents. And it strikes me now that, in Durant’s writings, one finds both the virtues and the vices of the ‘Great Books’ idea illustrated with extreme precision.
Durant was broadminded and well-rounded; he could write ably about a multitude of subjects. He was tolerant, kindly, sometimes witty, with a firm belief in human progress and achievement. His prose style was superb—a model of clarity and grace—which he used in his quest to disseminate as widely as possible the fruits of “Civilization” (his all-inclusive term for everything good in the West). Neither a genius nor a scholar, Durant was an enthusiast: he was able to write so wonderfully about historical figures because he genuinely loved and revered them; in fact, he almost literally worshiped them, as he himself admitted.
But he also had many weaknesses. First, the ‘Great Books’ mindset caused Durant to concentrate his attention overmuch on the high-points in cultural achievement. One gets an extremely skewed picture of European history if one focuses solely on the greatest thinkers and artists. Of course, it’s pleasant to contemplate these individuals, which is partly why Great books of the western world list of titles books are so fun to read; but such exclusive concentration also produces a kind of Pollyannish attitude, where history is seen through rose-tinted glasses, and persecutions, wars, and bigotry are not given their due—and the banality of daily life is wholly sidestepped.
A related consequence of the ‘Great Books’ attitude is a somewhat reactionary mindset. Since Durant so often equates the old with the good, tradition with right, age with quality, he can be remarkably, and sometimes stupidly, conservative. For example, whenever Durant writes of sexual mores, he comes across as a moralizing Sunday-school teacher. For Durant, promiscuity is immoral, and homosexuality a sin. Long-term, faithful heterosexual marriages are the mark of ‘civilization’. Because Durant never justifies this opinion—a habit of his—I can only conclude that this was mere prejudice on his part.
Another obvious result of the ‘Great Books’ philosophy is elitism. Durant frequently mentions in this book that talent is unequally distributed; and because of this “natural inequality of man,” the stupid majority are destined forever to toil under the dominance of the intelligent minority. Now, of course I wouldn’t disagree that people are differently endowed from birth with various aptitudes. But I’m very far from believing that the inequality which we see throughout history and which persists today is simply the result of the “skill” of the wealthy and powerful. Rather, I agree with Gibbon, that “The generality of princes, if they were stripped of their purple and cast naked into the world, would immediately sink to the lowest rank of society without a hope of emerging from their obscurity.”
The ‘Great Books’ program also has the shortcoming of emphasizing breadth over depth. Durant certainly embodies this. Although he can write about many subjects, he is an expert on none of them; and this lack of serious expertise prevented him from advancing the state of knowledge in any field. Durant’s ideology also privileges the transmission of old ideas rather than the creation of new ones. After all, if one worships the past, there is little motivation to re-imagine the future. Moreover, the ‘Great Books’ doctrine stressed reputation at the expense of rigor. Ideas are praised for their lasting influence, their grandness of scope, their contribution to a long-standing debate—but not for their accuracy. In Durant, this produced a man who often cared more about whether an idea was beautiful or interesting rather than whether it was true.
Fueling this tendency is another shibboleth of the ‘Great Books’ school: that simply by reading the greatest books of the ages, one could purge oneself of all provincial prejudices and look upon history as from a timeless perspective. Durant seems to think this way, as the very title of this book shows: The Lessons of History. These conclusions are not his own theses, not his own ideas—but lessons, which Durant can gather from the fabric of history as easily as a child can infer the lesson from a fairytale. It goes without saying that this is nonsense. Durant looked at history and found his own prejudices; and this book is merely a collection of them.
I’m sure you’re wearied by this litany of accusations and complaints, so I will only mention in passing the other distinctive sins of this ‘Great Books’ mindset—namely, its glorification of Europe, and only Western Europe, at the expense of the rest of the world, as well as its underrepresentation of women and minorities. This is wonderfully illustrated in Durant’s plan of the Story of Civilization, wherein he dedicates one volume to all of Asia, and the rest of the eleven volumes to Europe (and none to South America or to Africa).
At this point you may be wondering, “If Durant has so many faults, which you are apparently so acutely aware of, why are you reading so much of him?” Well, this has to do with my own history. At the end of my time in college, vaguely feeling that the education I received wasn’t worth half of what I paid for it, I picked up Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind. This book had a profound effect on me. Bloom seemed to articulate my dissatisfaction with my education, as well point me in the direction where it could be rectified. As soon as I finished, I looked up the list of the Great Books of the Western World, and dove in.
Now, despite all of the faults I listed above, I must still admit that one receives a stupendous education by reading the books recommended in the program. I read rabidly, desperately, doing my best to make up for lost time; and whatever may be my intellectual shortcomings now—and they are many—I am at least far better off than I was before I began. But of course I still haven’t read all of these hoary books—there are a lot!—and this is partly why I’m interested in Will Durant: for in him, I can see the end result of my own educational project.
Unfortunately, current mass housing interest rate Durant was truly an excellent writer, for the reasons I discussed above, he was a poor thinker. This slim volume, the fruits of a massive research project, is a collection of vague homilies, baseless theorizing, and unsupported claims. It’s incredible and a bit depressing that so much learning could produce so little insight. I still think I have much to learn from Durant and the other proponents of the ‘Great Books’ school—as well as from the books themselves, of course. But now, hopefully, after sorting through Durant’s writings, Great books of the western world list of titles will be better able to separate the good from the bad, the worthless from the valuable; for I do think, after all, that there is something essentially precious in the idea.
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Long before Oprah’s Book Club, there was…
By Mary Ruth Yoe
Photo courtesy Special Collections Research Center
“Quick,” I command an office mate. “Tell me what the Great Books mean to you.” Startled at the question, she hastily offers, “They’re the classics, the books you read in the core, the ones Hutchins talked about.” If I’d asked, she would have named names. Thucydides, Shakespeare, Freud. But she would not have mentioned the 54-volume set that the University, in partnership with the Encyclopædia Britannica, published in 1952 as the Great Books of the Western World.
Those Great Books comprised 443 works (by 74 authors, all dead and male, most white) crammed into 32,000 pages of double-columned, 9-point type (the type you’re reading, perhaps with some difficulty, is 9.5 points). They are the subject of a new book with a title almost as long as the 62-inch, rainbow-hued set itself: A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books (Public Affairs). Written by Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam, A Great Idea at the Time is a lively look at a mid-20th-century phenom now almost forgotten.
The business venture was rooted in Robert M. Hutchins’s belief that “[t]he aim of education is wisdom,” an enlightenment achieved via Socratic dialogue centered on great texts. Within a year of arriving at Chicago as the nation’s youngest university president, Hutchins and his sidekick, philosopher Mortimer Adler, were leading 20 undergrads through weekly discussions of such works, class sessions sprinkled with visiting luminaries like Lillian Gish and Gertrude Stein.
In 1943 the men started a Great Books group for Chicago bigwigs and their wives; over the next few years thousands of Great Books discussion groups sprang up. From the start, supply couldn’t always keep up with demand for the sometimes obscure texts. Adman–turned–U of C vice president William H. Benton had an aha moment: Hey, kids, let’s put out the Great Books!
Beam has fun explaining how the greats got chosen by committee vote, recorded in notes such as, “All against Twain want it understood that they love him” (Huckleberry Finn Volume 48 of the second edition, issued in 1990)* . And how the publishers tried to make the set useful to buyers who didn’t really want to read it, devoting two volumes to the Syntopicon, a 2,428-page index listing the works’ allusions to 102 Great Ideas, from Angel to World. The ideas, like the texts, had some curious omissions: Hutchins testily complained to Adler, “[M]ost of my friends are interested in money, fame, power, and sex—I don’t see those in the 102 ideas. What are we going to do about those?” (In Adler’s defense, Wealth, Honor, Tyranny, and Desire were among the topical umbrellas.)
In a two-part essay (excerpted from his best-seller, How to Read a Book) published in the Magazine’s February and March 1940 issues, Adler writes about “What a Great Book Is.” It is not, he declares, necessarily a classic—nor is that word necessarily a compliment: “Mark Twain, you will recall, defined a classic as ‘something that everyone wants to have read, and nobody wants to read.’”
But that is not the whole Truth, Beam makes plain. As an Idea, selecting the classics for the masses had more than an Element of hubris and hucksterism and even humorlessness, but it also played, at least in part, to the lure of Imagination.
*Corrected November 20, 2008
Great Books of the Western World is an act of piety. Anyways, these are the fictitious works that extend beyond the ambit of my ability to comment. 46 books Gulliver’s Travels is yet another mystery, to my mind. This is just my thought on the Great Books of the Western World. Great Books of the Western World Great Books of the Western World is a series of books originally published in the United States in 1952, by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., to present the Great Books in a 54-volume set. I once read a three-hundred page abridged version of Don Quixote, and, after finding that it was an abridged edition, feeling dirty over the matter, I quickly picked up the unabridged version. A financial debacle loomed, until Encyclopædia Britannica altered the marketing strategy and sold the set (as Hutchins had feared) through experienced door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen. If I remember correctly, the reason some choices seem odd is that they were not selected based upon their greatness, per se. It was presented at a gala at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City on April 15, 1952. (ISBN: 9780852295311) from Amazon's Book Store. The Harvard Classics are not susceptible to similar claims. A prominent feature of the collection is a two-volume Syntopicon (meaning "a collection of topics") that includes essays written by Mortimer Adler on 102 "great ideas." The first two volumes would be presented to Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom and U.S. President Harry S. Truman.Sales were initially poor. The Odyssey was included. Of the Harvard Classics, at the time of writing this, I have not read Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana Jr., Minna von Barnhelm by Gotthold Lessing, and The Destruction of Dá Derga’s Hostel. Publisher's Web page (Encyclopædia Britannica) That note should have been written in the item description. One work that makes me wonder is Moby Dick, not because it isn’t among the best works of fiction ever written, but because I wonder what it was about the work that earned it a spot over, say, The Count of Monte Cristo. Let me preface this post by saying that I will not too strongly impose my opinions upon the two sets of books, in the sense that I will only criticize selections on the basis of what I think is within the realm of acceptability. This is the West. Because so many people have a different definition of what a great book is, can we truly define what a great book is? Why reading the great books is a lifelong project, and not a bucket list item The set was designed as an introduction to the Great Books of the Western World, published by the same organization and editors in 1952. Great Books of the Western World by Great Books Foundation. Thanks for the feedback. I’m reading the essay in the topic Angels found in the book Syntopicon I of the Great Books of the Western World series. The Britannica Librarys Great Books of the Western world, by contrast, is much more heavily tilted in favor of philosophy and science — especially philosophy. The College’s syllabus is composed exclusively of the seminal texts that have, for good or for ill, animated Western civilization. Great Books Of The Western World Kant. For example, the works chosen to represent Austen, Dickens and Dostoevsky are other than what I would have picked, but that is no matter, though I might ask readers to comment on whether they think Little Dorrit is better than Great Expectations, for one. The only other comment I have for the Harvard Classics’ fiction is that they were exceptionally well chosen, but I do wish that there would have been more novels included. The second edition is significantly larger than the first (1952). Welcome to E-books Great Books of the Western World. There are many books that people consider to be great books, but what does this truly mean? For example, the book Histories written by Herodotus (which is on our list of Great Books of the Western World to read) is about the origins of the Greco-Persian Wars.As seen in the Kahn Academy videos above, we see that the Greco-Persian Wars occurred because the Hellensitic (i.e. This phrase struck me with an urgency to be discussed. Great Books of the Western World is a series of books originally published in the United States in 1952, by Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., to present the Great Books in a 54-volume set; the second edition of the series comprises 60 volumes.. Among the original students was William Benton, future US Senator and later CEO of the Encyclopædia Britannica. At the end of the day, I can’t complain too much, except to air the minor grievance that cutting the story in half leaves out some key elements in understanding the Western perspective, as it was instantiated. Beginning with Homer, 3000 years ago through to Freud and on to 20th century authors, covering the sciences, maths, philosophy, arts, literature greats etc. Great Books of the Western World (COMPLETE 54 VOLUME MATCHED SET) PLUS "The Great Ideas Today" for the years 1981-88 and 1991 (9 books). Great Books of the Western World contains 517 works from 130 of the most renowned minds throughout hist Encyclopædia Britannica is proud to offer one of the most acclaimed publishing achievements of the 20th century, Great Books of the Western World. Get Free Great Books Of The Western World Kant Textbook and unlimited access to our library … I cannot begin to tell you on what basis this work was chosen, other than the fact that it contains an incredible amount of philosophical and religious ideas. The syntopicon, II -- v. The Great Books of the Western World is a hardcover 60-volume collection (originally 54 volumes) of the books on the Great Books list (517 individual works). However, I do have this feeling that some other works were excluded on the basis that they had to be translated, and, therefore, would have been lacking in the prose department. TOTAL OF 63 BOOKS. This is probably because the editor of the Britannica Library set, Mortimer Adler, was himself a philosopher and historian of philosophy. One major leg up that the Harvard Classics have over the Great Books of the Western World is the inclusion of (at least) an excerpt of Émile. I cannot begin to tell you on what basis this work was chosen, other than the fact that it contains an incredible amount of philosophical and religious ideas. GREAT BOOKS OF THE WESTERN WORLD 1 GREAT BOOKS OF THE WESTERN WORLD A Collection of the Greatest Writings in Western History Author/Title List by Volume: VOLUME 1 and 2 The Syntopicon This unique guide enables you to investigate a particular idea, such as courage or democracy, and compare the perspectives of different authors. The Great Conversation book. During the last couple decades, I’ve occasionally started the Ten Year Reading Plan, but never got very far. Nowhere, It Seems…, Chess Coaching Services (and Reasons for Doing So), Reflection on a First-Year Professorship: The Problem with Ethics Courses. That this is an important element of the human condition, I do no doubt; but I don’t think it merits the choosing of this particular work for the GBWW. Moreover, I think Beowulf possesses glimpses into the human condition that arise from an underrepresented period in Western literary history, making it all the more important. Through this method 50,000 sets were sold in 1961. Great Books of the Western World is a series of books originally published in the United States in 1952 by Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. in an attempt to present the western canon in a single package of 54 volumes. After 1,863 were sold in 1952, less than one-tenth that number were sold the following year. The makers of Encyclopaedia Britannica bring you the Great Books of the Western World. It’s been a while, so I’m not exactly sure. For all that I took the Harvard Classics to the woodshed in the first part of this series, the Great Books of the Western World shall get their fill in this one. I still remain open to being convinced that Gargantua and Pantagruel is a worthy selection, but I found it insufferable, and very few books, especially true classics, make me feel as though I can’t make it through the entire work, as this one did. Unfortunately, the Great Books of the Western World, once again, dropped the ball on this one, but the Harvard Classics contain it. "Great Books of the Western World is a series of books originally published in the United States in 1952 by Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. to present the western canon in a single package of 54 volumes. Page 1 of 50 - About 500 Essays Meaning Of A Great Book. I am not sure why the Harvard Classics contained the Aeneid but not the Odyssey; it’s sort of like cutting a story in half, and missing the point that Rome had a tremendous amount of respect for the Greeks, especially in the historical sense in which Rome declared Greece to be under the protectorate, and virtually equal to Rome. Following each essay is an extensive outline of the idea with page references to relevant passages throughout the collection. Comprising 60 volumes containing 517 works written by 130 authors, these texts capture the major ideas, stories, and discoveries that shaped Western culture. Filed under Great Books and Harvard Classics Series, Literature. I thought to myself ‘how nice would it be if I could compare the selections in the Great Books to that in the Classics.’ I do a quick search and come across your site, wow. ( Log Out / - Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_B...http://britannicashop.britannica.co.u...http://www.thegreatideas.org/index.html. Great Books of the Western World set: 1st edition (1952) and 2nd edition (1990) - The Great Books Index has both lists with links to online texts (mirror.org) 2nd edition (1990) [Included in indexes below]. This is the first time I have visited your site but certainly not the last. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. The Odyssey was included. At the heart of the Thomas Aquinas College curriculum are the great books, the original works of the greatest minds in our tradition, both ancient and modern. The syntopicon, I -- v. 2. Unfortunately, the Great Books of the Western World, once again, dropped the ball on this one, but the Harvard Classics contain it. The other reason for seeking another edition is that the construction of the edition included, which is probably as rough as the original, untranslated text, is absolutely horrible: iIn some places, you aren’t quite sure who is speaking, where the narration begins, ends, and so forth. University president Robert Hutchins collaborated with Mortimer Adler to develop a course, generally aimed at businessmen, for the purpose of filling in gaps in education, to make one more well-rounded and familiar with the "Great Books" and ideas of the past three millennia. On the matter of notes, the work is supposed to be a comedic work, and, as any who has read Candide knows, the difference between getting the jokes and not, is a good set of notes explaining the contemporary reference. Download and Read online Great Books Of The Western World Kant ebooks in PDF, epub, Tuebl Mobi, Kindle Book. Thanks again. Aside from this, there is not too much to complain about, as the fiction selected makes for very good reading. Part of the reason for this inclusion, no doubt, is to be fair to all sides of religion, which includes natural religion. As far as Western foundational literature goes, it would be a bit of alienation to exclude the Iliad, Odyssey, the Aeneid, and The Divine Comedy. On top of this, there is no real continuous plot, and many scholars, while enjoying the book as I do, say that they don’t really know what the mission was, after all is said and done; but as E. E. Cummings once noted, a great book never ends, and so we turn Don Quixote back to the first page and read it again. Greek) regions of the Ionian Penisula had revolted against the Achaemenid Empire of Persia. The heading of this item says: "Great Books of the Western World (54 Volumes)". Certainly, I have no formal complaint against Moby Dick, and the masterful prose attests to its just inclusion. I should note that it is not just by virtue of the fact that I am physicist, and consequently have not read these works, rather, it is because these two works, in particular, were taken out, in the printing of the second edition; and I have had access only to the second edition, and was not previously aware of this ad hoc omission. The story is enjoyable, but as far as being among the top one hundred works of fiction, I would doubt that I have met a dozen people who would claim such. (I hate how so many books do not note that they are abridged!) Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. Let me know if there is any particular set of aspects you would like to know about or comparisons you’d like to see done. In his speech, Hutchins said "This is more than a set of books, and more than a liberal education. The work does contain an important trope, that of man as a wanderer, which is thematic in everything from The Wanderer to Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein. Change ), The Impossibility of Precisely Measuring Positions of Particles in Quantum Physics, Comparing the Great Books of the Western World to the Harvard Classics (Part II): Assessing the Fiction Selections, Response to Pigliucci on Metaphysics and Interpretation of Data, A Superficial Reflection on Nagel’s “Mind and Cosmos”, Quo Vadis, Materialism? The only complement that I could desire is that of Beowulf, which, I would argue, is equally important to understanding the development of the language. It truly is one of the most extraordinary expressions of Romanticism, in all of the history of literature. ” I am not sure why the Harvard Classics contained the Aeneid but not the Odyssey; …” I think you meant to say that the Harvard Classics omitted the Iliad. At any rate, the point should be clear: if you are interested in a taste and the gist, this is a work that can be contracted without offense. Nevertheless, he agreed to the project and paid $60,000 for it.After debates about what to include and how to present it, with an eventual budget of $2,000,000, the project was ready. Other articles where Great Books of the Western World is discussed: Mortimer J. Adler: …Hutchins in editing the 54-volume Great Books of the Western World (1952) and conceived and directed the preparation of its two-volume index of great ideas, the Syntopicon. Table of contents of the Great Books of the Western World (2nd edition, 1990), edited by Mortimer Adler et al., published by Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.. After reading it, I can honestly say that very little was lost. In sum, I think it is egregious that Adler included this work, and I can only think that he did so out of some bizarre personal penchant, or because of the political/philosophical elements of the work that appealed to him. I wish I knew what the philosophy was in selecting the fiction for the GBWW, so feel free to comment on this, if you have any suspicions (or you know why). He proposed selecting the greatest books of the canon, complete and unabridged, having Hutchins and Adler edit them for publishing by Encyclopædia Britannica. This is its meaning for mankind." Hutchins, Robert Maynard (editor) Published by William Benton, Publisher, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. (1952) The aura of light which surrounds them {angels} signifies, according to established conventions of symbolism, the spirituality of angels. In 1963 the editors published Gateway to the Great Books, a ten-volume set of readings designed as an introduction to the authors and themes in the Great Books series. One contraction made by the Harvard Classics, which I feel acceptable, was only including part I of Don Quixote. The collection was available from Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., w… This is a collection of some of public domain books considered by many to represent the greatest works of Western civilization. Coup d’oeil, the list may appear significant, but, in reality, the overlap between the editions is miniscule. Of these, the choice of Lessing’s work strikes me, because I had not previously heard of it, while I often hear reference after reference to his Nathan the Wise. Great Books of the Western World - 54 Volumes by Collective - Robert Maynard Hutchins ( Editor in Chief ) and a great selection of related books, art and collectibles available now at AbeBooks.co.uk. Great Books of the Western World is a series of books originally published in the United States in 1952, by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., to present the Great Books in a 54-volume set. Each one speaks to the reality at the core of human experience, a reality that transcends time or place. To begin with, Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais has to be the worst choice of fiction title in the Great Books of the Western World. The inclusion of The Metamorphosis over The Trial is another minor irritation, which I won’t belabor, except to say that there may be no better allegorical work ever written than the latter; but The Metamorphosis has certainly been en vogue (and is much shorter), so Adler can’t be begrudged on the matter of, as Thomas Jefferson said, “swimming with the fish” in matters of fashion.
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Some of the search engine results that end up leading folks to my GBWW vs. HC series are “why should I read the harvard classics” and “why should I read the great books of the western world.” Since there seems to be considerable demand for an answer to these questions, I figured I would take the time to give my two cents. I will start with the Harvard Classics (HC).
I have already said that the HC is lacking in the way of multicultural literature. A quick look at the list of readings tells you so much. In my view, there really is room for an edition of great books of the world, or a world classics series, given how bad the HC is on this. Someone like Harold Bloom would disagree with me, of course; but I have very particular reasons that I am open to a much more multicultural root, reasons I don’t think Bloom would disagree with. Primarily, cultures see the world in different ways. A sufficiently observant American visiting England would notice so much, just by the way the English reserve every possible space in urban areas for greenery, and by the way their grocery stores are stocked —there is an evident, possibly subconscious, appeal to naturalism, in terms of respect for (and the room in their way of life made for) natural foods and natural settings. Now, if we are talking about the sentiments of progress in Victorian England, such sentiments buoy up like the cream in non-homogenized milk. It is this cream that we want to taste from different nations in different times of history. To say that nothing in Mongolian literature —or Venezuelan, or African descent, or whomever’s literature— existed, ever, worth including in something like the HC is like saying that these cultures never had cream. Even Eastern Europe has been excluded. In admitting this shortcoming, there are fantastic reasons for reading the Harvard Classics. Let me begin with literacy.
The swathe of literature offered by the HC might be the most concentrated set of works, in terms of challenging the reader to higher and higher levels of comprehension, that I have ever come across. I have always been a big supporter of reading philosophy for increased reading comprehension, even if you have only a slight interest in philosophy. The reason is that conveying ideas requires craftsmanship with the English language, and the adequate reception of those ideas is dependent upon reading ability. That is, the more complex the thoughts being conveyed are, the more ability that the reader requires in taking the raw materials (the words and sentences) and putting them into their intended form (the ideas). To a very great extent, ideas deconstructed into linguistic components and reconstructed from them, by the reader, back into the original form, ideas. It is in the work that the reader must to that constitutes the capacity called “literacy.” But “Why the Harvard Classics?,” you might say. I think the collection has some of the best sets of concepts to achieve the development of higher degrees of literacy, whether these concepts are imagery, plots, and suggestive undertones of a fictional story, the deep spiritual inquiry of religious texts, the emotion-plumbing quality of poetry, and the abstruse ideas of philosophical thought. Even in presenting these examples, I have marked that there are additional cognitive processes that benefit from reading the HC, not just the more abstract modes that philosophy is associated with. That is, even if you are very much interested in philosophy, as I am, a stroll through the HC will do you some good. It is very difficult, maybe impossible, to overstate the value the HC have in advancing literacy. One of the things I have found to be problematic among educator in American (K-12) schools is that they intend students to get better at reading by doing the same level of reading continually. They make it look like an impossible mission to teach a child to read, lowering standards at every chance, because their method is not working; and it goes without saying that the problem is the student, not the method, or so they seem to think. It has been my experience that it is not that the reading is too hard for youths, but that it is not hard enough. What’s more, the readings that tend to be given to the youths are vapid and meaningless, and the young develop an aversion to reading altogether. I simply think that the works found in the Harvard Classics should be imposed at a younger age. That many adults haven’t read them (though many wish they had) is a product of the education system; but, rest assured, it is never too late to reap the benefits of the HC. Summary of reason number one: Literacy!
Since I hit upon the relevance of philosophy in this discussion, let me say something about why one may want to read the HC, even though they are heavily into philosophy (or something similar that is very demanding of comprehension, e.g., law) and an outstanding reader. As I touched on above, there are certainly different kinds of cognitive processes that one will engage in, when reading various kinds of literature. Coming from the more abstract fields of study (physics, math, Kantian philosophy, logic, etc.), I, and my compatriots, have naturally less exposure to aesthetics. This is an area that, especially, the Harvard Classics is strong in. With three volumes dedicate to English poetry, I think there can be no doubt about it, and the judgment is only reinforced by the actual selection. Additionally, there is something very, very different in the cognitive processes of following an argument or following a complex storyline, where many characters (depth of character included) come together in an ordered chaos of interactions. In all of these respects, and many more, I think the HC is a wonderfully chosen compilation.
There is something very refreshing about the Harvard Classics, in terms of how it orients the mind. The place that each of us occupies in a human tradition cannot go without consideration. I think this is a part of living an examined life. Though we are individuals, we have this genetic heritage to people, events, and cultures past. I think the HC provides the appropriate context for developing this more holistic perspective of ourselves, allowing us to examine who we are and in what ways we are truly unique (and a part of something much bigger, too). This is, to my mind, precisely what people lack when we see them acting in absurd and destructive ways, regardless the destructiveness of scale, regardless of whether inflicted upon the self or upon society. One’s orientation toward humanity and Cosmos is as much a part of mental and spiritual health —the individual’s health— as it is social, communal, national, and the species’ health. This may seem like a big task for so modest a set of books to fulfill, but it really isn’t. Literary tradition past is really a fossilization of human experience brought to life by the mind of the reader. How many times I have read Beowulf, and forgot that what I was reading was hundreds and hundreds of years old. When we read these works and remind ourselves of human triumphs, defeats, pleasure, and pains, we stand in their stead for a moment because they also stand in ours. “Fossils” to a point, but very much alive in the sense that the common bonds between people over times, if we care to recognize them, tell us more about ourselves than some of us can say on our own; these works give a basis and a perspective that we could not otherwise begin to grasp; and this is a basis that, to some extent, transcends the idiosyncrasies of cultural histories (my reason for ranting about the value of Greek literature and arts in Part III of this series). By the way, one can extend much of this to the arts, as well.
Finally, I would like to make a push in advocation of reading all of the Harvard Classics, not just selecting a few. The reason is that the set presents such a wonderful blend of different aspects of literature. There are scientific treatises, classic literary fiction, poetry, spiritual texts, travelogues, biographies, and many others. While the ratios are not quite what I would have them be, this is, nonetheless, a wonderful spread of works that are too good to pass on, granted the benefit of personal perspective that they may yield.
I could say much of the same about the Great Books of the Western World, but the Great Books are much more for the later-in-life crowd and scholars. This makes sense, though. The Harvard Classics were compiled to give a “complete undergraduate education,” though few undergraduates read as much, these days. Moreover, I recommend the HC to most people, if I am going to recommend either wholesale, because the HC are designed to give that much more holistic and balanced, slightly less cerebral plenum of literature. For those having read the HC, looking for something a bit more, I usually suggest the ancient Greek works in the GBWW. I just think they are that important. Besides, so much of our modern intellectual verbiage includes endless references to these works. In the everyday, you may hear someone called a “Cassandra”; one of Freud’s complexes was called “Oedipal”; one Nobel Laureate and philosopher referred to “Sisyphus.” Who were these folks, anyways? Reading the Greeks gives you the insight —or you can just read the Wikipedia pages, gleaning atomic facts, no understanding, and a superficial usage (dare I say, “waste”?) of time. I just want to be clear that, while I have quietly pushed the GBWW, I do think that the HC are more accessible and probably more productive for the average and slightly above average thinker and reader.
I would say that the one group of people that are neither advanced in age, or in scholarship, who I would recommend the GBWW to is the group interested especially in philosophy. Nearly all of the works are chosen for the philosophical value. Just take a look at the non-philosophy titles. The Miser is quite a philosophical play; The Brothers Karamazov is deeply philosophical; The Principles of Psychology is philosophical; and Gulliver’s Travels is philosophical. There are some that aren’t really philosophical, but they are far and few between.
There are a great many books to read in this world. Certainly, there is a case to be made that there are many other great books to read than the ones on these lists, the HC and GBWW. However, I would say that, unless you are really sure you have a good plan to get a very high quality blend of books, especially a holistic blend, I would say that sticking with the Harvard Classics and Great Books of the Western World is among the top ways to go. Some selections will be a mere matter of taste. There is no need to read them all, and I have never heard of anyone reading all of them straight through; so going back and forth between these sets and other selections, not included in these sets (perhaps, more modern), is a good way to go. That’s what I have done (and am still doing). I hope you feel I have given you a few good reasons to dig into the Harvard Classics and the Great Books of the Western World. Happy reading!
Note: For folks particularly interested in the importance of a classical education, take a look at Jeffrey Brenzel’s lecture on the topic by clicking this sentence.
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"This set of books," says Dr. Hutchins in "The Great Conversation," a sort of after-dinner speech that has somehow become Volume I of Great Books, "is the result of an attempt to reappraise and re-embody the tradition of the West for our generation." For some, this might take a bit of doing, but Dr. Hutchins makes it sound as easy as falling off a log (with Mark Hopkins on the other end): "The discussions of the Board revealed few differences of opinion about the overwhelming majority of the books in the list. The set is almost self- selected, in the sense that one book leads to another, amplifying, modifying, or contradicting it." But if the criterion of selection really was whether a book amplifies, modifies, or contradicts another book, one wonders how any books at all were eliminated. Actually, the Board seems to have shifted about between three criteria that must have conflicted as often as they coincided: which books were most infuential in the past, which are now, which ought to be now. Cicero and Seneca were more important in the past than Plato and Aeschylus but are less important today; in excluding the former and including the latter, the Board honored the second criterion over the first. On the other hand, devoting two volumes apiece to Aristotle and Aquinas could be justified only by their historical, not their contemporary, interest. The third criterion was involved here, too; these philosophers are important to the Adler-Hutchins school of thought, and the Board doubtless felt that if they are not important in modern thought, they damned well should be. My objection is not to this method of selection -- jockeying back and forth between conflicting criteria is the essence of the anthologist's craft -- but to the bland unawareness of it shown by the impresarios, Dr. Hutchins and Dr. Adler, who write as if the Truth were an easy thing to come by. This doctrinaire smugness blinds them to the real problems of their enterprise by giving them mechanical, ready-made solutions that often don't fill the bill.
THE wisdom of the method varies with the obviousness of the choice, being greatest where there is practically no choice; that is, with the half of the authors -- by no means "the overwhelming majority" -- on which agreement may be presumed to be universal: Homer, the Greek dramatists, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Virgil, Plutarch, Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Machiavelli, Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Milton, Pascal, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Gibbon, Hegel, Kant, Goethe, and Darwin. A large second category seems sound and fairly obvious, though offering plenty of room for discussion: Herodotus, Lucretius, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Tacitus, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Swift, Montesquieu, Boswell, Mill, Marx, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Freud. The rest of the list depended entirely upon the Board, and in this case the choice seems to be mostly foolish. Only two selections are both daring and sound: Moby Dick and William James' Psychology. The former is, of course, well known but could easily have been passed over; the latter is an extraordinarily rich and imaginative work that has been overshadowed by the Freudian vogue. The Freud volume, with no less than eighteen books and papers in it, gives an excellent conspectus of Freud's work; the Marx volume, on the other hand, contains only the Communist Manifesto and Volume I of Capital (misleadingly titled, so that it suggests it is the whole work), which is barely the ABC of Marx's political thought. This unevenness of editing is prevalent. There is a provincial overemphasis on English literature at the expense of French; we get Boswell, Gulliver, Tristram Shandy, and Tom Jones but no Moliere, Corneille, or Racine, and no Stendhal, Balzac, or Flaubert. This is what might be called an accidental eccentricity, the kind of error any board of fallible mortals might make. But most of the eccentricities are systematic rather than accidental, springing from dogma rather than oversight.
A fifth of the volumes are all but impenetrable to the lay reader, or at least to this lay reader -- the four devoted to Aristotle and Aquinas and the six of scientific treatises, ranging from Hippocrates to Faraday. "There is a sense in which every great book is always over the head of the reader," airily writes Dr. Hutchins. "He can never fully comprehend it. That is why the books in this set are infinitely rereadable." I found these ten volumes infinitely unreadable. There is a difference between not fully comprehending Homer and Shakespeare (in that one is always discovering something new on rereading them) and not even getting to first base with either a writer's terminology or what he is driving at. Aristotle and Aquinas should have been included, I would say, but four volumes is excessive. Furthermore, no expository apparatus is provided, no introduction relating their Weltanschauung to our own, no notes on their very special use of terms and their concepts. Lacking such help, how can one be expected to take an interest in such problems, vivid enough to Aquinas, as "Whether an Inferior Angel Speaks to a Superior Angel?," "Whether We Should Distinguish Irascible and Concupiscible Parts in the Superior Appetite?," "Whether Heavenly Bodies Can Act on Demons?," and "Whether by Virtue of Its Subtlety a Glorified Body Will No Longer Need to Be in a Place Equal to Itself?" In fact, even with help, one's interest might remain moderate. In the case of a philosopher like Plato, essentially a literary man and so speaking a universal human language, the difficulty is far less acute, but Aquinas and Aristotle were engineers and technicians of philosophy, essentially system builders whose concepts and terminology are no longer familiar.
The difficulty is much more urgent in the six volumes of scientific work, so urgent that almost no expository apparatus would suffice. A scientific work differs from a literary, historical, or philosophical work (the three other categories into which the editors sort the Great Books) partly because it is written in a language comprehensible only to the specialist (equations, diagrams, and so on) and partly because its importance is not in itself but in its place in the development of science, since it has often been revised, edited, and even superseded by the work of later scientists. Milton, on the other hand, does not supersede Homer; Gibbon represents no advance over Thucydides. All this is pretty obvious, but in this one instance, the editors of the Great Books exhibit a remarkable capacity for overlooking the obvious. Their dogma states that all major cultural achievements are of timeless, absolute value, and that this value is accessible to the lay reader without expository aids if he will but apply himself diligently. Because science is clearly part of our culture, they have therefore included these six useless volumes without asking themselves what benefit the reader will get from a hundred and sixty double-column pages of Hippocrates ("We must avoid wetting all sorts of ulcers except with wine, unless the ulcer be situated in a joint." "In women, blood collected in the breasts indicates madness." "You should put persons on a course of hellebore who are troubled with a defluction from the head." "Acute disease come [sic] to a crisis in fourteen days") or how he can profit from or even understand Fourier's Analytical Theory of Heat and Huygens' Treatisc on Light without a special knowledge of earlier and later work in these fields
Another drawback is the fetish for Great Writers and complete texts, which results in a lot of the same thing by a few hands instead of a more representative collection. Minor works by major writers are consistently preferred to major works by minor writers. Thus nearly all Shakespeare is here, including even The Two Gentlemen of Verona, but not Marlowe's Dr. Faustus or Webster's Duchess of Malfi or Jonson's Volpone. Nearly all Milton's poetry is here, but no Donne, no Herrick, no Marvell, or, for that matter, any other English poetry except Chaucer and Shakespeare. We get Gibbon in two huge volumes but no Vico, Michelet, or Burckhardt; six hundred pages of Kant but no Nietzsche or Kierkegaard; two volumes of Aquinas but no Calvin or Luther; three hundred pages of Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws, but no Voltaire or Diderot. Even if in every case the one right author had been elected to the Great Writers' Club, which is not the situation, this principle of selection would give a distorted view of our culture, since it omits so much of the context in which each great writer existed.
SO much for the selection, which, for all its scholastic whimsicality, is the most successful aspect of the enterprise.*(MacDonald's footnote here.) Having caught your goose, you must cook it. But the editors are indifferent cooks. They have failed to overcome the two greatest barriers to a modern reader's understanding and enjoyment of the Great Books -- that their authors were largely foreigners in both place and time.
Only a third of them wrote in English; almost all of them were citizens of strange countries fifty to three thousand years away. Except for a few scientific works, apparently no translations were commissioned for this un- dertaking. The existing translations of prose writers are probably adequate, and some are classic. But just two of the verse translations seem good to me: Rogers' Aristophanes and Priest's Faust. (I speak of reading pleasures not of their fidelity. But I assume, first, that a work of art is intended to give pleasure, and that if it does not, the fault lies either with the writer, a thought too unsettling to be entertained in the case of the Great Books, or with the translator; and, second, that if any writer, Great or not, wrote verse he must have had in mind the effect of verse, in which the unit of form is the rhythmical line rather than the sentence or the paragraph, and that a prose rendering which runs the lines together produces something that is to poetry as marmalade is to oranges.) Rhoades' Virgil and Cookson's Aeschylus are in verse, but they are dull and mediocre, the former smoothly so and the latter clumsily so. Charles Eliot Norton's prose Dante is unbelievably graceless ("In my imagination appeared the vestige of the pitilessness of her who . . ." "While I was going on, my eyes were encountered by one, and I said straightway thus . . ."). Jebb's Sophocles and E. P. Coleridge's Euripides are in that fantastic nineteenthcentury translator's prose ("Yon man . . . Ay me! And once again, Ay mel" "Why weepest thou? Thus stands the matter, be well assured." "In fear of what woe fore shown?"). Homer is in Samuel Butler's translation, the best prose version extant, except for T. E. Lawrence's Odyssey, and far better than the Wardour Street English of Butcher-Lang-Leaf-Myers, but it is still prose, and Homer was a poet. In prose, he reads like a long-winded novel. It is not as if there were no excellent modern verse renderings of the Greeks: Richmond Lattimore's Iliad, published by Dr. Hutchins' own University of Chicago, and the eleven plays by various hands in Dudley Fitts' Greek Plays in Modern Translation, put out by Dial in 1947. At modest expenditure, the editors could have used these translations and commissioned others that would have for the first time made all the Greeks, Virgil, and Dante readable in English. However, since to the editors the classics are not works of art but simply quarries to be worked for Ideas, they chose instead to spend a million dollars in compiling that two-volume index, or Syntopicon.
On principle, they have ignored the other barrier, time. "The Advisory Board," Hutchins writes, "recommended that no scholarly apparatus be included in the set. No 'introductions' giving the editors' views of the authors should appear. The books should speak for themselves, and the reader should decide for himself. Great books contain their own aids to reading; that is one reason why they are great. Since we hold that these works are intelligible to the ordinary man, we see no reason to interpose ourselves or anybody else between the author and the reader.' (The Doctor doesn't explain why scholarly introductions represent an editorial interposition between author and reader while a two- volume Syntopicon does not.) It is true that our age tends to read about the classics instead of reading them, to give such emphasis to the historical background that the actual text is slighted, and the Adler-Hutchins school is quite right in combatting this tendency. But surely, without distracting the reader from the text, a "scholarly apparatus" could have given the essential information about the historical and cultural context in which each work appeared and have translated terms and concepts whose meaning has changed with time. For example, while some of the theories advanced in James's Psychology are still fruitful, others are not -- a fact that the modest and admirably pragmatic James would have been the first to accept -- and the general reader would profit from such an expert discussion of the point as is provided in Margaret Knight's introduction to a recent Pelican anthology of James's writings on psychology. By presenting the complete text with no comment or exposition, the Board of Editors implies it is a "classic," timeless and forever authoritative, which of course is just what they want to suggest. This is not my concept of a classic. Nor do I agree with Dr. Hutchins when he implies that indoctrination ("giving the editors' views") is the only function of an introduction. There is a difference between informing the reader and telling him what to think that seems to escape Dr. Hutchins, possibly because in his case there isn't any difference.
WE now come to the question: Why a set at all? Even if the selection and the presentation were ideal, should the publishers have spent two million dollars to bring out the Great Books, and should the consumer spend $249.50 to own them? Some of the more enthusiastic Great Bookmanites seem to think The Books have been preserved for us only through the vigilance of their leaders. Clifton Fadiman, in the expansive atmosphere of a Waldorf banquet for the founding subscribers, saluted those present as "you who are taking upon yourselves . . . the burden of preserving, as did the monks of early Christendom, through another darkening . . . age the visions, the laughter, the ideas, the deep cries of anguish, the great eurekas of revelation that make up our patent to the title of civilized man" (applause). But with or without the present enterprise, the eurekas and the deep cries of anguish would continue to resound. The publishers themselves state that all but twenty-one of the four hundred and forty-three works are "generally available in bookstores and libraries." Most of the Great Books can be had in inexpensive reprints, and almost all the rest can be bought for less than the five dollars a volume they cost in this set. This presents a dilemma: Those who are truly interested in books probably already have most of these, while those who don't may be presumed not to be ardent readers, and not in a mood to spend two hundred and fifty dollars. Even when need and desire coincide, as in the case of young bookworms (if such there still are), it is more fun -- and cheaper -- to buy the books separately. Not only that, but sets, especially of different authors, are monotonous and depressing; books, like people, look better out of uniform. It bothers me to see Tristram Shandy dressed like the Summa Theologica. Milton should be tall and dignified, with wide margins; Montaigne smaller, graceful, intimate; Adam Smith clear and prosaic; and so on. Mr. Rudolph Ruzicka has done his best, by varying the type faces and the title pages, to give variety and distinction to the set. In this respect, and in the binding, he has made a vast advance over the Harvard Classics (no great feat). But he has put nearly everything into double columns, which I find textbookish and uninviting. (Even the Classics are not doublecolumn.) This was doubtless necessary for the lengthier books, but such slim volumes as Homer, Dante, Hegel, Bacon, and Rabelais get the same treatment. Rabelais looks particularly grotesque in this textbook format. There is, however, one work in the set to which double columns are admirably suited: Dr. Adler's Syntopicon.
WITH this formidable production I shall now grapple. I have already pointed out that insofar as the set has a raison d'etre, the Syntopicon is it. It is, however, a poor substitute for an introductory apparatus. According to Dr. Adler, "this gargantuan enterprise" represents "about 400,000 man-hours of reading . . . over seventy years of continuous reading, day and night, seven days a week, week in and week out from birth on." Since he did not start reading at birth and is not seventy, he had to call in some help; the Syntopicon is "the product of more than one hundred scholars working for seven years," which is to say that a hundred scholars worked on it at one time or another during the seven years of preparation. (The staff fluctuated between twenty and fifty people.)
The first step was to select not some Great Ideas but The Great Ideas. A list of seven hundred was whittled down to a hundred and two, extending from Angel to World and including Art, Beauty, Being, Democracy, Good and Evil, Justice, Logic, Man, Medicine, Prudence, Same and Other, Theology, and Wisdom. *(MacDonald's footnote here.) These were broken down into 2,987 "topics," the top sergeants in this ideological army, the link between the company commanders (the hundred and two Great Ideas) and the privates (the 163,000 page references to the Great Books). Thus the references under "Art" are arranged under twelve topics, such as "3. Art as imitation," "7a. Art as a source of pleasure or delight," "8. Art and emotion: expression, purgation, sublimation." With Dr. Adler as field marshal, coach, and supreme arbiter, the "scholars" (bright young graduate students who needed to pick up a little dough on the side and latched on to this latter-day W.P.A.) dissected the Great Ideas out of the Great Books and, like mail clerks, distributed the fragments among the topical pigeonholes, the upshot being that, in theory, every passage on "Art as a source of pleasure or delight" in the Great Books from Homer to Freud ended up in "Art 7a." Finally, Dr. Adler has prefaced the references under each Great Idea with a syntopical essay that summarizes the Great Conversation of the Great Writers about it and that reads like the Minutes of the Preceding Meeting as recorded by a remarkably matter- of-fact secretary.
The Syntopicon, writes Dr. Adler, is " a unified reference library in the realm of thought and opinion," and he compares it to a dictionary or an encyclopedia. Words and facts, however, can be so ordered because they are definite, concrete, distinguishable entities, and because each one means more or less the same thing to everyone. Looking them up in the dictionary or encyclopedia is not a major problem. But an idea is a misty, vague object that takes on protean shapes, never the same for any two people. There is a strong family resemblance between the dictionaries of Dr. Johnson, Mr. Webster, and Messrs. Funk & Wagnalls, but every man makes his own Syntopicon, God forbid, and this one is Dr. Adler's, not mine or yours. To him, of course, ideas seem to be as objective and distinct as marbles, which can be arranged in definite, logical patterns. He has the classifying mind, which is invaluable for writing a natural history or collecting stamps. Assuming that an index of ideas should be attempted at all, it should have been brief and simple, without pretensions to either completeness or logical structure -- a mere convenience for the reader who wants to compare, say, Plato, Pascal, Dr. Johnson and Freud on love. Instead, we have a fantastically elaborate index whose fatal defect is just what Dr. Adler thinks is its chief virtue: its systematic all-inclusive- ness. (He apologizes because it is not inclusive enough: "It is certainly not claimed for the references under the 3,000 topics that they constitute a full collection of the relevant passages in the great books. But the effort to check errors of omission was diligent enough to permit the claim that the references under each topic constitute an adequate representation of what the great books say on that subject.") This approach is wrong theoretically because the only one of the authors who wrote with Dr. Adler's 2,987 topics in mind was Dr. Adler. And it is wrong practically because the reader's mental compartmentation doesn't correspond to Dr. Adler's, either. Furthermore, one needs the patience of Job and the leisure of Sardanapalus to plow through the plethora of references. Those under Science, which take up twelve and a half pages, begin with four lines of references to Plato, which took me an hour to look up and read. Sometimes, as when one finds sixtytwo references to one author (Aquinas) under one subdivision of one topic under one idea (God), one has the feeling of being caught in a Rube Goldberg contraption. Again, under "Justice 2. The precepts of justice: doing good, harming no one, rendering to each his own, treating equals equally," one is referred to "Chaucer, 22sa- 232a, esp. 231b-232a," which turns out to be the entire "Reeve's Tale,"- a bit of low comedy that one of the mail clerks threw into this pigeonhole apparently because Chaucer stuck on a five-line moral at the end ("esp. 23lb- 232a"). The one method of classification that would have been useful was not employed; there is no attempt to distinguish between major and minor references. An important discussion of justice in Plato has no more weight than an aside by Uncle Toby in "Tristram Shandy," although it is common practice to make such a distinction by using different type faces or by putting the major references first.
"What the Corpus Juris does for the legal profession," Dr. Adler has said, "the Syntopicon will do for everyone." That is, as lawyers follow a single point of law through a series of cases, the reader can follow one topic through the Great Books. The Doctor is simply carrying on his mistaken analogy with the dictionary. The structure of law, although intricate, is a rigid framework within which concepts are so classified and defined that they mean exactly the same thing to everybody. Yet Dr. Adler actually suggests that the best way for the beginning reader, wholly unfamiliar with the Great Books, to get acquainted with them is to follow chosen topics through a series of works whose context he knows nothing about.
It is natural for Dr. Adler to compare his Syntopicon with the Corpus Juris, since he has been a teacher of the philosophy of law and a writer about it, and his mind is essentially a legalistic one. He aspires to be the great codifier and systematizer of Western culture, to write its Code Napoleon. The Syntopicon is merely the first step toward this goal. At his Institute for Philosophical Research, another group of scholars is working with him, using the Syntopicon, to produce "a dialectical summation of Western thought, a synthesis for the twentieth century."*(MacDonald's footnote here.) The most celebrated attempt at such a summation was, of course, the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, Dr. Adler's guide and inspirer. Aquinas had certain historical advantages over his disciple -- leaving aside the personal ones: the culture he summarized was homogeneous, systematically articulated, and clearly outlined because of the universal acceptance of the Roman Catholic faith as expressed in the Bible and by the Church Fathers. Dr. Adler cannot bring these qualities to and make them a part of twentieth-century thought, but he proceeds as if he could, and he has run up his own homemade substitutes for the sacred writings. Thus the true reason for his set of Great Books becomes apparent. Its aim is hieratic rather than practical -- not to make the books accessible to the public (which they mostly already were) but to fix the canon of the Sacred Texts by printing them in a special edition. Simply issuing a list would have been enough if practicality were the only consideration, but a list can easily be revised, and it lacks the totemistic force of a five-foot, hundredpound array of books. The Syntopicon is partly a concordance to the Sacred Texts, partly the sort of commentary and interpretation of them the Church Fathers made for the Bible.
In its massiveness, its technological elaboration, its fetish of The Great, and its attempt to treat systematically and with scientific precision materials for which the method is inappropriate, Dr. Adler's set of books is a typical expression of the religion of culture that appeals to the American academic mentality. And the claims its creators make are a typical expression of the American advertising psyche. The way to put over a two-million-dollar cultural project is, it seems, to make it appear as pompous as possible. At the Great Bookmanite banquet at the Waldorf, Dr. Hutchins said, "This is more than a set of books. It is a liberal education.... The fate of our country, and hence of the world, depends on the degree to which the American people achieve liberal education. [It is] a process . . . of placing in the hands of the American people the means of continuing and revitalizing Western civilization, for the sake of the West and for the sake of all mankind." This is Madison Avenue cant -- Lucky Strike Green Has Gone to War, The Great Books Have Enlisted for the Duration. It is also poppycock. The problem is not placing these already available books in people's hands (at five dollars a volume) but getting people to read them, and the hundred pounds of densely printed, poorly edited reading matter assembled by Drs. Adler and Hutchins is scarcely likely to do that.
In their first year, 1952, Adler & Hutchins (and Benton, of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which put up the original $2,000,000) sold 1,863 sets of their densely printed, poorly edited, over-priced and over-syntopiconized collection. In 1953, they made some kind of record by selling just 138, no zeros omitted, sets. (I like to think the above review was partly responsible.) Three years later, they got in a new sales manager who went to work on what might humorously be called the reading public. The results were sensational. By 1960 sales had risen to over 35,000 sets a year and last year 51,083 sets were sold for a gross return of $22,000,000. The Great Books of the Western World are at this writing most definitely in business.
The story is told in an article entitled "Cashing in on Culture" that appeared in Time of April 20th last. It runs, in part:
The turning point came in 1956 when Benton brought into Great Books the salesman -- stocky, bespectacled Kenneth M. Harden, a veteran of thirty-seven years of encyclopedia selling. [The accompanying photograph shows Mr. Harden and Mr. Adler smiling behind three stacks of Great Books; The Salesman looks about like the Savant except he is several inches higher; stocky is as stocky does, after all.] At the time he took over as national sales manager, recalls Harden, Great Books executives "felt there was a 2% cream on top of our society who were Great Books prospects -- the eggheads." Countered Harden: "Let's go after the mass market -- the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker."
Harden set about building an indefatigable door-to-door sales force. Operating out of Los Angeles, Harden set up a course at which new salesmen learned how to use the Syntopticon [sic throughout the Time report; it seems impossible to get that word right] and to pronounce the names of the authors (reading them is not required).
In the field, Harden's salesmen offered the Great Books (sold in sets costing from $298 to $1,175 depending on binding) for as little as $10 down and $10 a month, and threw in a bookcase and a Bible or dictionary to boot. In chart- studded sales broadsides, they talked earnestly of the importance of a liberal education for children, and displayed Great Books reading lists for youngsters. To help spread the Great Books idea, more than 50,000 adults were signed up in Great Books discussion groups (run by the nonprofit Great Books Foundation).
With this kind of hard sell, Harden increased Great Books sales 400% . . . in the first three years of his regime. Today his salesmen average an annual salary of $9,000, make as much as $30,000, and managers take home much more. Harden insists: "They are not just making money. They are carrying the banner."
Some of Mr. Harden's regional sales managers make $100,000 a year, which is a very pleasant banner to carry. They may not "just" be making money but they are certainly doing so. And one wonders what golden effulgence radiates from the banner Mr. Harden himself bears aloft? Who fished the murex up? What porridge had John Keats?
That the public bought less than 2,000 sets of the Great Books in 1952 and 1953 while last year they bought twentyfive times as many -- this shows that Culture, like any other commodity, must now be "sold" to Americans. The dif- ference was made by Mr. Harden's high-pressure door-to-door sales campaign, which was "backstopped," as we say on Madison Avenue, by lavish magazine advertising with full-color photographs of Men of Distinction -- including Mr. Adlai Stevenson, alas -- who praised The Product as unrestrainedly as so many debutantes endorsing the virtues of Pond's facial cream: He's famous, he's intelligent, he uses the Syntopicon. The operation was designed to work off on the public a massive back inventory of a slow-selling item. It reminds one of those traveling book-agents of the last century who badgered and flattered hundreds of thousands of householders, as ignorant as they were innocent, into investing in the Complete Works of William Ellery Channing. Their sales pitch was the same: Respect for Culture, Keeping up with the Adler-Joneses, and, above all, the Obligation to the Children, who would be forever disadvantaged if their parents failed to Act Now on this Opportunity for a mere $10 down or $10 a month -- which means over two years of paying for the set and puts the Great Books of the Western World in the same class of goods as TV sets and washing machines. "Sorry, lady," says the man from the finance agency as he and his helper stagger out to the truck with one hundred pounds of Western Culture, "we just work here." It is a false position for Drs. Adler and Hutchins to have gotten themselves into, though of course there was that $2,000,000 investment, half of it for the Syntopicon, one of the most expensive toy railroads any philosopher ever was given to play with. Still, I wonder what they really think of stocky, bespectacled Kenneth M. Harden and the effects of the hard sell as applied to Thuycidides and Rabelais? That is, Thoosiddidees and Rabbelay: "new salesmen [learn how] to pronounce the names of the authors; reading them is not required." This last is sensible, since if the salesmen did read the works some of them have been plugging for six years, things might be even more balled up than they are now. And they are all instructed in what is after all the main point, the use of that Syntopicon -- "Please, gentlemen, not Syntopticon" -- in which the Great Writers have at last achieved systematic fulfillment, from Aeschylus (Esskuluss) to Zeno (Zeenoh). I also wonder how many of the over l00,000 customers who have by now caved in under the pressure of Mr. Harden and his banner-bearing colleagues are doing much browsing in these upland pastures? Those nineteenth-century book-agents were persuasive fellows, too, but few of the deckled-edged sets they wedged into the family book case ever emerged again, and the limp-leather Emersons and Carlyles they placed on the sitting- room tables tended to remain there. I don't expect answers to these rhetorical questions from the Doctors, since they didn't reply to my 1952 critique -- unless their employing Mr. Harden was a kind of answer. But I do wonder.
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Great Books of the Western World - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Great Books of the Western World From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Great Books of the Western World is a series of books originally published in the United States in 1952, by Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., to present the Great Books in a 54-volume set; the second edition of the series comprises 60 volumes. The original editors had three criteria for including a book in the series: the book must be relevant to contemporary matters, and not only important in its historical context; it must be rewarding to re-read; and it must be a part of "the great conversation about the great ideas", relevant to at least 25 of the 102 great ideas identified by the editors. The books were not chosen on the basis of ethnic and cultural inclusiveness, historical influence, or the editors' agreement with the views expressed by the authors.[1]
The Great Books (second edition)
Contents 1 History 2 Volumes 3 Second edition 4 Criticisms and responses 4.1 Criticisms of the authors selected 4.2 Criticisms of the works selected 4.3 Criticisms of difficulty 4.4 Criticisms of the set's rationale 4.5 Response to criticisms 5 See also 6 References 7 External links
History The project for the Great Books of the Western World began at the University of Chicago, where the president, Robert Hutchins, collaborated with Mortimer Adler to develop a course — generally aimed at businesspeople — for the purpose of filling the gaps in their liberal education; to render the reader as an intellectually rounded man or woman familiar with the Great Books of the Western canon, and knowledgeable of the great ideas developed in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World
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Great Books of the Western World - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
course of three millennia. An original student of the project was William Benton (later a U.S. senator, and then chief executive officer of the Encyclopædia Britannica publishing company) who proposed selecting the greatest books of the Western canon, and that Hutchins and Adler produce unabridged editions for publication, by Encyclopædia Britannica. Yet, Hutchins was wary of such a business endeavour, fearing that the books would be sold as a product, thereby devaluing them as cultural artefacts; nevertheless, he agreed to the business deal, and paid $60,000 for the project. After deciding what subjects and authors to include, and how to present the materials, the project was begun, with a budget of $2,000,000. On April 15, 1952, the Great Books of the Western World were presented at a publication party in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, in New York City. In his speech, Hutchins said, "This is more than a set of books, and more than a liberal education. Great Books of the Western World is an act of piety. Here are the sources of our being. Here is our heritage. This is the West. This is its meaning for mankind." The first two sets of books were given to Elizabeth II, Queen of the U.K., and to Harry S. Truman, the incumbent U.S. President. The initial sales of the book sets were poor, with only 1,863 sets sold in 1952, and less than one-tenth of that number of book sets were sold in 1953. A financial debacle loomed until Encyclopædia Britannica altered the sales strategy, and sold the book set through experienced door-to-door encyclopædia-salesmen, as Hutchins had feared; but, through that method, 50,000 sets were sold in 1961. In 1963 the editors published Gateway to the Great Books, a ten-volume set of readings meant to introduce the authors and the subjects of the Great Books. Each year, from 1961 to 1998, the editors published The Great Ideas Today, an annual updating about the applicability of the Great Books to contemporary life.[2][3] The Internet and the E-book reader have made available some of the Great Books of the Western World in an on-line format.[4]
Volumes Originally published in 54 volumes, The Great Books of the Western World covers categories including fiction, history, poetry, natural science, mathematics, philosophy, drama, politics, religion, economics, and ethics. Hutchins wrote the first volume, titled The Great Conversation, as an introduction and discourse on liberal education. Adler sponsored the next two volumes, "The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon", as a way of emphasizing the unity of the set and, by extension, of Western thought in general. A team of indexers spent months compiling references to such topics as "Man's freedom in relation to the will of God" and "The denial of void or vacuum in favor of a plenum". They grouped the topics into 102 chapters, for which Adler wrote 102 introductions. Four colors identify each volume by subject area -- Imaginative Literature, Mathematics and the Natural Sciences, History and Social Science, and Philosophy and Theology. The volumes contained the following works:
Volume 1 The Great Conversation
Volume 2 Syntopicon I: Angel, Animal, Aristocracy, Art, Astronomy, Beauty, Being, Cause, Chance, Change, Citizen, Constitution, Courage, Custom and Convention, Definition, Democracy, Desire, Dialectic, Duty, Education, Element, Emotion, Eternity, Evolution, Experience, Family, Fate, Form, God, Good and Evil, Government, Habit, Happiness, History, Honor, Hypothesis, Idea, Immortality, Induction, Infinity, Judgment, Justice, Knowledge, Labor, Language, Law, Liberty, Life and Death, Logic, and Love https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World
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Volume 3 Syntopicon II: Man, Mathematics, Matter, Mechanics, Medicine, Memory and Imagination, Metaphysics, Mind, Monarchy, Nature, Necessity and Contingency, Oligarchy, One and Many, Opinion, Opposition, Philosophy, Physics, Pleasure and Pain, Poetry, Principle, Progress, Prophecy, Prudence, Punishment, Quality, Quantity, Reasoning, Relation, Religion, Revolution, Rhetoric, Same and Other, Science, Sense, Sign and Symbol, Sin, Slavery, Soul, Space, State, Temperance, Theology, Time, Truth, Tyranny, Universal and Particular, Virtue and Vice, War and Peace, Wealth, Will, Wisdom, and World
Volume 4 Homer (rendered into English prose by Samuel Butler) The Iliad The Odyssey
Volume 5 Aeschylus (translated into English verse by G.M. Cookson) The Suppliant Maidens The Persians Seven Against Thebes Prometheus Bound The Oresteia Agamemnon Choephoroe The Eumenides Sophocles (translated into English prose by Sir Richard C. Jebb) The Oedipus Cycle Oedipus the King Oedipus at Colonus Antigone Ajax Electra The Trachiniae Philoctetes Euripides (translated into English prose by Edward P. Coleridge) Rhesus Medea Hippolytus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World
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Alcestis Heracleidae The Suppliants Trojan Women Ion Helen Andromache Electra Bacchantes Hecuba Heracles Mad Phoenician Women Orestes Iphigeneia in Tauris Iphigeneia at Aulis Cyclops Aristophanes (translated into English verse by Benjamin Bickley Rogers) The Acharnians The Knights The Clouds The Wasps Peace The Birds The Frogs Lysistrata Thesmophoriazusae Ecclesiazousae Plutus
Volume 6 Herodotus The History (translated by George Rawlinson) Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War (translated by Richard Crawley and revised by R. Feetham)
Volume 7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World
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Plato The Dialogues (translated by Benjamin Jowett) Charmides Lysis Laches Protagoras Euthydemus Cratylus Phaedrus Ion Symposium Meno Euthyphro Apology Crito Phaedo Gorgias The Republic Timaeus Critias Parmenides Theaetetus Sophist Statesman Philebus Laws The Seventh Letter (translated by J. Harward)
Volume 8 Aristotle Categories On Interpretation Prior Analytics Posterior Analytics Topics Sophistical Refutations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World
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Physics On the Heavens On Generation and Corruption Meteorology Metaphysics On the Soul Minor biological works
Volume 9 Aristotle History of Animals Parts of Animals On the Motion of Animals On the Gait of Animals On the Generation of Animals Nicomachean Ethics Politics The Athenian Constitution Rhetoric Poetics
Volume 10 Hippocrates Works Galen On the Natural Faculties
Volume 11 Euclid The Thirteen Books of Euclid's Elements Archimedes On the Sphere and Cylinder Measurement of a Circle On Conoids and Spheroids On Spirals On the Equilibrium of Planes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World
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The Sand Reckoner The Quadrature of the Parabola On Floating Bodies Book of Lemmas The Method Treating of Mechanical Problems Apollonius of Perga On Conic Sections Nicomachus of Gerasa Introduction to Arithmetic
Volume 12 Lucretius On the Nature of Things (translated by H.A.J. Munro) Epictetus The Discourses (translated by George Long) Marcus Aurelius The Meditations (translated by George Long)
Volume 13 Virgil Eclogues Georgics Aeneid
Volume 14 Plutarch The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans
Volume 15 P. Cornelius Tacitus (translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb) The Annals The Histories
Volume 16 Ptolemy Almagest, part 1 (translated by R. Catesby Taliaferro) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World
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Nicolaus Copernicus On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres (translated by Charles Glenn Wallis) Johannes Kepler (translated by Charles Glenn Wallis) Epitome of Copernican Astronomy (Books IV–V) The Harmonies of the World (Book V)
Volume 17 Plotinus The Six Enneads
Volume 18 Augustine of Hippo The Confessions The City of God On Christian Doctrine
Volume 19 Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica (First part complete, selections from second part, translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province and revised by Daniel J. Sullivan)
Volume 20 Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica (Selections from second and third parts and supplement, translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province and revised by Daniel J. Sullivan)
Volume 21 Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy (Translated by Charles Eliot Norton)
Volume 22 Geoffrey Chaucer Troilus and Criseyde The Canterbury Tales
Volume 23 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World
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Niccolò Machiavelli The Prince Thomas Hobbes Leviathan
Volume 24 François Rabelais Gargantua and Pantagruel
Volume 25 Michel Eyquem de Montaigne Essays
Volume 26 William Shakespeare The First Part of King Henry the Sixth The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth The Third Part of King Henry the Sixth The Tragedy of Richard the Third The Comedy of Errors Titus Andronicus The Taming of the Shrew The Two Gentlemen of Verona Love's Labour's Lost Romeo and Juliet The Tragedy of King Richard the Second A Midsummer Night's Dream The Life and Death of King John The Merchant of Venice The First Part of King Henry the Fourth The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth Much Ado About Nothing The Life of King Henry the Fifth Julius Caesar As You Like It
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Volume 27 William Shakespeare Twelfth Night; or, What You Will The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark The Merry Wives of Windsor Troilus and Cressida All's Well That Ends Well Measure for Measure Othello, the Moor of Venice King Lear Macbeth Antony and Cleopatra Coriolanus Timon of Athens Pericles, Prince of Tyre Cymbeline The Winter's Tale The Tempest The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth Sonnets
Volume 28 William Gilbert On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies Galileo Galilei Dialogues Concerning the Two New Sciences William Harvey On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals On the Circulation of Blood On the Generation of Animals
Volume 29 Miguel de Cervantes The History of Don Quixote de la Mancha
Volume 30 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World
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Sir Francis Bacon The Advancement of Learning Novum Organum New Atlantis
Volume 31 René Descartes Rules for the Direction of the Mind Discourse on the Method Meditations on First Philosophy Objections Against the Meditations and Replies The Geometry Benedict de Spinoza Ethics
Volume 32 John Milton English Minor Poems Paradise Lost Samson Agonistes Areopagitica
Volume 33 Blaise Pascal The Provincial Letters Pensées Scientific and mathematical essays
Volume 34 Sir Isaac Newton Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy Optics Christian Huygens Treatise on Light
Volume 35 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World
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John Locke A Letter Concerning Toleration Concerning Civil Government, Second Essay An Essay Concerning Human Understanding George Berkeley The Principles of Human Knowledge David Hume An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Volume 36 Jonathan Swift Gulliver's Travels Laurence Sterne The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Volume 37 Henry Fielding The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
Volume 38 Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu The Spirit of the Laws Jean Jacques Rousseau A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality A Discourse on Political Economy The Social Contract
Volume 39 Adam Smith An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Volume 40 Edward Gibbon The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Part 1)
Volume 41 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World
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Edward Gibbon The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Part 2)
Volume 42 Immanuel Kant Critique of Pure Reason Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals Critique of Practical Reason Excerpts from The Metaphysics of Morals Preface and Introduction to the Metaphysical Elements of Ethics with a note on Conscience General Introduction to the Metaphysic of Morals The Science of Right The Critique of Judgement
Volume 43 American State Papers Declaration of Independence Articles of Confederation The Constitution of the United States of America Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay The Federalist John Stuart Mill On Liberty Considerations on Representative Government Utilitarianism
Volume 44 James Boswell The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
Volume 45 Antoine Laurent Lavoisier Elements of Chemistry Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier Analytical Theory of Heat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World
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Michael Faraday Experimental Researches in Electricity
Volume 46 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel The Philosophy of Right The Philosophy of History
Volume 47 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Faust
Volume 48 Herman Melville Moby Dick; or, The Whale
Volume 49 Charles Darwin The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
Volume 50 Karl Marx Capital Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Manifesto of the Communist Party
Volume 51 Count Leo Tolstoy War and Peace
Volume 52 Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky The Brothers Karamazov
Volume 53 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World
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William James The Principles of Psychology
Volume 54 Sigmund Freud The Origin and Development of Psycho-Analysis Selected Papers on Hysteria The Sexual Enlightenment of Children The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy Observations on "Wild" Psycho-Analysis The Interpretation of Dreams On Narcissism Instincts and Their Vicissitudes Repression The Unconscious A General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis Beyond the Pleasure Principle Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego The Ego and the Id Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety Thoughts for the Times on War and Death Civilization and Its Discontents New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
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.[1] The pre-20th century books added (volume numbering is not strictly compatible with the first edition due to rearrangement of some books):
Volume 20 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World
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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
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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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World
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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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World
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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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World
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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
Criticisms and responses Criticisms of the authors selected Criticism has attended Great Books of the Western World since publication. The stress Hutchins placed on the monumental importance of these works was an easy target for those who dismissed the project as a celebration of dead European males, ignoring contributions of women and non-European authors.[5][6] The criticism swelled in tandem with the feminist and civil rights movements.[7] In his Europe: A History, Norman Davies criticizes the compilation for overrepresenting selected parts of the western world, especially Britain and the U.S., while ignoring the other, particularly Central and Eastern Europe. According to his calculation, in 151 authors included in both editions, there are 49 English or American authors, 27 Frenchmen, 20 Germans, 15 ancient Greeks, 9 ancient Romans, 6 Russians, 4 Scandinavians, 3 Spaniards, 3 Italians, 3 Irishmen, 3 Scots, and 3 Eastern Europeans. Prejudices and preferences, he concludes, are self-evident.
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In response, such criticisms have been derided as ad hominem and biased in themselves. The counter-argument maintains that such criticisms discount the importance of books solely because of generic, imprecise and possibly irrelevant characteristics of the books' authors, rather than because of the content of the books themselves.[1] In France there appeared several criticisms arguing that writers included in the list such as Milton, Harvey, Gilbert or Melville weren't universally as relevant as some other writers such as John Calvin and Voltaire, who were initially excluded; also, that it excluded many non-British or US authors from the early 20th century who were better known to French readers, such as Musil, Roth or Zweig.
Criticisms of the works selected Others thought that while the selected authors were worthy, too much emphasis was placed on the complete works of a single author rather than a wider selection of authors and representative works (for instance, all of Shakespeare's plays are included). The second edition of the set already contained 130 authors and 517 individual works. The editors point out that the guides to additional reading for each topic in the Syntopicon refer the interested reader to many more authors.[8]
Criticisms of difficulty The scientific and mathematical selections also came under criticism for being incomprehensible to the average reader, especially with the absence of any sort of critical apparatus. The second edition did drop two scientific works, by Apollonius and Fourier, in part because of their perceived difficulty for the average reader. Nevertheless, the editors steadfastly maintain that average readers are capable of understanding far more than the critics deem possible. Robert Hutchins stated this view in the introduction to the first edition: Because the great bulk of mankind have never had the chance to get a liberal education, it cannot be "proved" that they can get it. Neither can it be "proved" that they cannot. The statement of the ideal, however, is of value in indicating the direction that education should take.[9]
Criticisms of the set's rationale Since the great majority of the works were still in print, one critic noted that the company could have saved two million dollars and simply written a list. Encyclopædia Britannica's aggressive promotion produced solid sales. Dense formatting also did not help readability.[10] The second edition selected translations that were generally considered an improvement, though the cramped typography remained. Through reading plans and the Syntopicon, the editors have attempted to guide readers through the set.[11]
Response to criticisms The editors respond that the set contains wide-ranging debates representing many viewpoints on significant issues, not a monolithic school of thought. Mortimer Adler argued in the introduction to the second edition: Presenting a wide variety and divergence of views or opinions, among which there is likely to be some truth but also much more error, the Syntopicon [and by extension the larger set itself] invites readers to think for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World
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themselves and make up their own minds on every topic under consideration.[12]
See also John Erskine Charles W. Eliot Robert Maynard Hutchins Mortimer J. Adler Educational perennialism Western canon Great Books Harvard Classics Liberal arts
References 1. ^ a b c Mortimer Adler (September 1997). "Selecting works for the 1990 edition of Great Books of the Western World" (http://books.mirror.org/gb.sel1990.html). Great Books Index. Retrieved 2007-05-29. "We did not base our selections on an author's nationality, religion, politics, or field of study; nor on an author's race or gender. Great books were not chosen to make up quotas of any kind; there was no "affirmative action" in the process." 2. ^ Milton Meyer (1993). "Robert Maynard Hutchins: A Memoir" (http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft4w10061d/). University of California Press. Retrieved 2007-05-30. This biography of Robert M. Hutchins contains an extensive discussion of the Great Books project. 3. ^ Carrie Golus (2002-07-11). "Special Collections tells the story of a cornerstone of American education" (http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/020711/greatbooks.shtml). The University of Chicago Chronicle. Retrieved 2007-05-30. 4. ^ "Great Books of the Western World (eBooks @ University of Adelaide)" (http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/literature/gbww/index.html). University of Adelaide. Retrieved 7 June 2012. 5. ^ Sabrina Walters (2001-07-01). "Great Books won Adler fame, scorn" (http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1P24603568.html). Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved 2007-07-01. 6. ^ Peter Temes (2001-07-03). "Death of a Great Reader and Philosopher" (http://web.archive.org/web/20071104012348/http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4155/is_20010703/ai_n13917 760). Chicago Sun-Times. Archived from the original (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4155/is_20010703/ai_n13917760) on 2007-11-04. Retrieved 2007-07-11. 7. ^ John Berlau (August 2001). "What Happened to the Great Ideas? – Mortimer J. Adler's Great Books programs" (http://www.greatbooksacademy.org/newsroom/what-happened-to-the-great-ideas-by-john-berlau/). Insight Magazine Insight on the News 17 (32): 16. Retrieved March 2014. "Harvard University's Henry Louis Gates blasted the Great Books for showing 'profound disrespect for the intellectual capacities of people of color – red, brown or yellow.'" 8. ^ Mortimer J. Adler (1990). "Bibliography of Additional Readings". The Syntopicon: II. Great Books of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World
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Western World, vol. 1-2 (2nd edition ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. pp. 909–996. ISBN 0-85229-531-6. 9. ^ Robert M. Hutchins (1952). "Chapter VI: Education for All". The Great Conversation. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. p. 44. 10. ^ Dwight Macdonald (1952-11-29 with later appendix). "The Book-of-the-Millennium Club" (http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/macdonald-great-books.html). The New Yorker. Retrieved 2007-05-29. "I also wonder how many of the over 100,000 customers who have by now caved in under the pressure of Mr. Harden and his banner-bearing colleagues are doing much browsing in these upland pastures?" Check date values in:
Great Books of the Western World is an act of piety. Anyways, these are the fictitious works that extend beyond the ambit of my ability to comment. 46 books Gulliver’s Travels is yet another mystery, to my mind. This is just my thought on the Great Books of the Western World. Great Books of the Western World Great Books of the Western World is a series of books originally published in the United States in 1952, by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., to present the Great Books in a 54-volume set. I once read a three-hundred page abridged version of Don Quixote, and, after finding that it was an abridged edition, feeling dirty over the matter, I quickly picked up the unabridged version. A financial debacle loomed, until Encyclopædia Britannica altered the marketing strategy and sold the set (as Hutchins had feared) through experienced door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen. If I remember correctly, the reason some choices seem odd is that they were not selected based upon their greatness, per se. It was presented at a gala at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City on April 15, 1952. (ISBN: 9780852295311) from Amazon's Book Store. The Harvard Classics are not susceptible to similar claims. A prominent feature of the collection is a two-volume Syntopicon (meaning "a collection of topics") that includes essays written by Mortimer Adler on 102 "great ideas." The first two volumes would be presented to Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom and U.S. President Harry S. Truman.Sales were initially poor. The Odyssey was included. Of the Harvard Classics, at the time of writing this, I have not read Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana Jr., Minna von Barnhelm by Gotthold Lessing, and The Destruction of Dá Derga’s Hostel. Publisher's Web page (Encyclopædia Britannica) That note should have been written in the item description. One work that makes me wonder is Moby Dick, not because it isn’t among the best works of fiction ever written, but because I wonder what it was about the work that earned it a spot over, say, The Count of Monte Cristo. Let me preface this post by saying that I will not too strongly impose my opinions upon the two sets of books, in the sense that I will only criticize selections on the basis of what I think is within the realm of acceptability. This is the West. Because so many people have a different definition of what a great book is, can we truly define what a great book is? Why reading the great books is a lifelong project, and not a bucket list item The set was designed as an introduction to the Great Books of the Western World, published by the same organization and editors in 1952. Great Books of the Western World by Great Books Foundation. Thanks for the feedback. I’m reading the essay in the topic Angels found in the book Syntopicon I of the Great Books of the Western World series. The Britannica Librarys Great Books of the Western world, by contrast, is much more heavily tilted in favor of philosophy and science — especially philosophy. The College’s syllabus is composed exclusively of the seminal texts that have, for good or for ill, animated Western civilization. Great Books Of The Western World Kant. For example, the works chosen to represent Austen, Dickens and Dostoevsky are other than what I would have picked, but that is no matter, though I might ask readers to comment on whether they think Little Dorrit is better than Great Expectations, for one. The only other comment I have for the Harvard Classics’ fiction is that they were exceptionally well chosen, but I do wish that there would have been more novels included. The second edition is significantly larger than the first (1952). Welcome to E-books Great Books of the Western World. There are many books that people consider to be great books, but what does this truly mean? For example, the book Histories written by Herodotus (which is on our list of Great Books of the Western World to read) is about the origins of the Greco-Persian Wars.As seen in the Kahn Academy videos above, we see that the Greco-Persian Wars occurred because the Hellensitic (i.e. This phrase struck me with an urgency to be discussed. Great Books of the Western World is a series of books originally published in the United States in 1952, by Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., to present the Great Books in a 54-volume set; the second edition of the series comprises 60 volumes.. Among the original students was William Benton, future US Senator and later CEO of the Encyclopædia Britannica. At the end of the day, I can’t complain too much, except to air the minor grievance that cutting the story in half leaves out some key elements in understanding the Western perspective, as it was instantiated. Beginning with Homer, 3000 years ago through to Freud and on to 20th century authors, covering the sciences, maths, philosophy, arts, literature greats etc. Great Books of the Western World (COMPLETE 54 VOLUME MATCHED SET) PLUS "The Great Ideas Today" for the years 1981-88 and 1991 (9 books). Great Books of the Western World contains 517 works from 130 of the most renowned minds throughout hist Encyclopædia Britannica is proud to offer one of the most acclaimed publishing achievements of the 20th century, Great Books of the Western World. Get Free Great Books Of The Western World Kant Textbook and unlimited access to our library … I cannot begin to tell you on what basis this work was chosen, other than the fact that it contains an incredible amount of philosophical and religious ideas. The syntopicon, II -- v. The Great Books of the Western World is a hardcover 60-volume collection (originally 54 volumes) of the books on the Great Books list (517 individual works). However, I do have this feeling that some other works were excluded on the basis that they had to be translated, and, therefore, would have been lacking in the prose department. TOTAL OF 63 BOOKS. This is probably because the editor of the Britannica Library set, Mortimer Adler, was himself a philosopher and historian of philosophy. One major leg up that the Harvard Classics have over the Great Books of the Western World is the inclusion of (at least) an excerpt of Émile. I cannot begin to tell you on what basis this work was chosen, other than the fact that it contains an incredible amount of philosophical and religious ideas. GREAT BOOKS OF THE WESTERN WORLD 1 GREAT BOOKS OF THE WESTERN WORLD A Collection of the Greatest Writings in Western History Author/Title List by Volume: VOLUME 1 and 2 The Syntopicon This unique guide enables you to investigate a particular idea, such as courage or democracy, and compare the perspectives of different authors. The Great Conversation book. During the last couple decades, I’ve occasionally started the Ten Year Reading Plan, but never got very far. Nowhere, It Seems…, Chess Coaching Services (and Reasons for Doing So), Reflection on a First-Year Professorship: The Problem with Ethics Courses. That this is an important element of the human condition, I do no doubt; but I don’t think it merits the choosing of this particular work for the GBWW. Moreover, I think Beowulf possesses glimpses into the human condition that arise from an underrepresented period in Western literary history, making it all the more important. Through this method 50,000 sets were sold in 1961. Great Books of the Western World is a series of books originally published in the United States in 1952 by Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. in an attempt to present the western canon in a single package of 54 volumes. After 1,863 were sold in 1952, less than one-tenth that number were sold the following year. The makers of Encyclopaedia Britannica bring you the Great Books of the Western World. It’s been a while, so I’m not exactly sure. For all that I took the Harvard Classics to the woodshed in the first part of this series, the Great Books of the Western World shall get their fill in this one. I still remain open to being convinced that Gargantua and Pantagruel is a worthy selection, but I found it insufferable, and very few books, especially true classics, make me feel as though I can’t make it through the entire work, as this one did. Unfortunately, the Great Books of the Western World, once again, dropped the ball on this one, but the Harvard Classics contain it. "Great Books of the Western World is a series of books originally published in the United States in 1952 by Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. to present the western canon in a single package of 54 volumes. Page 1 of 50 - About 500 Essays Meaning Of A Great Book. I am not sure why the Harvard Classics contained the Aeneid but not the Odyssey; it’s sort of like cutting a story in half, and missing the point that Rome had a tremendous amount of respect for the Greeks, especially in the historical sense in which Rome declared Greece to be under the protectorate, and virtually equal to Rome. Following each essay is an extensive outline of the idea with page references to relevant passages throughout the collection. Comprising 60 volumes containing 517 works written by 130 authors, these texts capture the major ideas, stories, and discoveries that shaped Western culture. Filed under Great Books and Harvard Classics Series, Literature. I thought to myself ‘how nice would it be if I could compare the selections in the Great Books to that in the Classics.’ I do a quick search and come across your site, wow. ( Log Out / - Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_B...http://britannicashop.britannica.co.u...http://www.thegreatideas.org/index.html. Great Books of the Western World set: 1st edition (1952) and 2nd edition (1990) - The Great Books Index has both lists with links to online texts (mirror.org) 2nd edition (1990) [Included in indexes below]. This is the first time I have visited your site but certainly not the last. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. The Odyssey was included. At the heart of the Thomas Aquinas College curriculum are the great books, the original works of the greatest minds in our tradition, both ancient and modern. The syntopicon, I -- v. 2. Unfortunately, the Great Books of the Western World, once again, dropped the ball on this one, but the Harvard Classics contain it. The other reason for seeking another edition is that the construction of the edition included, which is probably as rough as the original, untranslated text, is absolutely horrible: iIn some places, you aren’t quite sure who is speaking, where the narration begins, ends, and so forth. University president Robert Hutchins collaborated with Mortimer Adler to develop a course, generally aimed at businessmen, for the purpose of filling in gaps in education, to make one more well-rounded and familiar with the "Great Books" and ideas of the past three millennia. On the matter of notes, the work is supposed to be a comedic work, and, as any who has read Candide knows, the difference between getting the jokes and not, is a good set of notes explaining the contemporary reference. Download and Read online Great Books Of The Western World Kant ebooks in PDF, epub, Tuebl Mobi, Kindle Book. Thanks again. Aside from this, there is not too much to complain about, as the fiction selected makes for very good reading. Part of the reason for this inclusion, no doubt, is to be fair to all sides of religion, which includes natural religion. As far as Western foundational literature goes, it would be a bit of alienation to exclude the Iliad, Odyssey, the Aeneid, and The Divine Comedy. On top of this, there is no real continuous plot, and many scholars, while enjoying the book as I do, say that they don’t really know what the mission was, after all is said and done; but as E. E. Cummings once noted, a great book never ends, and so we turn Don Quixote back to the first page and read it again. Greek) regions of the Ionian Penisula had revolted against the Achaemenid Empire of Persia. The heading of this item says: "Great Books of the Western World (54 Volumes)". Certainly, I have no formal complaint against Moby Dick, and the masterful prose attests to its just inclusion. I should note that it is not just by virtue of the fact that I am physicist, and consequently have not read these works, rather, it is because these two works, in particular, were taken out, in the printing of the second edition; and I have had access only to the second edition, and was not previously aware of this ad hoc omission. The story is enjoyable, but as far as being among the top one hundred works of fiction, I would doubt that I have met a dozen people who would claim such. (I hate how so many books do not note that they are abridged!) Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. Let me know if there is any particular set of aspects you would like to know about or comparisons you’d like to see done. In his speech, Hutchins said "This is more than a set of books, and more than a liberal education. The work does contain an important trope, that of man as a wanderer, which is thematic in everything from The Wanderer to Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein. Change ), The Impossibility of Precisely Measuring Positions of Particles in Quantum Physics, Comparing the Great Books of the Western World to the Harvard Classics (Part II): Assessing the Fiction Selections, Response to Pigliucci on Metaphysics and Interpretation of Data, A Superficial Reflection on Nagel’s “Mind and Cosmos”, Quo Vadis, Materialism? The only complement that I could desire is that of Beowulf, which, I would argue, is equally important to understanding the development of the language. It truly is one of the most extraordinary expressions of Romanticism, in all of the history of literature. ” I am not sure why the Harvard Classics contained the Aeneid but not the Odyssey; …” I think you meant to say that the Harvard Classics omitted the Iliad. At any rate, the point should be clear: if you are interested in a taste and the gist, this is a work that can be contracted without offense. Nevertheless, he agreed to the project and paid $60,000 for it.After debates about what to include and how to present it, with an eventual budget of $2,000,000, the project was ready. Other articles where Great Books of the Western World is discussed: Mortimer J. Adler: …Hutchins in editing the 54-volume Great Books of the Western World (1952) and conceived and directed the preparation of its two-volume index of great ideas, the Syntopicon. Table of contents of the Great Books of the Western World (2nd edition, 1990), edited by Mortimer Adler et al., published by Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.. After reading it, I can honestly say that very little was lost. In sum, I think it is egregious that Adler included this work, and I can only think that he did so out of some bizarre personal penchant, or because of the political/philosophical elements of the work that appealed to him. I wish I knew what the philosophy was in selecting the fiction for the GBWW, so feel free to comment on this, if you have any suspicions (or you know why). He proposed selecting the greatest books of the canon, complete and unabridged, having Hutchins and Adler edit them for publishing by Encyclopædia Britannica. This is its meaning for mankind." Hutchins, Robert Maynard (editor) Published by William Benton, Publisher, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. (1952) The aura of light which surrounds them {angels} signifies, according to established conventions of symbolism, the spirituality of angels. In 1963 the editors published Gateway to the Great Books, a ten-volume set of readings designed as an introduction to the authors and themes in the Great Books series. One contraction made by the Harvard Classics, which I feel acceptable, was only including part I of Don Quixote. The collection was available from Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., w… This is a collection of some of public domain books considered by many to represent the greatest works of Western civilization. Coup d’oeil, the list may appear significant, but, in reality, the overlap between the editions is miniscule. Of these, the choice of Lessing’s work strikes me, because I had not previously heard of it, while I often hear reference after reference to his Nathan the Wise. Great Books of the Western World - 54 Volumes by Collective - Robert Maynard Hutchins ( Editor in Chief ) and a great selection of related books, art and collectibles available now at AbeBooks.co.uk. Great Books of the Western World is a series of books originally published in the United States in 1952, by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., to present the Great Books in a 54-volume set. Each one speaks to the reality at the core of human experience, a reality that transcends time or place. To begin with, Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais has to be the worst choice of fiction title in the Great Books of the Western World. The inclusion of The Metamorphosis over The Trial is another minor irritation, which I won’t belabor, except to say that there may be no better allegorical work ever written than the latter; but The Metamorphosis has certainly been en vogue (and is much shorter), so Adler can’t be begrudged on the matter of, as Thomas Jefferson said, “swimming with the fish” in matters of fashion.
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Long before Oprah’s Book Club, there was…
By Mary Ruth Yoe
Photo courtesy Special Collections Research Center
“Quick,” I command an office mate. “Tell me what the Great Books mean to you.” Startled at the question, she hastily offers, “They’re the classics, the books you read in the core, the ones Hutchins talked about.” If I’d asked, she would have named names. Thucydides, Shakespeare, Freud. But she would not have mentioned the 54-volume set that the University, in partnership with the Encyclopædia Britannica, published in 1952 as the Great Books of the Western World.
Those Great Books comprised 443 works (by 74 authors, all dead and male, most white) crammed into 32,000 pages of double-columned, 9-point type (the type you’re reading, perhaps with some difficulty, is 9.5 points). They are the subject of a new book with a title almost as long as the 62-inch, rainbow-hued set itself: A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books (Public Affairs). Written by Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam, A Great Idea at the Time is a lively look at a mid-20th-century phenom now almost forgotten.
The business venture was rooted in Robert M. Hutchins’s belief that “[t]he aim of education is wisdom,” an enlightenment achieved via Socratic dialogue centered on great texts. Within a year of arriving at Chicago as the nation’s youngest university president, Hutchins and his sidekick, philosopher Mortimer Adler, were leading 20 undergrads through weekly discussions of such works, class sessions sprinkled with visiting luminaries like Lillian Gish and Gertrude Stein.
In 1943 the men started a Great Books group for Chicago bigwigs and their wives; over the next few years thousands of Great Books discussion groups sprang up. From the start, supply couldn’t always keep up with demand for the sometimes obscure texts. Adman–turned–U of C vice president William H. Benton had an aha moment: Hey, kids, let’s put out the Great Books!
Beam has fun explaining how the greats got chosen by committee vote, recorded in notes such as, “All against Twain want it understood that they love him” (Huckleberry Finn Volume 48 of the second edition, issued in 1990)* . And how the publishers tried to make the set useful to buyers who didn’t really want to read it, devoting two volumes to the Syntopicon, a 2,428-page index listing the works’ allusions to 102 Great Ideas, from Angel to World. The ideas, like the texts, had some curious omissions: Hutchins testily complained to Adler, “[M]ost of my friends are interested in money, fame, power, and sex—I don’t see those in the 102 ideas. What are we going to do about those?” (In Adler’s defense, Wealth, Honor, Tyranny, and Desire were among the topical umbrellas.)
In a two-part essay (excerpted from his best-seller, How to Read a Book) published in the Magazine’s February and March 1940 issues, Adler writes about “What a Great Book Is.” It is not, he declares, necessarily a classic—nor is that word necessarily a compliment: “Mark Twain, you will recall, defined a classic as ‘something that everyone wants to have read, and nobody wants to read.’”
But that is not the whole Truth, Beam makes plain. As an Idea, selecting the classics for the masses had more than an Element of hubris and hucksterism and even humorlessness, but it also played, at least in part, to the lure of Imagination.
*Corrected November 20, 2008
