Great Books of the Western World
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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. The series is now in its second edition and contains 60 volumes. It retails for US$1,195 (GB£585 or €861).
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[edit] History
The project got its start at the University of Chicago. 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. Among the original students was William Benton, future US Senator and then CEO of the Encyclopædia Britannica. It was he who proposed a series of books presenting the greatest works of the canon, complete and unabridged, to be edited by Hutchins and Adler and published by Encyclopædia Britannica. Hutchins was wary, fearing that the works would be sold and treated as encyclopedias, cheapening the great books they were. Nevertheless, he was persuaded to agree to the project and pay $60,000 for it.
After several debates about what was to be included and how the work was to be presented, and the budget exploding to $2,000,000, the project was ready for publication. It was presented at a gala at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City on April 15, 1952. In a speech made that night, 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." It was decided that the first two volumes would be presented to Queen Elizabeth and President Truman.
Sales were initially poor. After 1,863 were sold in 1952, less than one-tenth that number were sold the following year. 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 salespeople. Through this method 50,000 sets were sold in 1961. 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. Each year from 1961 to 1998 the editors published The Great Ideas Today, an annual update on the applicability of the Great Books to current issues.
[edit] The works
Originally published in 54 volumes, The Great Books of the Western World covers topics including fiction, history, poetry, natural science, mathematics, philosophy, drama, politics, religion, economics, and ethics. The first volume, titled The Great Conversation, contains an introduction and discourse on liberal education by Hutchins. The next two volumes, "The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon", were conceived by Adler 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 in all the works 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 were grouped into 102 chapters, for which Adler wrote 102 introductions. The volumes contained the following works:
Volume 1
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
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
Volume 5
Volume 6
Volume 7
Volume 8
Volume 9
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 Pheroids
- On Spirals
- On the Equilibrium of Planes
- The Sand-Reckoner
- Quadrature of the Parabola
- On Floating Bodies
- Book of Lemmas
- The Method Treating of Mechanical Problems
- Apollonius of Perga
- Nicomachus of Gerasa
Volume 12
Volume 13
Volume 14
Volume 15
Volume 16
- Ptolemy
- Nicolaus Copernicus
- Johannes Kepler
- Epitome of Copernican Astronomy (Books IV - V)
- The Harmonies of the World (Book V)
Volume 17
Volume 18
Volume 19
- Thomas Aquinas
- Summa Theologiae (First part complete, selections from second part)
Volume 20
- Thomas Aquinas
- Summa Theologiae (Selections from second and third parts and supplement)
Volume 21
Volume 22
Volume 23
Volume 24
Volume 25
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
Volume 27
- William Shakespeare
- Twelfth Night; or, What You Will
- 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
- Galileo Galilei
- William Harvey
- On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals
- On the Circulation of Blood
- On the Generation of Animals
Volume 29
Volume 30
- Sir Francis Bacon
- Advancement of Learning
- Novum Organum
- New Atlantis
Volume 31
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
- Christian Huygens
- Treatise on Light
Volume 35
Volume 36
Volume 37
Volume 38
- Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu
- Jean Jacques Rousseau
- A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
- A Discourse on Political Economy
- The Social Contract
Volume 39
Volume 40
Volume 41
Volume 42
- Immanuel Kant
- The Critique of Pure Reason
- Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals
- The Critique of Practical Reason
- Preface and Introduction to the Metaphysical Elements of Ethics with a note on Conscience (This and the following two selections are excerpts from The Metaphysics of Morals.)
- General Introduction to the Metaphysic of Morals
- The Science of Right
- The Critique of Judgement
Volume 43
- American State Papers
- Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay
- John Stuart Mill
- On Liberty
- Considerations on Representative Government
- Utilitarianism
Volume 44
Volume 45
- Antoine Laurent Lavoisier
- Elements of Chemistry
- Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier
- Analytical Theory of Heat
- Michael Faraday
- Experimental Researches in Electricity
Volume 46
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- The Philosophy of Right
- The Philosophy of History
Volume 47
Volume 48
Volume 49
Volume 50
Volume 51
Volume 52
Volume 53
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
[edit] Second edition
In 1990 a second edition of the Great Books of the Western World was published, this time 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 from the set: 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 to the set, and said that the Syntopicon should have been expanded to include references to the Qur'an. He addressed criticisms that the set was too heavily Western European and did not adequately represent women and minority authors.
The pre-20th century books added (volume numbering is not strictly compatible with the first edition due to rearrangement of some books—see the complete table of contents for the second edition):
Volume 20
- John Calvin
- Institutes of the Christian Religion (Selections)
Volume 23
Volume 31
- Moliere
- The School for Wives
- The Critique of the School for Wives
- Tartuffe
- Don Juan
- The Miser
- The Would-Be Gentleman
- The Would-Be Invalid
- Jean Racine
Volume 34
- Voltaire
- Denis Diderot
- Rameau's Nephew
Volume 43
Volume 44
Volume 45
Volume 46
Volume 47
Volume 48
Volume 52
The six volumes of 20th century material consisted of the following:
Volume 55
- William James
- Henri Bergson
- John Dewey
- Experience in Education
- Alfred North Whitehead
- Science and the Modern World
- Bertrand Russell
- Martin Heidegger
- What is Metaphysics?
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- 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
- Werner Heisenberg
- Physics and Philosophy
- Erwin Schrödinger
- Theodosius Dobzhansky
- C.H. Waddington
- The Nature of Life
Volume 57
- Thorstein Veblen
- R.H. Tawney
- The Acquisitive Society
- John Maynard Keynes
Volume 58
- Sir James George Frazer
- The Golden Bough (selections)
- Max Weber
- Essays in Sociology (selections)
- Johan Huizinga
- Claude Levi-Strauss
- Structural Anthropology (selections)
Volume 59
- Henry James
- George Bernard Shaw
- Joseph Conrad
- Anton Chekhov
- Luigi Pirandello
- Marcel Proust
- Willa Cather
- Thomas Mann
- James Joyce
Volume 60
- Virginia Woolf
- Franz Kafka
- D.H. Lawrence
- The Prussian Officer
- T.S. Eliot
- Eugene O'Neill
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
- William Faulkner
- Bertolt Brecht
- Ernest Hemingway
- George Orwell
- Samuel Beckett
[edit] Criticisms and responses
The Great Books of the Western World have received their share of criticism from the time of their publication. The stress Hutchins placed on the monumental importance of these works was an easy target for those who dismissed the project as elites in their ivory tower pretending to save the world. Likewise the project has been attacked for further promoting the deification of dead white males, while ignoring contributions of females and minorities to the canon. This mostly emerged later with the feminist and civil rights movements.
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.
In response, such criticisms have been discounted as ad hominem and unfairly discriminatory in themselves. The counter-argument maintains that such criticisms appear to dismiss or diminish 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.
Others thought that while the selected authors were worthy, there was too much emphasis on the complete works of a single author (even less notable ones) rather than a wider selection of authors and representative works (for instance, all of Shakespeare's plays are included, but no Christopher Marlowe or Ben Jonson.) Defenders of the set have pointed out that any reasonable number of volumes cannot possibly represent all authors or works that some readers might find desirable, and that any selection of authors and works is bound to be controversial to some extent. The second edition of the set already contains 130 authors and 517 individual works. Ironically, the inclusion of so many writers and so much material has led to complaints of cramped typography. The editors point out that the guides to additional reading for each topic in the Syntopicon refer the interested reader to many more authors—including, incidentally, Marlowe and Jonson.
The scientific and mathematical selections also came under criticism for being incomprehensible to the average reader, especially absent any sort of critical apparatus. The second edition did drop two scientific works, by Apollonius and Fourier, at least in part because of their perceived difficulty for the average reader. On the other hand, the editors have maintained from the beginning of the project that average readers may be capable of understanding far more than some academic 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.
Yet another criticism was that the series was in reality more for show than for substance. Adler insisted on adding the Syntopicon in order to emphasize the unity of the set and encourage readers, but many dismissed it as unwieldy and useless. As the great majority of the works were still in print, some critics noted that the company could have saved 2 million dollars and simply written a list. While the sales were good through the aggressive promotion Encyclopædia Britannica put forth, the percentages of those purchased that were actually read to any significant extent, let alone completed, must still be rather small. Some argued that their main use was to create the illusion of being cultured, without any real substance behind it, only a modest financial investment. Furthermore the translations used were generally seen to be poor, given the scope and aim of the project, which certainly did not encourage readership. In an effort to keep ballooning costs down, the publishers decided to use only translations that were in the public domain, and often quite dated. This combined with the dense formatting did not help its readability.
The second edition obtained translations that were generally considered an improvement, though the problem of cramped typography may be unavoidable in a set that includes so much material. As for the charge that many sets go unread, the same could quite possibly be said for many other books sold every year. Through reading plans and the indexed treatment of subjects in the Syntopicon, the editors have made efforts to provide readers with some guidance on reading in the set.
Robert M. Pirsig, in his autobiographic novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, has his main character Phædrus criticize the Great Books project radically for misestimating the value of the books:
- "He came to hate them vehemently, and to assail them with every kind of invective he could think of, not because they were irrelevant but for exactly the opposite reason. The more he studied, the more convinced he became that no one had yet told the damage to this world that had resulted from our unconscious acceptance of their thought."
To which the editors respond that the set contains wide-ranging debates representing many viewpoints on significant issues, not a monolithic presentation of a particular 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 themselves and make up their own minds on every topic under consideration.
[edit] External links
- Official Britannica web page for the Great Books
- Great Books web pages by Alan Nicoll
- University of Chicago announcement of an exhibition offers some history of the Great Books concept
- The Book-of-the-Millennium Club, a New Yorker article from 1952 critical of the Great Books
- The Great Books list a contemporary and progressive list of the great books
- A "Great Books" College Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, CA uses Great Books instead of textbooks for classwork
