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Great Books of the Western World

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The Great Books of the Western World (ISBN 0852295316) 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 Great Books

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, making 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 salesmen. 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.

The works

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

Volume 3

Volume 4

Volume 5

Volume 6

Volume 7

  • Plato
    • Dialogues
    • Seventh Letter

Volume 8

Volume 9

Volume 10

Volume 11

Volume 12

Volume 13

Volume 14

Volume 15

Volume 16

Volume 17

Volume 18

Volume 19

Volume 20

Volume 21

Volume 22

Volume 23

Volume 24

Volume 25

Volume 26

Volume 27

Volume 28

Volume 29

Volume 30

Volume 31

Volume 32

Volume 33

Volume 34

Volume 35

Volume 36

Volume 37

Volume 38

Volume 39

Volume 40

Volume 41

Volume 42

Volume 43

Volume 44

Volume 45

Volume 46

Volume 47

Volume 48

Volume 49

Volume 50

Volume 51

Volume 52

Volume 53

Volume 54

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 Qu'ran. 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 here):

Volume 20

Volume 23

Volume 31

Volume 34

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

Volume 56

Volume 57

Volume 58

Volume 59

Volume 60

Criticism

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.

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 pooh-poohed it as unwieldy and useless. 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.

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