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 54 volumes. A second edition was published in 1990, in 60 volumes. Some translations were updated, some works were removed, and there were additions from the 20th century, in six new volumes.
The original editors had three criteria for including a book in the series drawn from Western civilization: the book must be relevant to contemporary matters, and not only important in its historical context; it must be rewarding to re-read repeatedly with respect to liberal education; and it must be a part of "the great conversation about the great ideas", relevant to at least 25 of the 102 "Great Ideas" as identified by the editor of the series's comprehensive index, the Syntopicon, to which they belonged. The books were chosen not on the basis of ethnic and cultural inclusiveness (historical influence being seen as sufficient for inclusion), nor on whether the editors agreed with the authors' views."Selecting Works for the 1990 Edition of the Great Books of the Western World" , Dr. Mortimer Adler
History The project for the Great Books of the Western World began at the University of Chicago, where the president, Robert Hutchins, worked with Mortimer Adler to develop there a course of a type originated by John Erskine at Columbia University in 1921, with the innovation of a "round table" approach to reading and discussing great books among professors and undergraduates.Adler, Mortimer Jerome (1988). Reforming Education, Geraldine Van Doren, ed. (New York: MacMillan), p. xx.—generally aimed at businessmen. The purposes they had in mind were for filling the gaps in their liberal arts education (including Hutchins' own, self-confessed gaps) and to render the reader an intellectually rounded man or woman familiar with the Great Books of the Western canon and knowledgeable of the Great Ideas visited in the "Great Conversation" over the course of three millennia.
An original student of the project was William Benton, who at the time was the chief executive officer of the Encyclopædia Britannica publishing company and later was a United States senator. In 1943, he proposed selecting the greatest books of the Western canon, and that Hutchins and Adler produce unabridged editions for publication by Encyclopædia Britannica. Hutchins was wary at first, fearing that commodifying the books would devalue them as cultural artifacts; but he agreed to the business deal and was paid $60,000 for his work on the project. Benton at first refused the deal on the basis that the set of works selected would be just that, artifacts, never to be read.
By chance, Adler was re-reading a source he was using for a book he was writing at the time, How to Think about War and Peace. He noted to the person who had provided the book for him that he had missed the instructive passage that this person was pointing out to him and wondered why that had happened. They realized that Adler had read the book focusing on one idea about war and peace. Adler struck on the idea of making an index for the whole set for Hutchins, so that readers could have "random access" to the works, with the desired result that they would develop a greater interest in the works.Adler, Mortimer J. (1977). Philosopher at Large (New York: MacMillan), p. 237.
Failure to come to terms
After deciding what subjects and authors to include, and how to present the materials, the indexing part of the project was begun, with a budget of another $60,000. Adler began compiling what his group called the "Greek index" bearing on the works selected from ancient Greece, expecting completion of the entire project within six months. After two years, the Greek index was declared to be a resounding failure. The inferior terms under the Great Ideas across the centuries in which the Greek-language works were written had shifted in their significance, and the preliminary index reflected that, the ideas presented not having "come to terms" with each other.Adler, Mortimer J. (1977). Philosopher at Large (New York: MacMillan), pp. 244-246.
During those times, Adler had a flash of insight. He set his group re-reading each work preliminarily with a single assigned subordinate idea in mind in the form of a fairly elaborate phrase. If any instances of the idea appeared, they could collate them with co-ordinate ideas of a similar type collected the same way, use the material thus noted to better re-frame the larger idea structure and then finally start re-reading the work in its entirety with revised phrasing to do the complete indexing, of ideas.Adler, Mortimer (aft. 1957). "The Joy of Learning". The Radical Academy website.
Eventual popular success
In 1945, Adler began writing the initial forms of the essays for the Great Ideas and six years and $940,000 more later, 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 United Kingdom, and to Harry S. Truman, the incumbent U.S. president. Adler appeared on the cover of Time for a story about the set of works and its idea index and inventory of Western topics of thought at large, of sorts.Time, March 17, 1952
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. This biography of Robert M. Hutchins contains an extensive discussion of the Great Books project. According to Alex Beam, Great Books of the Western World eventually sold a million sets.Beam, Alex (November 10, 2008). "A great idea at the time." Kirkus Reviews. The Internet and the E-book reader have made available some of the Great Books of the Western World in an on-line format.
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 the 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 following list of Volumes 1–54 is for the first edition (1952). The second edition (1990) omitted "The Great Conversation" by the first editor-in-chief, Robert Maynard Hutchins. Because of this, a number of the volumes of the second edition are numbered one less than they are in the first (e.g., Homer is Volume 4 of the first edition but Volume 3 in the second, and so on). This is of interest because Volumes 3 - 54 are numbered in historical order of the first included author's lifetime, which may lead to some confusion for novice readers when, for example, a 17th-century writer (Kepler) is included in the same volume as Ptolemy (2d century AD).
With one exception, Volumes 3–54 are labelled with all of the included authors listed on the spine. Volumes 40 and 55–60 (second edition) are labelled by subject matter (e.g. volume 57 is called "20th Century Social Sciences I"). The inside covers of volumes 3–60 display useful parallel timelines of all the authors lifespans entitled "Chronology of the Great Authors. The timeline is divided into three eras: Ancient Greece and Rome; The Middle Ages Through the Eighteenth Century; The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.
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
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 Alcestis Heracleidae The Suppliants The Trojan Women Ion Helen Andromache Electra Bacchantes Hecuba Heracles Mad The Phoenician Women Orestes Iphigenia in Tauris Iphigenia in 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 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 (translated by E. M. Edghill) On Interpretation (translated by E. M. Edghill) Prior Analytics (translated by A. J. Jenkinson) Posterior Analytics (translated by G. R. G. Mure) Topics (translated by A. W. Pickard-Cambridge) Sophistical Refutations (translated by A. W. Pickard-Cambridge) Physics (translated by R. P. Hardie & R. K. Gaye) On the Heavens (translated by J. L. Stocks) On Generation and Corruption (translated by H. H. Joachim)