Great Books of the Western World
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The Great Books 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. The
series is now in its second edition and contains 60 volumes. It
retails for US$1,195 (GB£585 or ˆ861). The list of Great Books
is maintained by the Great Books Foundation, and is part of the
Great Books curriculum.
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 later CEO of the
Encyclopædia Britannica. He proposed selecting the greatest
books of the canon, complete and unabridged, having Hutchins and
Adler edit them for publishing by Encyclopædia Britannica.
Hutchins was wary, fearing that the works would be sold and
treated as encyclopedias, thereby cheapening them. 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. It was presented at a gala at
the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City on April 15, 1952. 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 volumes would be presented to Queen
Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom and U.S. President Harry S.
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
The works
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. The volumes contained the
following works, color-coding the spines to denote the
categories::
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
