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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 series is now in its second edition and contains 60 volumes.


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


Originally published in 54 volumes, ''The Great Books of the Western World'' covers topics including ", 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 3



Volume 4




Volume 6




Volume 8



Volume 9



Volume 10





Volume 13














Volume 25




Volume 27



Volume 28



Volume 29





Volume 32




Volume 34



Volume 35



Volume 36





Volume 39






Volume 43














SECOND EDITION


In '' 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 46





The six volumes of 20th century material consisted of the following:


Volume 55



Volume 56



Volume 57




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 Movement s.

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.

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 .)

The scientific and mathematical selections also came under criticism for being incomprehensible to the average reader, especially absent any sort of critical apparatus.

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 Publisher s 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.

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."


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