Great books

The great books are those that tradition, and various institutions and authorities, have regarded as constituting or best expressing the foundations of Western culture (the Western canon is a similar but broader designation); derivatively the term also refers to a curriculum or method of education based around a list of such books. Mortimer Adler lists three criteria for including a book on the list:

• the book has contemporary significance; that is, it has relevance to the problems and issues of our times;
• the book is inexhaustible; it can be read again and again with benefit; "This is an exacting criterion, an ideal that is fully attained by only a small number of the 511 works that we selected. It is approximated in varying degrees by the rest."[3]
• the book is relevant to a large number of the great ideas and great issues that have occupied the minds of thinking individuals for the last 25 centuries.[4]

The first words of Robert M. Hutchins' preface to the 1952 Great Books of the Western World series declared:

Until lately the West has regarded it as self-evident that the road to education lay through great books. No man was educated unless he was acquainted with the masterpieces of his tradition. There never was very much doubt in anybody's mind about which the masterpieces were. They were the books that had endured and that the common voice of mankind called the finest creations, in writing, of the Western mind.[5]

Hutchins and his circle believed textbooks, designed as stepping stones to reach the great understanding achieved by certain authors, and, yes, which often included many important details of practical use, were really becoming a problem in replacing the great books, that is, by becoming the final steps of education in their place. Because in that way, they reduced the ability for learners to attain to the full understanding, by principles, of what they were capable of learning and what the great authors were able to well-convey about the difficult topics they treated or, at least, what those authors were among the best able to convey with regard to the topics it was their primary concern to address in those writings.

In America, Thomas Jefferson,[6] well known for his interest in higher education, frequently composed great books lists for his friends and correspondents, for example, for Peter Carr in 1785[7] and again in 1787.[8]

In 1909, Harvard University published a 51-volume Great Books series, titled the Harvard Classics. These volumes are now in the public domain.

Great Books of the Western World came about as the result of a discussion among American academics and educators, starting in the 1920s and 1930s and begun by Prof. John Erskine of Columbia University,[9] about how to improve the higher education system by returning it to the western liberal arts tradition of broad cross-disciplinary learning. These academics and educators included Robert Hutchins, Mortimer Adler, Stringfellow Barr, Scott Buchanan, Jacques Barzun, and Alexander Meiklejohn. The view among them was that the emphasis on narrow specialization in American colleges had harmed the quality of higher education by failing to expose students to the important products of Western civilization and thought, an emphasis contibuting to the other motives, bearing concurrent results, specified in the above prefatory remarks to the set.

They were at odds both with much of the existing educational establishment and with contemporary educational theory, which caused educational theorists like Sidney Hook[10] and John Dewey (see pragmatism) to disagree with the premise that there was crossover in education.

In 1920, Professor Erskine taught the first course based on the "Great Books" program, titled "General Honors", at Columbia University, and helped mould its core curriculum.[11][12] The course, however, initially began to fail shortly after its introduction due to numerous disputes between senior faculty over the best way to conduct classes, as well as concerns about the rigour of the courses. This resulted in junior faculty, including Mark Van Doren and Mortimer Adler after 1923, teaching parts of the course. The course was discontinued in 1928, though later reinstated. Adler left for the University of Chicago in 1929, where he continued his work on the theme, and along with the University president, Robert M. Hutchins, held an annual seminar of great books. In 1937, when Mark Van Doren redesigned the course, it was already being taught at St. John's College, Annapolis, in addition to the University of Chicago. This course was later named Humanities A for freshmen, and then subsequently evolved into Literature Humanities.[12] Survivors, however, include Columbia's Core Curriculum, the Common Core at Chicago, and the Core Curriculum at Boston University, each heavily focused on the "great books" of the Western canon.

Modern day university and college Great Books Programs are inspired by the Great Books movement that began in the United States during the 1920s. The aim of such programs is a return to the Western Liberal Arts tradition in education, as a correction to the extreme disciplinary specializations common within the academy. The essential component of such programs is a high degree of engagement with whole primary texts, the Great Books. The curricula of Great Books programs often follow a canon of texts considered more or less essential to a student's education, such as Plato's Republic, or Dante's Divine Comedy. Such programs often focus exclusively on Western culture. Their employment of primary texts dictates an interdisciplinary approach, as most of the Great Books do not fall neatly under the prerogative of a single contemporary academic discipline. Great Books programs often include designated discussion groups as well as lectures, and have small class sizes. In general students in such programs receive an abnormally high degree of attention from their professors, as part of the overall aim of fostering a community of learning.

There are only a few true "Great Books Programs" still in operation. These schools focus almost exclusively on the Great Books Curriculum throughout enrolment and do not offer classes analogous to those commonly offered at other colleges. The first, and most well known, of these schools is St. John's College in Annapolis and Santa Fe (program established in 1937);[13] it was followed by Shimer College in Chicago, the Integral Program[14] at Saint Mary's College of California (1955), Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, California (est. 1971), Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in Merrimack, New Hampshire (est. 1978), and Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in Warner, New Hampshire. More recent schools with this type of curriculum include New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho (est. 1994), Gutenberg College in Eugene, Oregon (est. 1994), Harrison Middleton University in Tempe, Arizona (est. 1998), Wyoming Catholic College in Lander, Wyoming (est. 2005), and Imago Dei College in Oak Glen, California (est. 2010). Fordham University's Honors Program at Rose Hill incorporates the Great Books curriculum into a rigorous first four semesters in the program. Loyola University Chicago's Honors Program combines a Great Books curriculum with additional elective classes on subjects not covered in traditional Western thought over a rigorous four year program.[15] The University of Notre Dame's Program of Liberal Studies, established in 1950, is a highly regarded Great Books Program that operates as a separate institution within the College of Liberal Arts. Dharma Realm Buddhist University is the first Great Books school to offer curriculum combining Eastern and Western classics.[16]

The Center for the Study of the Great Ideas advances the Great Conversation found in the Great Books by providing Adler's guidance, and resource materials through both live and on-line seminars, educational and philosophical consultation, international presence on the Internet, access to the Center's library collection of books, essays, articles, journals and audio/video programs. Center programs are unique in that they do not replicate other existing programs either started or developed by Adler.

In contemporary scholarship, the Great Books curriculum was drawn into the popular debate about multiculturalism, traditional education, the "culture war," and the role of the intellectual in American life. Many had issue with the lack of culture added to this list in both the first and second editions due to its lack of diversity in ethnic origin, as many Hispanic and African American documents were overlooked because they did not meet the ideals, of the Great ideas that the chosen texts had to meet a total of 25 of at the least, to be considered as Great books. Much of this debate centered on reactions to the publication of The Closing of the American Mind in 1987 by Allan Bloom.[65] In his book, Allan Bloom suggested that the shortcomings of teaching the methods of the Great books is that it focuses primarily on historical reading without allowing for point of view of the reader in today’s day in age. He argued that this limited the ability for our knowledge to grow, given that no perspective was given in regards to the advancement of civilization past the date of these books.

The Great Books of the Western World is a hardcover 60-volume collection (originally 54 volumes) of the books on the Great Books list (517 individual works). A prominent feature of the collection is a two-volume Syntopicon (meaning "a collection of topics") that includes essays written by Mortimer Adler on 102 "great ideas." Following each essay is an extensive outline of the idea with page references to relevant passages throughout the collection. The collection is available from Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., which owns the copyright.

Shortly after Adler retired from the Great Books Foundation in 1989, a second edition (1990) of the Great Books of the Western World was published; it included more Hispanic and female authors and, for the first time, works by black authors.[66] During his tenure as president of the Foundation, Adler had resisted such additions.[67]

We did not base our selections on an author's nationality, religion, politics, or field of study; nor on an author's race or gender. Great books were not chosen to make up quotas of any kind; there was no "affirmative action" in the process ... we chose the Great books on the basis of their relevance to at least 25 of the 102 great ideas. Many of the Great books are relevant to a much larger number of the 102 great ideas, as many as 75 or more great ideas, a few to all 102 great ideas. In sharp contrast are the good books that are relevant to less than 10 or even as few as 4 or 5 great ideas. We placed such books in the lists of Recommended Readings to be found in the last section in each of the 102 chapters of the "Syntopicon". Here readers will find many twentieth-century female authors, black authors, and Latin American authors whose works we recommended but did not include in the second edition of the great books.[3]

In the course of history ... new books have been written that have won their place in the list. Books once thought entitled to belong to it have been superseded; and this process of change will continue as long as men can think and write. It is the task of every generation to reassess the tradition in which it lives, to discard what it cannot use, and to bring into context with the distant and intermediate past the most recent contributions to the Great Conversation.[68]

The following is an example list, in chronological order, compiled from How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler (1940), and How to Read a Book, 2nd ed. by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren (1972):

Ancient (before AD 500) :

1. Homer – Iliad; Odyssey
2. The Old Testament
3. Aeschylus – Tragedies
4. Sophocles – Tragedies
5. Herodotus – Histories
6. Euripides – Tragedies
7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War
8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings
9. Aristophanes – Comedies
10. Plato – Dialogues
11. Aristotle – Works
12. Epicurus – "Letter to Herodotus"; "Letter to Menoecus"
13. Euclid – Elements
14. Archimedes – Works
15. Apollonius – Conics
16. Cicero – Works (esp. Orations; On Friendship; On Old Age; Republic; Laws; Tusculan Disputations; Offices)
17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things
18. Virgil – Works (esp. Aeneid)
19. Horace – Works (esp. Odes and Epodes; The Art of Poetry)
20. Livy – History of Rome
21. Ovid – Works (esp. Metamorphoses)
22. Quintilian – Institutes of Oratory
23. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia
24. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola; Germania; Dialogus de oratoribus (Dialogue on Oratory)
25. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic
26. Epictetus – Discourses; Enchiridion
27. Ptolemy – Almagest
28. Lucian – Works (esp. The Way to Write History; The True History; The Sale of Creeds; Alexander the Oracle Monger; Charon; The Sale of Lives; The Fisherman; Dialogue of the Gods; Dialogues of the Sea-Gods; Dialogues of the Dead)
29. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations
30. Galen – On the Natural Faculties
31. The New Testament
32. Plotinus – The Enneads
33. St. Augustine – "On the Teacher"; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine

Medieval (AD 500—1450) :

34. The Volsungs Saga or Nibelungenlied
35. The Song of Roland
36. The Saga of Burnt Njál
37. Maimonides – The Guide for the Perplexed
38. St. Thomas Aquinas – Of Being and Essence; Summa Contra Gentiles; Of the Governance of Rulers; Summa Theologica
39. Dante Alighieri – The New Life (La Vita Nuova); "On Monarchy"; Divine Comedy
40. Giovanni Boccaccio - The Decameron
41. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales
42. Thomas à Kempis – The Imitation of Christ

Modern (after AD 1450) :

43. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks
44. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
45. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly; Colloquies
46. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
47. Thomas More – Utopia
48. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises
49. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel
50. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion
51. Michel de Montaigne – Essays
52. William Gilbert – On the Lodestone and Magnetic Bodies
53. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote
54. Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
55. Francis Bacon – Essays; The Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum; New Atlantis
56. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays
57. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Two New Sciences
58. Johannes Kepler – The Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Harmonices Mundi
59. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; Generation of Animals
60. Grotius – The Law of War and Peace
61. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan; Elements of Philosophy
62. René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy; Principles of Philosophy; The Passions of the Soul
63. Corneille – Tragedies (esp. The Cid, Cinna)
64. John Milton – Works (esp. the minor poems; Areopagitica; Paradise Lost; Samson Agonistes)
65. Molière – Comedies (esp. The Miser; The School for Wives; The Misanthrope; The Doctor in Spite of Himself; Tartuffe; The Tradesman Turned Gentleman; The Imaginary Invalid; The Affected Ladies)
66. Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensées; Scientific Treatises
67. John Bunyan - The Pilgrim's Progress
68. Boyle – The Sceptical Chymist
69. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light
70. Benedict de Spinoza – Political Treatises; Ethics
71. John Locke – A Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; An Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Some Thoughts Concerning Education
72. Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies (esp. Andromache; Phaedra; Athalie (Athaliah))
73. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Opticks
74. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays on Human Understanding; Monadology
75. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe; Moll Flanders
76. Jonathan Swift – The Battle of the Books; A Tale of a Tub; A Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal
77. William Congreve – The Way of the World
78. George Berkeley – A New Theory of Vision; A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
79. Alexander Pope – An Essay on Criticism; The Rape of the Lock; An Essay on Man
80. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; The Spirit of the Laws
81. Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary
82. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones
83. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; Lives of the Poets
84. David Hume – A Treatise of Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding; History of England
85. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Discourse on Inequality; On Political Economy; Emile: or, On Education; The Social Contract; Confessions
86. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
87. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations
88. William Blackstone – Commentaries on the Laws of England
89. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace
90. Edward Gibbon – The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography
91. James Boswell – Journal; The Life of Samuel Johnson
92. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry)
93. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers (together with the Articles of Confederation; United States Constitution and United States Declaration of Independence)
94. Jeremy Bentham – Comment on the Commentaries; Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions
95. Johann Wolfgang Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth
96. Thomas Robert Malthus – An Essay on the Principle of Population
97. John Dalton – A New System of Chemical Philosophy
98. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat
99. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – The Phenomenology of Spirit; Science of Logic; Elements of the Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History
100. William Wordsworth – Poems (esp. Lyrical Ballads; Lucy poems; sonnets; The Prelude)
101. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems (esp. Kubla Khan; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ); Biographia Literaria
102. David Ricardo – On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
103. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma
104. Carl von Clausewitz – On War
105. Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love
106. François Guizot – History of Civilization in France
107. Lord Byron – Don Juan
108. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism
109. Michael Faraday – The Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity
110. Nikolai Lobachevsky – Geometrical Researches on the Theory of Parallels
111. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology
112. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy
113. Honoré Balzac – Works (esp. Le Père Goriot; Le Cousin Pons; Eugénie Grandet; Cousin Bette; César Birotteau)
114. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal
115. Victor Hugo - Les Misérables
116. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter
117. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America
118. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; Principles of Political Economy; On Liberty; Considerations on Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography
119. Charles Darwin – On the Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography
120. William Makepeace Thackeray – Works (esp. Vanity Fair; The History of Henry Esmond; The Virginians; Pendennis)
121. Charles Dickens – Works (esp. Pickwick Papers; Our Mutual Friend; David Copperfield; Dombey and Son; Oliver Twist; A Tale of Two Cities; Hard Times)
122. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
123. George Boole – The Laws of Thought
124. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden
125. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – Das Kapital (Capital); The Communist Manifesto
126. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch
127. Herman Melville – Typee; Moby-Dick; Billy Budd
128. Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov
129. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories
130. Henry Thomas Buckle – A History of Civilization in England
131. Francis Galton – Inquiries into Human Faculties and Its Development
132. Bernhard Riemann – The Hypotheses of Geometry
133. Henrik Ibsen – Plays (esp. Peer Gynt; Brand; Hedda Gabler; Emperor and Galilean; A Doll's House; The Wild Duck; The Master Builder)
134. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; "What Is Art?"; Twenty-Three Tales
135. Richard Dedekind – Theory of Numbers
136. Wilhelm Wundt – Physiological Psychology; Outline of Psychology
137. Mark Twain – The Innocents Abroad; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court; The Mysterious Stranger
138. Henry Adams – History of the United States; Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres; The Education of Henry Adams; Degradation of Democratic Dogma
139. Charles Peirce – Chance, Love, and Logic; Collected Papers
140. William Sumner – Folkways
141. Oliver Wendell Holmes – The Common Law; Collected Legal Papers
142. William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; A Pluralistic Universe; Essays in Radical Empiricism
143. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors
144. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; On the Genealogy of Morality; The Will to Power; Twilight of the Idols; The Antichrist
145. Georg Cantor – Transfinite Numbers
146. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method; The Foundations of Science
147. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality; Introduction to Psychoanalysis; Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego; The Ego and the Id; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
148. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces
149. Max Planck – Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography
150. Henri Bergson – Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
151. John Dewey – How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; The Quest for Certainty; Logic – The Theory of Inquiry
152. Alfred North Whitehead – A Treatise on Universal Algebra; An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; Process and Reality; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas
153. George Santayana – The Life of Reason; Scepticism and Animal Faith; The Realms of Being (which discusses the Realms of Essence, Matter and Truth); Persons and Places
154. Vladimir Lenin – Imperialism; The State and Revolution
155. Marcel Proust – In Search of Lost Time (formerly translated as Remembrance of Things Past)
156. Bertrand Russell – Principles of Mathematics; The Problems of Philosophy; Principia Mathematica; The Analysis of Mind; An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth; Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits
157. Thomas Mann – The Magic Mountain; Joseph and His Brothers
158. Albert Einstein – The Theory of Relativity; Sidelights on Relativity; The Meaning of Relativity; On the Method of Theoretical Physics; The Evolution of Physics
159. James Joyce – "The Dead" in Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses
160. Jacques Maritain – Art and Scholasticism; The Degrees of Knowledge; Freedom and the Modern World; A Preface to Metaphysics; The Rights of Man and Natural Law; True Humanism
161. Franz Kafka – The Trial; The Castle
162. Arnold J. Toynbee – A Study of History; Civilization on Trial
163. Jean-Paul Sartre – Nausea; No Exit; Being and Nothingness
164. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – The First Circle; Cancer Ward

The original edition of How to Read a Book contained a separate "contemporary list" because "Here one's judgment must be tentative".[69] All but the following authors were incorporated into the single list of the revised edition:

1. Ivan Pavlov – Conditioned Reflexes
2. Thorstein Veblen – The Theory of the Leisure Class; The Higher Learning in America; The Place of Science in Modern Civilization; Vested Interests and the State of Industrial Arts; Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times
3. Franz Boas – The Mind of Primitive Man; Anthropology and Modern Life
4. Leon Trotsky – The History of the Russian Revolution

In 1954 Mortimer Adler hosted a live weekly television series in San Francisco, comprising 52 half-hour programs, entitled The Great Ideas. These programs were produced by the Institute for Philosophical Research and were carried as a public service by the American Broadcasting Company, presented by National Educational Television (NET), the precursor to what is now PBS. Adler bequeathed these films to the Center for the Study of the Great Ideas, where they are available for purchase.[70]

In 1993 and 1994, The Learning Channel created a series of one-hour programs discussing many of the Great Books of history and their impact on the world. It was narrated by Donald Sutherland and Morgan Freeman, among others.

• Association for Core Texts and Courses
• Banned books
• Education reform#Reforms of classical education
• Educational perennialism
• Liberal arts
• List of books considered the worst
• Transcendentalism
• Western canon

• Center for the Study of the Great Ideas website
• Dorfman, Ron (25 April 1997). "Culture Wars and the Great Conversation". Shattering Silences. PBS.
• Greater Books
• Recommended books - National Association of Scholars
• The Agora Foundation website