Great Books of the Western World
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.
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.
[3] 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.
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.
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 magazine for a story about the set of works and its idea index and inventory of Western topics of thought at large, of sorts.
[10] 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.
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".
Some of the other volumes were re-arranged, with even more pre-20th century material added but with four texts deleted: Apollonius' On Conic Sections, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, and Joseph Fourier's Analytical Theory of Heat.
He addressed criticisms that the set was too heavily Western European and did not adequately represent women and minority authors.
Robert Hutchins stated this view in the introduction to the first edition: Since the great majority of the works were still in print, one critic remarked that the company could have saved two million dollars and simply written a list.
[20] The editors responded that the set contains wide-ranging debates representing many viewpoints on significant issues, not a monolithic school of thought.
