Robert Hutchins, at the time, in addition to being the president of the University of Chicago, also served as chairman of the Board of Editors of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
[3] With this mission, Adler undertook a project that would consume over a decade of his life: identifying and indexing the western world's Great Ideas.
He single-handedly raised funds by selling more expensive “Founders Editions” of the sets, and disobeyed the order to fire his entire staff.
An internal memo from Encyclopædia Britannica, regarding a release party, reads: The second edition of Great Books of the Western World contained six additional volumes of works from the twentieth century, like James Joyce, Max Weber, etc.
In addition to being a “special idea” that would set Great Books of the Western World apart, the Syntopicon serves four other purposes, outlined in its preface.
For instance, the first idea “Angel” is broken down into “Inferior deities or demi-gods in polytheistic religion,” “the philosophical consideration of pure intelligences, spiritual substances, supra-human persons” and seven other subtopics.
[12] After this is the references section (for instance, “inferior deities or demi-gods in polytheistic religion” can be found in Homer, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, Locke, Hegel, Goethe and more).
Last is the additional readings, in which one could seek out more on the subject of “Angel.” The list of 102 ideas is broken between the two volumes, as follows: Volume 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 II: Man, Mathematics, Matter, Mechanics, Medicine, Memory and Imagination, Metaphysics, Mind, Monarchy, Nature, Necessity and Contingency, Oligarchy, One and Many, Opinion, Opposition,[13] Philosophy, Physics, Pleasure and Pain, Poetry, Principle, Progress, Prophecy, Prudence, Punishment, Quality, Quantity, Reasoning, Relation,[14] Religion, Revolution, Rhetoric, Same and Other, Science, Sense, Sign and Symbol, Sin, Slavery, Soul, Space, State, Temperance, Theology, Time, Truth, Tyranny and Despotism, Universal and Particular, Virtue and Vice, War and Peace, Wealth, Will, Wisdom, and World.
Full-page ads for Time magazine appeared in newspapers across the country, saying “What and Why is a Syntopicon?”[15] Time published an article about the new, pivotal piece of reference material, and Adler wrote them back in thanks, saying that “I think the piece is both thoroughly accurate and very lively, which, considering the subject matter, is quite a feat.”[16] Look magazine ran a feature on the Syntopicon, displaying behind-the-scene photos of the index's staff at work.
“Discussions of love by great authors,” the caption reads, “outweigh sin and eternity.”[17] Life magazine featured the scholars who had worked on the Syntopicon in front of 102 card catalogue drawers.
[18] Despite the extensive press coverage and cross-country speeches, however, sales of the Syntopicon and the Great Books of the Western World were slow.