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Great Books of the Western WorldThe Great Books of the Western World 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.
HistoryThe 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 Hitchins and Adler and published by Encyclopedia 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 amount were sold the following year. A financial debacle loomed, until Encyclopedia Britannica altered the marketing strategy and sold the set (as Hutchins feared) through experienced door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen. Through this method 50,000 editions were sold in 1961. The worksPublished in 54 volumes, The Great Books of the Western World covers topics including fiction, history, poetry, natural science, mathematics, philosophy, drama, politics, religion, economics, and ethics. The first volume, titled The Great Conversation contains an introduction and discourse on liberal education by Hutchins. The next two volumes "The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon" were written by Adler and contained an introduction to 102 different concepts and references to them in all the works within "The Great Books". The volumes contained the following works:
Second editionIn 1990 a second edition of the Great Books of the Western World was published, this time with updated translations and six more volumes of material, covering the 20th century, an era of which the first edition was nearly devoid. These new volumes consisted of the following:
CriticismThe 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 movements. 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. But another harmful criticism was that the series was in reality more for show than for substance. While the sales were good through the aggressive promotion Encyclopedia 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 publishers 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 readibilty. External links
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