Collection: Great Books of the Western World (editor-in-chief)

Overview

The Great Books of the Western World is a landmark multi-volume collection first issued in 1952 under the editorial leadership of Mortimer J. Adler, with Robert M. Hutchins as principal collaborator. The project gathered what its editors regarded as the foundational works of Western literature, philosophy, science, theology, and political thought, presenting them in accessible translations and authoritative editions. Designed as a single library of primary texts, the set seeks to map the intellectual trajectory that shaped Western civilization from antiquity through the early twentieth century.
Adler's role as editor-in-chief was central: he coordinated selections, commissioned translations, and oversaw the creation of the Syntopicon, a two-volume topical index that organizes the collection around 102 "Great Ideas." The original edition comprised 54 volumes and combined classic texts with editorial apparatus intended to encourage sustained, comparative reading across disciplines and historical periods.

Selection and Organization

Selection rested on explicit philosophical and pedagogical criteria. Works were chosen for their enduring intellectual influence and their capacity to illuminate recurring conceptual problems, justice, beauty, causality, liberty, and the like, rather than for biographical or purely historical reasons. Texts range from Homer, Plato, and Aristotle to Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Shakespeare, Descartes, Newton, Locke, Hume, Kant, Darwin, and Nietzsche, reflecting a canon anchored in European and classical traditions.
The Syntopicon functions as the organizational keystone, indexing passages from across the volumes under thematic entries that allow readers to trace how particular ideas evolved. Short introductory essays, bibliographic apparatus, and selected translations accompany many texts, all aimed at making complex primary works usable for non-specialist readers. The arrangement emphasizes cross-textual dialogue: passages are meant to be read against one another to reveal continuities and contrasts across eras and genres.

Educational Aim and Method

At its heart, the collection was an educational manifesto for liberal learning. Adler and Hutchins argued that exposure to primary texts, structured around central ideas, cultivates intellectual habits, critical reading, close comparison, and sustained reflection, that form the core of a liberal education. The volumes were intended both for classroom use in Great Books programs and for serious self-directed readers seeking an organized path through the Western intellectual tradition.
The editorial method privileges primary sources over secondary summaries, encouraging readers to encounter original arguments and literary forms directly. The Syntopicon's topical cross-references promote a synthetic approach to learning: students are invited to assemble dialogues among authors who never met, to test hypotheses across centuries, and to confront persistent philosophical questions through a succession of perspectives.

Reception, Criticism, and Legacy

The Great Books project achieved wide influence, helping to spawn Great Books curricula at colleges and to shape popular notions of a liberal canon. It brought renewed attention to primary-source reading and to interdisciplinary inquiry, and it remains a touchstone for debates about education, canon formation, and cultural authority. Libraries, schools, and private readers embraced the set as a pragmatic route to self-education and civic literacy.
Critics, however, have challenged the collection's premises and scope. Objections include an overemphasis on Western and male authors, a tendency to treat texts as ahistorical containers of timeless ideas, and the subjective nature of the selection criteria. Feminist, postcolonial, and multicultural scholars have pointed to absences and omissions that limit the set's representativeness. Despite such critiques, the project's methodological innovations, especially the Syntopicon's thematic indexing and the insistence on primary texts, left a lasting imprint on how textbooks, curricula, and reading programs conceive of foundational knowledge.