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By Root 1099 0

million words squeezed into fifty-four volumes. The publisher of this behemoth, which cost almost two million dollars to produce, is the Encyclopædia Britannica, which is jointly owned by Senator William Benton of Connecticut and the University of Chicago. The books were selected by a board headed by Dr. Robert Hutchins, formerly chancellor of the University of Chicago and now an associate director of the Ford Foundation, and Dr. Adler, who used to teach the philosophy of law at the University of Chicago and who now runs the Institute for Philosophical Research, an enterprise largely financed by the Ford Foundation. The novelty of the set and to a large extent its raison d’être is the Syntopicon, a two-volume index to the Great Ideas in the Great Books. The Syntopicon (“collection of topics”) was constructed by a task force commanded by Dr. Adler, who also contributes 1,150 pages of extremely dry essays on the Great Ideas, of which, according to his census, there are exactly a hundred and two. It also contains 163,000 page references to the Great Books plus an Inventory of Terms (which includes 1,690 ideas found to be respectable but not Great), plus a Bibliography of Additional Readings (2,603 books that didn’t make the grade), plus an eighty-page essay by Dr. Adler on “The Principles and Methods of Syntopical Construction,” and it cost the Encyclopædia just under a million dollars. If these facts and figures have an oppressive, leaden ring, so does this enterprise.

“This set of books,” says Dr. Hutchins in “The Great Conversation,” a sort of after-dinner speech that has somehow become Volume I of Great Books, “is the result of an attempt to reappraise and re-embody the tradition of the West for our generation.” For some, this might take a bit of doing, but Dr. Hutchins makes it sound as easy as falling off a log (with Mark Hopkins on the other end): “The discussions of the Board revealed few differences of opinion about the overwhelming majority of the books in the list. The set is almost self-selected, in the sense that one book leads to another, amplifying, modifying, or contradicting it.” But if the criterion of selection really was whether a book amplifies, modifies, or contradicts another book, one wonders how any books at all were eliminated. Actually, the Board seems to have shifted about between three criteria that must have conflicted as often as they coincided: which books were most influential in the past, which are now, which ought to be now. Cicero and Seneca were more important in the past than Plato and Aeschylus but are less important today; in excluding the former and including the latter, the Board honored the second criterion over the first. On the other hand, devoting two volumes apiece to Aristotle and Aquinas could be justified only by their historical, not their contemporary, interest. The third criterion was involved here, too; these philosophers are important to the Adler-Hutchins school of thought, and the Board doubtless felt that if they are not important in modern thought, they damned well should be. My objection is not to this method of selection—jockeying back and forth between conflicting criteria is the essence of the anthologist’s craft—but to the bland unawareness of it shown by the impresarios, Dr. Hutchins and Dr. Adler, who write as if the Truth were an easy thing to come by. This doctrinaire smugness blinds them to the real problems of their enterprise by giving them mechanical, ready-made solutions that often don’t fill the bill.

The wisdom of the method varies with the obviousness of the choice, being greatest where there is practically no choice; that is, with the half of the authors—by no means “the overwhelming majority”—on which agreement may be presumed to be universal: Homer, the Greek dramatists, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Virgil, Plutarch, Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Machiavelli, Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Milton, Pascal, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Gibbon, Hegel, Kant, Goethe, and Darwin. A large second category seems sound and