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By Root 997 0

toward this goal. At his Institute for Philosophical Research, another group of scholars is working with him, using the Syntopicon, to produce “a dialectical summation of Western thought, a synthesis for the twentieth century.”[3] The most celebrated attempt at such a summation was, of course, the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, Dr. Adler’s guide and inspirer. Aquinas had certain historical advantages over his disciple—leaving aside the personal ones: the culture he summarized was homogeneous, systematically articulated, and clearly outlined because of the universal acceptance of the Roman Catholic faith as expressed in the Bible and by the Church Fathers. Dr. Adler cannot bring these qualities to and make them a part of twentieth-century thought, but he proceeds as if he could, and he has run up his own homemade substitutes for the sacred writings. Thus the true reason for his set of Great Books becomes apparent. Its aim is hieratic rather than practical—not to make the books accessible to the public (which they mostly already were) but to fix the canon of the Sacred Texts by printing them in a special edition. Simply issuing a list would have been enough if practicality were the only consideration, but a list can easily be revised, and it lacks the totemistic force of a five-foot, hundred-pound array of books. The Syntopicon is partly a concordance to the Sacred Texts, partly the sort of commentary and interpretation of them the Church Fathers made for the Bible.

In its massiveness, its technological elaboration, its fetish of The Great, and its attempt to treat systematically and with scientific precision materials for which the method is inappropriate, Dr. Adler’s set of books is a typical expression of the religion of culture that appeals to the American academic mentality. And the claims its creators make are a typical expression of the American advertising psyche. The way to put over a two-million-dollar cultural project is, it seems, to make it appear as pompous as possible. At the Great Bookmanite banquet at the Waldorf, Dr. Hutchins said, “This is more than a set of books. It is a liberal education....The fate of our country, and hence of the world, depends on the degree to which the American people achieve liberal education. [It is] a process...of placing in the hands of the American people the means of continuing and revitalizing Western civilization, for the sake of the West and for the sake of all mankind.” This is Madison Avenue cant—Lucky Strike Green Has Gone to War, The Great Books Have Enlisted for the Duration. It is also poppycock. The problem is not placing these already available books in people’s hands (at five dollars a volume) but getting people to read them, and the hundred pounds of densely printed, poorly edited reading matter assembled by Drs. Adler and Hutchins is scarcely likely to do that.

Appendix:

THE HARD SELL

In their first year, 1952, Adler & Hutchins (and Benton, of the Encyclopædia Britannica, which put up the original $2,000,000) sold 1,863 sets of their densely printed, poorly edited, over-priced and over-syntopiconized collection. In 1953, they made some kind of record by selling just 138, no zeros omitted, sets. (I like to think the above review was partly responsible.) Three years later, they got in a new sales manager who went to work on what might humorously be called the reading public. The results were sensational. By 1960 sales had risen to over 35,000 sets a year and last year 51,083 sets were sold for a gross return of $22,000,000. The Great Books of the Western World are at this writing most definitely in business.

The story is told in an article entitled “Cashing in on Culture” that appeared in Time of April 20th last. It runs, in part:

The turning point came in 1956 when Benton brought into Great Books the salesman—stocky, bespectacled Kenneth M. Harden, a veteran of thirty-seven years of encyclopedia selling. [The accompanying photograph shows Mr. Harden and Mr. Adler smiling behind three stacks of Great Books; The Salesman looks about like the Savant except