Great Books of the Western World: Encyclopedia II - Great Books of the Western World

The 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 Hutchins and Adler and published by Encyclopædia 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 number were sold the following year. A financial debacle loomed, until Encyclopædia Britannica altered the marketing strategy and sold the set (as Hutchins had feared) through experienced door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen. Through this method 50,000 sets were sold in 1961. In 1963 the editors published Gateway to the Great Books, a ten-volume set of readings designed as an introduction to the authors and themes in the Great Books series. Each year from 1961 to 1998 the editors published The Great Ideas Today, an annual update on the applicability of the Great Books to current issues.

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1952, 1961, 1963, 1990, 1998, 20th century, A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, A Doll's House, A Letter Concerning Toleration, A Lost Lady, A Mathematician's Apology, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A Rose for Emily, A Syntopicon, Adam Smith, Aeschylus, Agamemnon, Ajax, Albert Einstein, Alcestis, Alexander Hamilton, Alexis de Toqueville, Alfred North Whitehead, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Andromache, Angel, Animal, Animal Farm, Antigone, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, Anton Chekhov, Apollonius of Perga, Apollonius', Archimedes, Areopagitica, Aristocracy, Aristophanes, Aristotle, Art, Arthur Eddington, Articles of Confederation, Astronomy, Augustine of Hippo, Bacchantes, Beauty, Being, Benedict de Spinoza, Bertolt Brecht, Bertrand Russell, Beyond Good and Evil, Blaise Pascal, Britain, Bérénice, C.H. Waddington, CEO, Candide, Capital, Categories, Cause, Central, Chance, Change, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Choephoroe, Christian Huygens, Citizen, Civilization and Its Discontents, Claude Levi-Strauss, Concerning Civil Government, Second Essay, Constitution, Contingency, Convention, Count Leo Tolstoy, Courage, Cousin Bette, Custom, Cyclops, D.H. Lawrence, Dante Alighieri, David Hume, Death, Death in Venice, Declaration of Independence, Definition, Democracy, Democracy in America, Denis Diderot, Desire, Dialectic, Dialogues Concerning the Two New Sciences, Discourse on the Method, Don Juan, Duty, Eastern Europe, Ecclesiazousae, Education, Edward Gibbon, Electra, Element, Emma, Emotion, Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., Epictetus, Erasmus, Ernest Hemingway, Erwin Schrödinger, Essays, Eternity, Ethics, Euclid, Euclid's Elements, Eugene O'Neill, Euripides, Evil, Evolution, Experience, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Family, Fate, Faust, Fear and Trembling, Form, Francois Rabelais, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Engels, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, G.H. Hardy, Galen, Galileo Galilei, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Gateway to the Great Books, Genetics and the Origin of Species, Geoffrey Chaucer, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, George Berkeley, George Bernard Shaw, George Eliot, George Orwell, God, Good, Government, Great Books, Gulliver's Travels, Habit, Happiness, Heart of Darkness, Hecuba, Hedda Gabler, Helen, Henri Bergson, Henri Poincaré, Henrik Ibsen, Henry Fielding, Henry Fielding's, Henry James, Heracleidae, Heracles Mad, Herman Melville, Herodotus, Hippocrates, Hippolytus, History, History of Animals, Homer, Honor, Honore de Balzac, Huckleberry Finn, Hypothesis, Idea, Imagination, Immanuel Kant, Immortality, Induction, Infinity, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Ion, Iphigeneia at Aulis, Iphigeneia in Tauris, James Boswell, James Joyce, James Madison, Jane Austen, Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Jean Racine, Johan Huizinga, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Calvin, John Dewey, John Jay, John Locke, John Maynard Keynes, John Milton, John Stuart Mill, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Conrad, Joseph Fourier's, Judgment, Justice, Karl Barth, Karl Marx, Knowledge, Labor, Language, Laurence Sterne, Laurence Sterne's, Law, Leviathan, Liberty, Life, Little Dorrit, Logic, Love, Lucretius, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Luigi Pirandello, Lysistrata, Man, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Many, Marcel Proust, Marcus Aurelius, Mark Twain, Martin Heidegger, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Mathematics, Matter, Max Planck, Max Weber, Mechanics, Medea, Medicine, Meditations on First Philosophy, Memory, Metaphysics, Meteorology, Michael Faraday, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Middlemarch, Miguel de Cervantes, Mind, Moby Dick; or, The Whale, Moliere, Monarchy, Mortimer Adler, Mother Courage and Her Children, Mourning Becomes Electra, Nature, Necessity, New Atlantis, New York City, Niccolò Machiavelli, Nicolaus Copernicus, Nicomachean Ethics, Nicomachus of Gerasa, Niels Bohr, Norman Davies, Novum Organum, Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus the King, Oligarchy, On Generation and Corruption, On Interpretation, On Liberty, On Narcissism, On Sophistical Refutations, On the Gait of Animals, On the Generation of Animals, On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies, On the Motion of Animals, On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, On the Nature of Things, On the Parts of Animals, On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres, On the Soul, One, Opinion, Opposition, Optics, Orestes, Other, P. Cornelius Tacitus, Pain, Paradise Lost, Particular, Peace, Pensées, Philoctetes, Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, Phoenician Women, Physics, Phèdre, Plato, Pleasure, Plotinus, Plutarch, Plutus, Poetics, Poetry, Politics, Posterior Analytics, Pragmatism, President Truman, Principle, Prior Analytics, Progress, Prometheus Bound, Prophecy, Prudence, Ptolemy, Punishment, Qu'ran, Quality, Quantity, Queen Elizabeth, R.H. Tawney, Reasoning, Relation, Religion, Remembrance of Things Past, René Descartes, Repression, Revolution, Rhesus, Rhetoric, Robert Hutchins, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Saint Joan, Same, Samson Agonistes, Samuel Beckett, Science, Sense, Seven Against Thebes, Sigmund Freud, Sign, Sin, Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, Sir James George Frazer, Six Characters in Search of an Author, Slavery, Sonnets, Sophocles, Soul, Space, State, Structural Anthropology, Summa Theologiae, Symbol, Søren Kierkegaard, T.S. Eliot, Tartuffe, Temperance, The Acharnians, The Aeneid, The Almagest, The Annals, The Athenian Constitution, The Beast in the Jungle, The Birds, The Brothers Karamazov, The Canterbury Tales, The City of God, The Clouds, The Confessions, The Constitution of the United States of America, The Critique of Judgement, The Critique of Practical Reason, The Critique of Pure Reason, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, The Divine Comedy, The Eclogues, The Eumenides, The Federalist, The Frogs, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, The Geometry, The Georgics, The Golden Bough, The Great Conversation, The Great Gatsby, The Harmonies of the World, The Histories, The History, The History of Don Quixote de la Mancha, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, The History of the Peloponnesian War, The Iliad, The Interpretation of Dreams, The Knights, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, The Master Builder, The Meditations, The Metamorphosis, The Metaphysics of Morals, The Miser, The Odyssey, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, The Persians, The Philosophy of Right, The Praise of Folly, The Prince, The Principles of Human Knowledge, The Principles of Psychology, The Problems of Philosophy, The Provincial Letters, The Sand-Reckoner, The School for Wives, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, The Six Enneads, The Social Contract, The Spirit of the Laws, The Suppliant Maidens, The Suppliants, The Theory of the Leisure Class, The Trachiniae, The Waning of the Middle Ages, The Wasps, The Waste Land, The Wild Duck, The Would-Be Invalid, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Theology, Thesmophoriazusae, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Mann, Thorstein Veblen, Thucydides, Time, To the Lighthouse, Tom Jones, Topics, Tristram Shandy, Troilus and Cressida, Trojan Women, Truth, Tyranny, US Senator, Uncle Vanya, United States, Universal, University of Chicago, Utilitarianism, Vice, Virgil, Virginia Woolf, Virtue, Voltaire, Voltaire's, Waiting for Godot, Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, War, War and Peace, Wealth, Werner Heisenberg, Will, Willa Cather, William Benton, William Faulkner, William Gilbert, William Harvey, William James, William Shakespeare, Wisdom, World, civil rights movements, drama, economics, ethics, feminist, fiction, history, ivory tower, liberal education, mathematics, natural science, philosophy, poetry, politics, public domain, publishers, religion, western canon

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "History", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

Great Books of the Western World - History

Great Books of the Western World - History: Encyclopedia II - Great Books of the Western World - History

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Great Books of the Western World: Encyclopedia II - Great Books of the Western World - History

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Great Books of the Western World - History

Great Books of the Western World - History: Encyclopedia II - Great Books of the Western World - History

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