Abstract
On April 15, 1952, a few years after the formation of the Great Books Foundation, the Encylopædia Britannica Corporation hosted a celebratory banquet, in New York City’s lavish Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Its purpose was to announce the publication of what the New York Times dubbed a “literary leviathan.” That monster was the 54-volume Great Books of the Western World—the set that by 1965 would fill living rooms and dens at an annual rate of 50,000 units sold and gross annual revenues of approximately $20,000,000. The distinguished guest list for the 1952 event included Hollywood film “Code” enforcer Will H. Hays, Simon and Schuster publisher M. Lincoln Schuster, Book-of-the-Month-Club editor Irita Van Doren, and prominent businessmen Alfred Vanderbilt, Marshall Field, Jr., and Nelson A. Rockefeller. Dinner speakers included University of Chicago Chancellor Lawrence Kimpton (as master of ceremonies) and the French philosopher Jacques Maritain, as well as Clifton Fadiman, Robert Hutchins, Mortimer Adler, and Connecticut Senator and Britannica Publisher, William Benton. Other members of Adler’s community of discourse, old and new, in attendance included Jacques Barzun, Scott Buchanan, William Gorman, Richard McKeon, and Mark Van Doren.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
“54-Volume Summary of Western Culture Hailed as History-Making at Dinner Here,” New York Times, April 16, 1952, 25; “The Marvelous Encyclopedia Business,” Forbes, February 15, 1965, 17–18; “Services: Cashing in on Culture,” Time, April 20, 1962, 94; University of Chicago Special Collections (UCSC), Mortimer J. Adler Papers (MJAP), Box 59, Folder: “Waldorf Dinner”; Mortimer Adler, Philosopher at Large: An Intellectual Autobiography 1902–1976 (New York: Macmillan, 1977), 257–258; University of Nebraska-Lincoln, University Archives/Special Collections (UNLA), Robert E. Dewey Papers (REDP), Box 34, Folder: “Great Books Presentation Dinner” transcript.
Ibid. For more on Maritain, see Bernard E. Doering, Jacques Maritain and the French Catholic Intellectuals (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983) and William Sweet, “Jacques Maritain,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online, available at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ maritain/.
George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945 (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1996), 21, 30, 35–37, 48–49, 68–70.
UNLA, “Dinner” transcript; UCSC/MJAP, Box 59, Folders: “Waldorf Dinner” (table roster) and “Data for … Project” (Adler’s “Outline of the History the Great Books Project, 1943–1950,” 8); Herman Kogan, The Great EB: The Story of the Encyclopædia Britannica (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 242.
Mary Ann Dzuback, Robert M. Hutchins: Portrait of an Educator (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 160, 200–202, 226–227, 231, 240, 243, 248;
Harry S. Ashmore, Unseasonable Truths: The Life of Robert Maynard Hutchins (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1989), 128–129, 245, 329–330, 374–376.
Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 196;
Michael Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 275–277;
Lawrence Cremin, American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876–1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 416; Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 6 (1939); Dwight Macdonald, “The Book-of-the-Millenium Club,” New Yorker (November 29, 1952);
Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959; Harper Torchbook, 1961), 96n; Adler, Philosopher at Large, 237.
Tim Lacy, “Dreams of a Democratic Culture: Revising the Origins of the Great Books Idea, 1869–1921,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 7 (October 2008): 421–423; Rubin, 27–30; Cremin, 385–386;
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. by John Cumming (1944; New York: Continuum, 1997), 120–167 passim;
Michael Kammen, American Culture American Tastes: Social Change and the Twentieth Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), xii, chapter 1 passim.
Sidney Hyman, The Lives of William Benton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 3, 138, 159.
Hyman, 3–5; Adler, Philosopher, 236; Rubin, 193; Mary Ann Dzuback, Robert M. Hutchins: Portrait of an Educator (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 163–166;
William H. McNeill, Hutchins’ University: A Memoir of the University of Chicago, 1929–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 66;
Harry Ashmore, Unseasonable Truths: The Life of Robert Maynard Hutchins (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1989), 31, 179–186;
Charles A. Madison, Book Publishing in America (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1966), 382;
Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 36, 38, 46, 307, 310.
Hyman, 163, 174, 179; Ashmore, 181–182; Dzuback, 165; Congress, Memorial Addresses and Other Tributes in the Congress of the United States on the Life and Contributions of William Benton, ninety-third Cong., first session (Washington: GPO, 1973), v, 4; Robert Maynard Hutchins, “Educator,” in The Record of a Tribute to the Honorable William Benton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 22. “Cooking things up” comes from Alden Whitman’s obituary, reprinted in the Congressional Record.
Hyman, 245–247, 258–261, 286; Hutchins, “Educator,” 22–23; Congress, Benton, v; Mortimer J. Adler, “The Great Books Idea,” KNOW II, no. 1 (Fall 1964): 2, 4;
Paul G. Hoffman, “Businessman,” in The Record of a Tribute to the Honorable William Benton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 18. See also Ashmore (255–259), Adler (235–236), and Madison (381–382). Sears first worked with Britannica during the 1910s, and gained full control in 1928 (Madison, 380–381). In Benton’s New York Times obituary (March 19, 1973), Alden Whitman reported that, through Benton’s leadership of Britannica, the University earned “more than 25 million dollars in 25 years.”
Marchand, xviii, xxi–xxii, 1. For more on the connection between efficiency, time, and Western modernity, see Stephen Kern’s The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983) and
Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1982).
Mortimer J. Adler, review of The Story of Philosophy, by Will Durant, The Nation (September 29, 1926): 298. This section is a radically abbreviated version of Tim Lacy, “The Lovejovian Roots of Adler’s Philosophy of History: Authority, Democracy, Irony, and Paradox in Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World,” Journal of the History of Ideas 71, no.1 (January 2010): 113–137.
Daniel J. Wilson, Arthur O. Lovejoy and the Quest for Intelligibility (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 85;
Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 165–166, 260;
Arthur O. Lovejoy, “Pragmatism Versus the Pragmatist,” in Essays in Critical Realism: A Co-Operative Study of the Problem of Knowledge, (ed.) Durant Drake et al. (1920; repr., New York: Gordian Press, 1968), 35–84;
Frederick Copleston, S. J., A History of Philosophy, Volume 8, Part II (Garden City, NY: Doubleday/Image Books, 1967), 150–153;
Bruce Kucklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 1720–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 210–211.
Wilson, 194–195, 230n16; Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936; repr., 1964), 3.
Adler, Philosopher, 38, 40, 45, 186–197, 200, 268, 304–305; Wilson, 88–93; Arthur O. Lovejoy, “On Some Conditions of Progress in Philosophical Inquiry,” The Philosophical Review 26 (March 1917): 123–163;
Mortimer J. Adler, The Idea of Freedom: A Dialectical Examination of the Conceptions of Freedom (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1958), 1: v, xv; Bennie R. Crockett, Jr., “Mortimer J. Adler: An Analysis and Critique of His Eclectic Epistemology” (PhD diss. University of Wales-Lampeter, 2000), 11, 51, 56–62, 77–83, 128–137.
Adler, Philosopher, 313; Mortimer J. Adler, “The Principles and Methods of Syntopical Construction,” in Great Books of the Western World, (ed.) Robert M. Hutchins, Vol. 3, The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon of Great Books of the Western World, (eds.) Mortimer J. Adler and William Gorman, Vol. II (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1952), 1259–1262.
Adler, “Principles,” 1254–1265; Adler, Idea of Freedom, xviii–xix; David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970), 135–142.
Robert Hutchins (ed.), Great Books of the Western World, Vol. 1, (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1952), iii (after long list of subscribers and donors, but before The Great Conversation);
Adam R. Nelson, Education and Democracy: The Meaning of Alexander Meiklejohn, 1872–1964 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 233–256;
Harold Rugg, Foundations for American Education (New York: World Book Company, 1947), 5, 7–8, 12, 30, 37, 574, 613–627; Adler, Philosopher, 49–50, 63, 81, 136, 160, 190, 214, 239; Allen, 99; Ashmore, 228; Dzuback, 68–69, 110, 123–124, 130–131, 169, 214, 270; McNeill, 111.
Robert M. Hutchins (ed.), Great Books of the Western World, Vol. 1, The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education, by Robert M. Hutchins (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1952), xvi–xvii; Rubin, 194.
Adler, Philosopher, 237–239; Adler, Second Look, 142; Rubin, 194; Adler, “Great Books, Democracy, and Truth,” in Freedom in the Modern World: Jacques Maritain, Yves R. Simon, Mortimer J. Adler, (ed.) Michael D. Torre (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press/American Maritain Society, 1989), 45.
W. E. Garrison, review of Great Books of the Western World, Robert Hutchins, ed., The Christian Century 69 (October 1, 1952): 1127. Also June 25, 1952, pp. 751–752.
For more on mid-century anti-Catholicism and the status of Catholic thought in American culture, see John Tracy Ellis, American Catholics and the Intellectual Life (Chicago: Heritage Foundation, 1956).
Highet review; David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 186.
James Hagerty, review of Great Books of the Western World, Robert Hutchins, ed., Commonweal September 26, 1952; Garrison (June 25, 1952); UCSC/ MJAP, Box 12, Folder: “Harvard Classics Comparison” (Adler to Benton, April 1, 1950); Henry James, Charles W. Eliot: President of Harvard University, 1869–1909, Vol. II (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1930; reprint, 1973), 195–196.
Lawrence Levine, The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 50–53.
Copyright information
© 2013 Tim Lacy
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lacy, T. (2013). Branding the History of Ideas: Adler, Lovejoy, and Britannica’s Great Books, 1943–1952. In: The Dream of a Democratic Culture. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137042620_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137042620_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-34094-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-04262-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)