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Who should be bounced from The Great Books series?
Before leaving for Japan, I'd been pawing through these volumes lately -- you know, the U. Chicago fat tomes with two columns on each page? The obvious question is which books belong and which do not; overall I'm surprised at how well the 1952 picks have held up and yes that is tribute to the University of Chicago or at least its influence.
I'm sad that Hume doesn't get his own volume, including many of his shorter essays. Plus I'd like to add Dickens's Bleak House and at least the first two books of Proust. And who to bounce? I nominate Plotinus as the obvious choice, noting that he has only about 24,000 cites on scholar.google.com, not even as many as Joseph Stiglitz.
In 1990 they dropped four books: Apollonius' On Conic Sections, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, and Joseph Fourier's Analytical Theory of Heat. The loss of Sterne is regretted but the others we can do without. You'll find a list of the added books in 1990 at the first link, about halfway down and yes they did include Swann's Way. Little Dorrit is not the best or even the second best Dickens selection. Most are good picks though I would have left the Bergson, the Dewey (unreadable), and tossed out some of the shorter works in favor of Ulysses. More William James is never a bad idea; how about The Varieties of Religious Experience? None of the science books will age well. And how about a wee bit of Mises and Hayek to reflect the failures of socialism? Absalom, Absalom would help cover race and maybe Mill on The Subjection of Women should be there too.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on May 30, 2008 at 09:35 AM in Books, History | Permalink
Comments
bleak house: by far my favorite 'non standard' dickens...maybe even beats out some of the more well known volumes. fun to see that you liked it as well.
Posted by: shawn at May 30, 2008 9:53:17 AM
Well, there's still clearly too darn much Freud, but he can't be dropped completely, so there's no help there. Balzac? Surely they could squeeze "The Road To Serfdom" into Volume 57?
Posted by: Dave at May 30, 2008 10:03:51 AM
I guess modern mathematics is not part of western culture then. Newton's Principia is still there, but much of that is pretty antiquated; whereas the enormous advance in mathematical analysis is now completely unrepresented, not even Gauss, who shd be ancient enough to be respectable, one would think.
Posted by: corporate serf at May 30, 2008 10:05:08 AM
Tyler, I respect and admire your learning and your judgement a lot, but you're wrong on Plotinus. I don't even need to go into how preposterous it is to use scholar.google.com as a benchmark for a Great Books series. The fact is that neoplatonism - best represented by Plotinus - is one of the most important schools of thought in the history of Western civilization. It's runs through all late classical Roman times, the Middle Ages and it is just impossible to begin to understand the Renaissance without a firm grasp of its main tenets. Millenialism, Kabbalah, Sufism, Christian Theology, William Blake and, for that matter, Jorge Luis Borges would be incomprehensible without The Enneads, the book you would like to see dropped.
Bottom line: Plotinus must stay!
Posted by: Diogo at May 30, 2008 10:07:09 AM
Diogo, I was joking with the scholar.google.com bit...I still think all of the developments you mention could have occurred without Plotinus...
Posted by: Tyler Cowen at May 30, 2008 10:09:30 AM
The dropping of Apollonius is dearly a deep loss. i'm glad I own a version of the set with it. You can't understand *anything* in Newton's Principia without it. Even more, that work makes it clear just how enormous the Greeks' knowledge of mathematics was--they knew nearly everything in algebra, and had discovered it all with geometry. Modern math is predicated on these things, and these are truly great works.
I found that the literature is what holds up poorly over time. Perhaps it's just our modern sensibility, but Flaubert's A Simple Heart and even Goethe's Faust do rather poorly. Perhaps their translations are the problem?
Posted by: mouse at May 30, 2008 10:13:56 AM
I get that Freud doesn't hold up as science but I think that the idea that human behavior is governed by the interaction of competing mental systems is an important take away. Though maybe he could share a volume with Jung's Man and his Symbols. I would probably try to cut Aquinas down to one volume though.
I would remove animal farm because it is a stupid awful book and not stupid and awful in any interesting way. I would think brave new world would have to have a place. Six characters in search of an author can go. Being and Nothingness and No Exit would be good inclusions. Maybe The Stranger, Maybe the Sound and the Fury.
Posted by: Michael Foody at May 30, 2008 10:30:07 AM
As a graduate of St. John's College in Annapolis, Chicago's Great Books series has a special place in my heart. Two points.
First, Apollonius is very important for understanding the development of astronomy and the rise of modern physics -- I'd keep him.
Second, I agree with Tyler about Plotinus. Not only is he critical to understanding Augustine and the development of Christian theology (e.g., the trinity), but Leszek Kolakowski rightly, in my opinion, asserts in his "Main Currents of Marxism" that Plotinus is the philosophical godfather of "dialectics", or the urge to overcome differences like the object-subject dichotomy. We need Plotinus to understand Hegel and Marx and their offspring who for good and ill are still with us today in various guises.
Posted by: Massachusetts Johnnie at May 30, 2008 10:55:23 AM
I personally think the literature is the most dispensable part of the series.
If you view the 'great books' as a means to understanding our own intellectual and spiritual horizon, then Euclid and Marx are givens, while Dickens, for example, isn't. Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky would be necessary, however.
Posted by: massachusetts Johnnie at May 30, 2008 11:05:42 AM
Massachusetts Johnnie, if you think all that about Plotinus, then you agree with me, not with Tyler (to whom I apologize for missing the joke).
Posted by: Diogo at May 30, 2008 11:21:47 AM
Drop Plotinus because his writings were sufficient, but not necessary, for what follows? That seems an odd standard. That is certainly not the standard you have used for suggesting that old fashioned thinking on science be dropped.
So, is this library to be based upon principle or whim? Are these books presented together to remind us of how we got where we are, intellectually, or to tickle us by confirming our own views of the world? Dewey is unreadable, but changed thinking about formal education. Is changing thinking about formal education for a few generations a great enough accomplishment to earn inclusion? At the cost of shedding a representative of the origins of modern scientific thinking?
The big library available to us now is larger than ever. We can have any book we want, so "books we want" seems a poor argument for changing the Great Books library. This particular small library should perform some function that our own prefered reading list does not. Both Mises and Hayek? That is the Tyler library, not a small library of representative great books. Is this a library of social problems or, as the editors suggest, of Great Ideas? Which of the Great Ideas does Faulkner treat so well that he cannot be left out?
Posted by: kharris at May 30, 2008 11:33:21 AM
Drop all the science texts. Reading them as if they're literature or philosophy or history is a mistake.
Each of the scientists and mathematicians made important contributions that are worth knowing and understanding. But there's no reason to consult the original text to learn, about, say Euclid or Newton.
Unless you're teaching history of science. But the world is full of first-rate mathematicians and physicists and engineers who learned from (and built on) Euclid and Newton without ever bothering with the orginal works.
That's how science and math work. Ideas matter, not texts.
Posted by: Auto at May 30, 2008 12:03:46 PM
people steal read marx lol
Posted by: anon at May 30, 2008 12:08:38 PM
Oh look, Tyler found another instance of it being thought reasonable to rank works of art. Big surprise, Tyler chimes in, casually dismissing Tom Jones as an obviously ungreat book. (How could any smart person think otherwise?) The shtick is tired.
Posted by: l at May 30, 2008 12:08:48 PM
Scandalously, weirdly missing are Horace's poetry (not to mention Sappho and Catullus); Castiglione's The Courtier; Sarpi's History of the Council of Trent; and Bayle's Dictionary -- to name a few.
I won't mention Mme de Lafayette, Mme de Sevigne, and Mme de Stael, Benjamin Constant, and Turgenev -- all of whom are certainly of much more historical, political, and literary importance than Fielding. And Thomas Hardy -- poems and novels. Missing? For shame. Turgenev belongs there more than Dostoyevsky, I would say.
Emma is an eccentric choice of the Austen novels.
Posted by: harold at May 30, 2008 12:29:57 PM
None of the science books will age well as science books. If you're trying to understand Special Relativity, Einstein's original papers are a terrible place to start, and plenty of physics textbooks do a better job of explanation. In fact, many modern (but still non-great-books-quality) works can be said to have a deeper understanding of the issues. Ditto for early quantum mechanics literature---it's much better explained, and in many cases with more thorough understanding, in more recent work.
But the same is true of all of the Great Books. The point of this list is not to find things that "age well", the point is to find things which are important foundations of "civilization". Modern civilization, broadly thought of, owes much to the early impact of Special Relativity, in its atom-bomb incarnation as well as its popular everything-is-relative misperceptions. Modern civilization owes fairly little to, e.g., Bell's Inequality and Quantum Electrodynamics and the deep and lasting (but mostly accessible-only-to-experts) insights therein. Planck's "Selected Papers" give you these writings in (more or less) the same form in which they impacted civilization, not in the form in which post-Planck works have redistilled them. That seems to match the goal of the Great Books approach.
Anyway, there's no point worrying about what works will age well. You have to pick some sort of reference point for the "civilization" you're talking about. Remember that the idea that the Greeks and Romans are important is not itself an immutable constant, but one which has had ups and downs. A Great Books list written in the mid-to-late 20th century will reflect a mid-to-late 20th century notion of how important they were, and right now it looks for all the world like early-20th-century thoughts about space, time, and matter were the revolutionary ones. If it turns out that Planck's and Schrodinger's quantum mechanics was a negligible 100-year-long blip in the overall sweep of science history---if they're superseded by something even more sweeping that lasts for the next 1000 years---well, that's for future editors to emend.
Imagine a Great Books list compiled in 1890---how much Egyptology would it have contained? How much Ruskinian aesthetics? How about the Rubaiyat? Would they have been "wrong" to include these things, which would later be seen as fairly-short-lived fads?
(I don't particularly hold with the Great Books approach generally, I must say ...)
Posted by: Ben M at May 30, 2008 12:38:07 PM
Looking over the lists, I'm surprised at the dearth of reformation literature. Calvin's Institutes was a 1990 addition, good, but where's Luther's The Bondage of the Will? Or a selection of the (mostly pretty short) reformation creeds: The Heidelberg Catechism, The Westminster Confession of Faith, The Canons of Dort, The Belgic Confession? Or Luther's 99 theses?
Posted by: Bob Montgomery at May 30, 2008 12:43:20 PM
Dropping anyone shows how true understanding of that person hasn't set in and how the forces of nepotism bias self serving intellectuals.
Posted by: Ron C. de Weijze at May 30, 2008 1:15:20 PM
Forcing anyone to read Ulysses should probably be illegal.
Posted by: Andy at May 30, 2008 2:00:09 PM
I agree the loss of Tristram shandy is a shame, though it is a fairly bizarre outlier in so many ways, that it is almost anti-canonical. Also, it is subversive and just plain funny, which maybe boots it off the list.
More surreal than Brautigan (and a better read), predates Proust by 200 years and plays with the futility of writing reconstructing the past with far more wit and imagination, it's a work of truly odd and remarkable genius, given the period in which it was written.
And Tom Jones was OK, but Moll Flanders was better.
Posted by: benny lava at May 30, 2008 3:14:12 PM
I too attended St. John's College in Annapolis (like the poster @ May 30, 2008 10:55:23 AM) and as a life-long student of this curriculum, thus feel compelled to chime in.
Regarding the question of Apollonius, his place in this canon is buttressed, and rightly so, by its explicit influence on several other texts that appear here—notably those works of astronomy and physics appearing in Volume 16 and Volume 34. Remove it and you remove the foundational innards of these later works. It is often asked, why we should include any of these later works of science or math at all (much less earlier ones such as those by Archimedes or Euclid), dated as they are? But if this series is meant to chart in some way the broader evolution of ideas, it would be a mistake to exclude such essential steps. A familiarity with Euclid via Euclid, or Apollonius via Apollonius, will place you that much closer to those who wrote with a direct familiarity with Euclid or Apollonius: I am thinking here in particular of at least a couple of authors that appear on the list, the explicit Euclidean influence in Hobbes’s thinking and methodology, and likewise in Spinoza’s thought and writing too—or, Wittgenstein and the whole rise of analytic philosophy, which owes much to Spinoza and the Greek geometrical tradition.
The Wiki article notes that “The second edition did drop two scientific works, by Apollonius and Fourier, at least in part because of their perceived difficulty for the average reader.” By that reasoning, Ptolemy’s Almagest or Newton’s Principia could just as well be dropped. If anything, I think the series could use a little more math and science—if not with the return of Apollonius, then with the addition of other overlooked
volumes of such thought.
Posted by: Dedalus at May 30, 2008 3:19:05 PM
Though I was fortunate enough as a freshman and sophomore at a distinguished university to take a year-long and demanding course in the history of Western Civilization and then an equal-length and demanding course in a survey of Western literature, I have always thought that the The Great Books education concocted by Hutchins and Adler at the University of Chicago in the 1930s and 1940s was something of a disaster . . . so much so that most departments at Chicago refused to recognize the undergrad degree for admittance to their Ph.D. programs. As for Adler's and Van Doren's book, How to Read a Book, it has a few intersting things to say about reading, but it says nothing in 300 or more pages than what Francis Bacon summarized in a couple.
.......
One problem: Adler hated almost all modern philosophy, and it was only in the later 1990 volume --- when he had no control over it --- that some 19th century philosophers were added, and not necessarily the most important. Then, too, he also had very little understanding of science and thought that science courses for undergrads should focus on the original texts . . . an approach that would have, say, chemists study the texts of alchemists in the middle ages.
He was also ignorant of the social sciences, as was Hutchins (whom I came to know when, as a new member of the faculty at UC Santa Barbara, I joined the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions --- which he headed at the time, living the good life at a huge estate in Montecito a tad east of Santa Barbara on the coast.
............
Nor is that all. Anyone whose education was limited to the Great Books project would come away knowing nothing important about non-Western civilizations --- Arab, Chinese, Persian, Japanese, Aztec-Inca, and so on, including their religious traditions.
What the Great Books education did foster was a kind of insular outlook good for scoring points at cocktail parties, with limited knowledge of any subject in depth. Looking over the extended list of the 2nd edition (1990), I find that anyone whose knowledge is confined to those books would know nothing about modern philosophy, the scientific method and modern science, the modern social sciences, almost all important novels, poetry, and drama of the last 150 years, modern empire-building, the emergence of nation-states, the rise and fall of European power globally speaking, military history in the modern world, and anything in modern art and music and theater and movies beyond what philistines themselves are repelled by.
............
Michael Gordon, aka the buggy professor: http://www.thebuggyprofessor.org
Posted by: michael gordon at May 30, 2008 3:24:47 PM
"But there's no reason to consult the original text to learn, about, say Euclid or Newton."
That strikes me as pretty wrongheaded. Without knowing Euclid in the original, for example, you would have no idea what leaps and bounds were taken to get from Euclid's geometry to the infinitely more abstract and symbolic -- and unreal -- forms of algebra, calculus, and the stuff that passes for "Euclidean" geometry in the average high school.
To do without original texts implies an enormous amount of faith on your part in whomever you're getting your "facts" from.
Posted by: massachusetts Johnnie at May 30, 2008 3:29:35 PM
This reminds me of a story I heard about a class at Boston College in which the students were very dismissive of "ancient" ways of thinking.
The professor interrupted the conversation, and offered any student an "A" for the semester if she could go to the chalkboard and successfully demonstrate to the professor's liking that the earth moves around the sun, and not vice versa.
Nobody accepted the challenge.
Posted by: massachusetts Johnnie at May 30, 2008 3:35:27 PM
Sorry, but the suggestion that Plotinus be removed is dotty. Everyone knows Whitehead's line about western philosophy being a series of footnotes to Plato. What many people don't realize is that throughout most of the history of western civilization, scholars didn't actually have access to Plato -- what they had, first and foremost, was Plotinus, which for the most part they took to be Plato.
Allow me to quote my colleague's SEP article on the subject: "Until well into the 19th century, Platonism was in large part understood, appropriated or rejected based on its Plotinian expression and in adumbrations of this. The theological traditions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism all, in their formative periods, looked to ancient Greek philosophy for the language and arguments with which to articulate their religious visions. For all of these, Platonism expressed the philosophy that seemed closest to their own theologies. Plotinus was the principal source for their understanding of Platonism."
To a quick introduction to the massive importance of Plotinus, I would start with Al-Farabi's "The opinions of the citizens of the virtuous city."
Posted by: Joseph Heath at May 30, 2008 3:44:43 PM
