by Alex Beam
Olin Foundation, St. John’s and
Olmstead, Frederick Law
On Christian Doctrine (St. Augustine)
On Conic Section (Apollonius of Perga)
On Fistulae (Hippocrates)
On Hemorrhoids (Hippocrates)
On Liberty (Mill)
On Narcissism (Freud)
On Sleep and Sleeplessness (Aristotle)
On the Circulation of the Blood (Harvey)
On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies (Gilbert)
On the Natural Faculties (Galen)
On the Nature of Things (Lucretius)
On the Revolution of Heavenly Spheres (Copernicus)
O’Neill, Eugene
Open Book, An (Dirda)
Oppenheimer, J. Robert
Optics (Newton)
Organon (Aristotle)
Origin of Species, The (Darwin)
Orwell, George
Osbourne, Fanny
Ovid
Paalman, Susan
“Pacem in Terris” conferences
Paepcke, Elizabeth
Paepcke, Walter
Paideia Proposal
Pall Mall Gazette
Panelas, Tom
Paradise Lost (Milton)
Partisan Review, MacDonald in
Party of One (Fadiman)
Pascal, Blaise
Payn, James
Paz, Octavio
Pearson, Clare
People’s Institute
Peregrine, Scott
Pershing, John
Pevear, Richard
Phenomenology (Hegel)
Philosopher at Large (Adler)
Philosophy Department (Chicago)
Philosophy Is Everybody’s Business
Philosophy of History, The (Hegel)
Philosophy of Right, The (Hegel)
Physics Department (Chicago)
Pickens, Leo
Pierson, George
Pirandello, Luigi
Pizarro, Karen
Pizarro, Tom
Planck, Max
Plato
Academy of
dialogues of
Plotinus
Plutarch
Poincare, Henri
Politics (Aristotle)
Portrait of the Artist, A ( Joyce)
Positivist Library
Potemkin
Praise of Folly, The (Erasmus)
“Prayer” (Adler)
Prince, The (Machiavelli)
Princeton University curriculum at
Principles of Human Knowledge, The (Berkeley)
Principles of Psychology, The ( James)
Pritzker, Rhoda
Private Life of Helen of Troy, The (Erskine)
Prometheus Bound (Aeschylus)
Prosser, Professor
Proust, Marcel
Prussian Officer, The (Lawrence)
Ptolemy
“Public Interest in Education, The” (Hutchins)
Puckett, Earl
Pusey, Nathan
Quadrivium
Quintilian
Rabelais, François
Racine, Jean
Rameau’s Nephew (Diderot)
Random House, Hutchins and
“Ranee, The” (Brooke)
Rawls, John
Reader’s Digest
Reconstruction in Philosophy (Dewey)
Redbook
Reflections in a Silver Spoon (Mellon)
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Tawney)
Rena-Dozier, Emily
Republic, The (Plato)
Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres (Copernicus)
Rhetoric (Aristotle)
Rhetorical Exercises (Quintilian)
Richardson, Clint
Rieff, Philip
Riggs, Austen
Rimpoche, Sogyal
Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, The (Gibbon)
Risley, Marius
Roberto Clemente Family Guidance Center, Great Books and
Rockefeller, John D.
Rockefeller Foundation
Roosevelt, Eleanor
Roosevelt, Franklin D.
Rose for Emily, A (Faulkner)
Rosenfeld, Isaac
Rothenberg, Molly
Round Table (Algonquin Club)
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
Rubin, Joan Shelley
Rumsfeld, Joyce
Ruskin, John
Russell, Bertrand
Rutherford, Ernest
Safra, Jacqui
St. Augustine
St. Chrysostom’s
Saint Joan (Shaw)
St. John’s College
Adler and
competitiveness of
curriculum at
described
Great Books and
Hutchins and
St. Mary’s College, Great Books and
Salinger, Pierre
Salk, Jonas
Sallust
Sandburg, Carl: on Chicago
Santa Barbara Center
Sappho
Sarton, George
Saturday Review
“Scattering of Alpha and Beta Particles by Matter and the Structure of the Atom, The” (Rutherford)
Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr.
Schrodinger, Erwin
Schueppert, George
Great Books Foundation and
on Great Books image
Schur, Max
Schwab, Joseph selection committee and
Science magazine
Sears, Roebuck & Co.
Seattle, Chief Joseph
Second Look in the Rearview Mirror, A (Adler)
Securities and Exchange Commission, Hutchins and
Sedgwick, Eva Kosofsky
“Sestina” (Bishop)
“Setting the Record Straight” (Adler)
Shakespeare, William
Shaw, G. B.
Shay, Jonathan
Sherman, Cindy
Shimer College, Great Books curriculum at
Shorris, Earl
Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, The (Hemingway)
Simon & Schuster
Simplicity of God, The (Aquinas)
Sinatra, Frank
Six Characters in Search of an Author (Pirandello)
Six Enneads, The (Plotinus)
“Six Great Ideas” (television show)
“$64Question, The” (television show)
Smeaton, Oliphant
Smith, Adam
Smith, Bill
Social Contract, The (Rousseau)
Socrates
Song of Roland, The
Sonnenschein, Hugo
Sonnets, The (Shakespeare)
Sontag, Susan
Sophocles
Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois)
Spartan Madball
Spillane, Mickey
Spinoza, Baruch
Spirit of Laws, The (Montesquieu)
“Spiritual Life in America” (Erskine)
Stagg, Amos Alonzo
Stanford University, protest at (photo)
“Star” (Thompson)
Stein, Gertrude: encounter with
Steinbeck, John
Sterne, Laurence
Stevenson, Adlai
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Strassler, Robert
Stratford, Belden
Strauss, Leo
Structural Anthropology (Levi-Strauss)
Summa Theologica (Aquinas)
Sunday Magazine, The
Swann in Love (Proust)
Swift, Harold
Swift, Jonathan
Symposium (Plato)
Syntopicon
advertisement for(fig.)
computerization of
Szilard, Leo
Tables of Anomalies (Ptolemy)
Tacitus
Taft, Robert
Tasso
Tate, Allen
Tawney, Richard H.
Taymor, Julie
Teachin
g Company
Temes, Peter
Thackeray, William
Theory of Heat (Fourier)
They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons (Heilbrunn)
Thomas Aquinas College, Great Books and
Thompson, Hunter
Thompson, Randall
Thoreau, Henry David
Thorgeirsson, Njal
Thucydides
Tilley, Karen
Time magazine
Call/Adler and
on Great Books
Hutchins and
on Maude Hutchins
To Kill a Mockingbird
To the Lighthouse (Woolf )
Tocqueville, Alexis de
Toklas, Alice B.
Tolstoy, Leo
Tom Jones (Fielding)
Toscanni, Arturo
Touchstones
Treatise on Light (Huygens)
Trilling, Lionel selection committee and
Tristram Shandy (Sterne)
Trivium
Troilus and Cressida (Chaucer)
Trojan Horse(photo)
Truman, Harry S
Tugwell, Rexford
Tunney, Gene
Twain, Mark
“21” (television show)
Twenty-Third Psalm
Two Years Before the Mast (Dana)
Ulysses (Joyce)
Uncle Vanya (Chekhov)
UNESCO, Benton and
Unger, Nell: criticism by
United States Information Agency, Benton and
U.S. Naval Academy(photo) St. John’s and
University of Chicago
Adler and
Britannica and
core curriculum at
core wars and
economic austerity at
football at
Great Books and
growth of
Hutchins and
University of Chicago Magazine
University of Chicago Roundtable, The (NBC)
Urban League
Urrea, Luis Albert
Van Doren, Charles
Van Doren, John
Van Doren, Mark
Adler and
Britannica and
General Honors and
selection committee and
Veblen, Thorstein
Veritas Fund, classical curricula and
Vertigo
Vindication of the Rights of Women (Wollstonecraft)
Virgil
Volokhonsky, Larissa
Voltaire
Von Hoffman, Nicholas: on Hutchins
Waddington, C. H.
Waiting for Godot (Beckett)
Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, launch party at
Walgreen, Charles
Wall Street Journal
Waning of the Middle Ages, The (Huizinga)
War and Peace (Tolstoy)
Washington Post
Waste Land, The (Eliot)
Wealth of Nations, The (Smith)
Weber, Max
Weismann, Max
Welles, Orson
Western Canon, The (Bloom)
White, Kurt
Whitehead, Alfred North
Whitehead, Ralph, Jr.
Whitman, Walt
Wigmore, J. H.
Wilford, Paul
Willard, George
Williams, Lynn
Wilson, Woodrow
Winesburg, Ohio (Anderson)
Winfrey, Oprah: book club of
Winn, Marcia
Wittgenstein, Ludwig
Wolfe, Tom
Wollstonecraft, Mary
Wood, Robert
Woolf, Virginia
Wyatt, Thomas
Yale Law School
Yale University
Young, Gig
Zeiderman, Howard
ALEX BEAM is a columnist for the Boston Globe and the author of three books: two novels about Russia, Fellow Travelers and The American Are Coming!, and a nonfiction book, Gracefully Insane: Life and Death Inside America’s Premier Mental Hospital. Gracefully Insane won a Massachusetts Book Award and was a New York Times Notable Book of 2002. The recipient of many journalism awards, Beam has written for the International Herald Tribune, the New York Times, Slate, the Atlantic, and many other magazines. He lives in Boston.
PublicAffairs is a publishing house founded in 1997. It is a tribute to the standards, values, and flair of three persons who have served as mentors to countless reporters, writers, editors, and book people of all kinds, including me.
I.F. STONE, proprietor of I. F. Stone’s Weekly, combined a commitment to the First Amendment with entrepreneurial zeal and reporting skill and became one of the great independent journalists in American history. At the age of eighty, Izzy published The Trial of Socrates, which was a national bestseller. He wrote the book after he taught himself ancient Greek.
BENJAMIN C. BRADLEE was for nearly thirty years the charismatic editorial leader of The Washington Post. It was Ben who gave the Post the range and courage to pursue such historic issues as Watergate. He supported his reporters with a tenacity that made them fearless and it is no accident that so many became authors of influential, best-selling books.
ROBERT L. BERNSTEIN, the chief executive of Random House for more than a quarter century, guided one of the nation’s premier publishing houses. Bob was personally responsible for many books of political dissent and argument that challenged tyranny around the globe. He is also the founder and longtime chair of Human Rights Watch, one of the most respected human rights organizations in the world.
For fifty years, the banner of Public Affairs Press was carried by its owner Morris B. Schnapper, who published Gandhi, Nasser, Toynbee, Truman, and about 1,500 other authors. In 1983, Schnapper was described by The Washington Post as “a redoubtable gadfly.” His legacy will endure in the books to come.
Peter Osnos, Founder and Editor-at-Large
1 After printing Kirsch’s article about the Classics, the editors at Harvard magazine pulled a Pall Mall Gazette: They invited their readers to submit their own lists of great books for a hypothetical new edition. The suggestions ranged from Feminism and Art History, by Norma Broude and Mary Garrardbook, to Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The two books most often chosen were Richard Feynman’s Lectures on Physics and James Joyce’s Ulysses. (“A monument of Irish wit,” Robert Hutchins called it when he helped choose Chicago’s 1952 Great Books, “but I am not sure that justifies its inclusion.” It didn’t.) Neither Joyce nor Feynman appeared in the 1990 revised and “modernized” edition of Chicago’s Great Books.
2 Adler’s abrasiveness cannot be understated. In an oral history interview, George Dell asked Adler about the rumor that he had hastened the death of Chicago philosopher and Dewey protégé George Herbert Mead, who resigned his chair while warring with Adler and Hutchins. Adler allowed that yes, he was quite abrasive, and that yes, he and Mead had disagreements. “But I mean, after all, that didn’t kill him. [Laughter]”
3 This could not have been as jarring as when Adler interrupted a discussion at a Physics Department lunch at the faculty club to hold forth on . . . angelology. The physicists were talking about Niels Bohr’s observation that an electron can pass from one orbit to another without traversing space. Why, that’s just like the angels! Adler explained to the roomful of men who had probably never been exposed to the Scholastics’ vision of particle physics before. “Far from persuading the physicists that angelology might be a respectable science,” Adler recalled, “my remarks on the subject, delivered with some heat and without any apology, generated doubts about my sanity as well as fears of a recrudescence of medievalism—the hobgoblin of a modern university dominated by experimental or empirical science.” from the educational ideology of the Middle Ages, Hutchins divided learning into four arts: natural, useful, liberal, and fine arts. Under useful arts he lumped medicine, navigation, engineering, and stenography(!). He called the liberal arts “contemplation and regular manipulation
of things as symbols with an eye to the truth” and the fine arts “regular cooperations which clarify the truths of individual things in themselves, and thus render them symbols of other things.” Facts are the enemy, Hutchins railed, in several highly publicized university speeches of the early 1930s. “Facts are the core of an anti-intellectual curriculum. . . . Facts do not solve problems. . . . The gadgeteers and data collectors, masquerading as scientists, have threatened to become the supreme chieftains of the scholarly world.” The university’s scientists and social scientists had no doubt who the “gadgeteers and data collectors” were. The enemy, according to Hutchins, was them.
4 There are several versions of this encounter, and the above draws mainly from Adler’s. Here is just a sample of Stein’s own lengthy account in Everybody’s Autobiography: “[Y ]es I know and I began to get excited yes I know, naturally you are teachers and teaching is your occupation and naturally what you call ideas are easy to teach and so you are convinced that they are the only ideas” etc. etc.
5 Milton Mayer, who sometimes stood in for Hutchins at the seminars, remembered Adler fretting about the ethnic makeup of their downtown teaching team. “[Morton,] a practical fellow, is worried about having too many Jews (beginning with Adler and Mayer) teaching fat Gentiles in an anti-Semitic club.”
6 Socrates, in Plato’s The Apology: “I am that gadfly which God has attached to the state, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you.” The school newspaper of St. John’s College is also called The Gadfly.
7 Thirty years later, in one of Adler’s innumerable appearances on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line television show, a young Michael Kinsley asked the aging Great Bookie if he still clung to the notion that the Great Ideas numbered 102.
“Weren’t you tempted by 100?” Kinsley asked.
Absolutely not, Adler replied, allowing that he might add one principle, equality: “The only idea that has demanded attention in the 20th century is equality.”
KINSLEY: “Is that not in there?”
BUCKLEY: “How extraordinary.”
ADLER: “I would add equality and drop nothing.”
KINSLEY: “What’s wrong with fate?”
After Kinsley noted that even the Michelin guides sometimes downgrade their restaurant ratings, Adler allowed, “I might drop fate.”
ADLER: “It had its greatest meaning in the ancient world.”
