What are the Great Books?

The short answer could be, the 1952 publication of Encyclopedia Britannica’s The Great Books of the Western World series. But that would be a truncated, and quite possibly, unhelpful answer.

Plus, that answer would thwart my penultimate purpose in writing this post, which is to provide some insights into what actually makes up a Great Book and why it would be important for a person to read the books that fit the criteria.

Which, in turn, leads me to my ultimate purpose, which is to get you to read the Great Books. Now that we have that out of the way, we can get started.

In his preface to the first book in the Great Books series, Robert M. Hutchins opened by writing,

Until lately, the West has regarded it as self-evident that the road to education lay through great books. No man was educated unless he was acquainted with the masterpieces of his tradition. There never was much doubt in anybody’s mind about which the masterpieces were. They were the books that had endured and that the common voice of mankind called the finest creations, in writing, of the Western mind.

Obviously, we in the post-modern era are far beyond “until lately.” What constitutes a genuine education is no longer self-evident. Further, our view of education is typically characterized by change, innovation, and individualization. There is little in our post-modern academia that is concerned with cultural literacy, that is the commonality of language, thought, or literature. The only thing the various post-modern approaches to education seem to have in common is specialized vocational training. While vocational training is important and not to be neglected, a Great Books or liberal arts education has as its goal something entirely different.

A Great Books education has virtue, wisdom, and human flourishing as its goal. Hutchins’ claim on this point is helpful to my argument. He writes,

The aim of liberal education is human excellence, both private and public (for man is a political animal). Its object is the excellence of man as man and man as citizen. It regards man as an end, not as a means; and it regards the ends of life, and not the means to it. For this reason it is the education of free men. Other types of education or training treat men as a means to some other end, or are at best concerned with the means of life, with earning a living, and not with its ends.

Another way of saying this is a liberally educated person is educated as a human being, not as a laborer, or a professional, or toward any other utilitarian ends. A liberally educated person is educated to become the best human being he or she can be.

One clarification is necessary here. By “liberal,” I don’t mean progressive, per se. By liberal, I mean that a person is educated to be a free and self-governing citizen. Adler and Hutchins note a few qualities of being a liberally educated person in their essay on “The Great Conversation.”

They explain that the liberally educated person “seeks to clarify the basic problems” and “understand the way in which one problem bears upon another.” Further, he or she understands deeper things like “the relation between the problem of the immortality of the soul and the problem of the best form of government.” The liberally educated person, “understands that the one problem cannot be solved by the same method as the other, and that the test that he will have to bring to bear upon solutions proposed differs from one problem to the other.”

In addition to understanding “the distinctions and interrelations of the basic fields of subject matter, the differences and connections between poetry and history, science and philosophy, theoretical and practical science,” the liberally educated person understands “the same methods cannot be applied in all fields,” and yet he certainly “knows the methods appropriate to each.”

In sum, the liberally educated person is “at home in the world of ideas” just as much as he or she is at home in “the world of practical affairs,” and he or she understands how the two realms relate to one another.

One important take away here is a liberal education cultivates the person to be his or her best self rather than training the person to do a vocational task. Another important take away is that the path to becoming a liberally educated is, in large part, paved with Great Books.

This then raises an important question. What is a great book? How can we know which books to read to become liberally educated?

While there is not a specific canon of books as there is with Scripture, there are some criteria that can help identify which books should be included in a list that would be beneficial in helping a person become their most fully human self. According to Adler and Hutchins, for a book to be a great book, it must meet (for the most part) the following eight criteria:

1. It is a book that has been read by the largest number of persons … that has, over the centuries, had more readers than other books, and that has “stood the test of time.”
2. It is a book that has the greatest number of alternative, independent, and consistent interpretations.
3. It is a book that raises the persistent unanswerable questions, the perennial human questions.
4. It is a book that is a fine work of art.
5. It is a book that is considered to be a masterpiece of the liberal arts.
6. It is a book with contemporary significance. That is, it deals with issues, problems, or facets of human life that are of major concern to us today as well as at the time in which it was written.
7. It is a book with re-readability. That is, it is intended for the general reader and as such, is a book worth reading carefully over and over again for both pleasure and for profit.
8. It is a book that demonstrates extensive relevance to the great ideas found in the thinking and writing of great authors throughout history. In other words, it has something of significance to say about a number of the great ideas.

Once we examine their list, we can possibly see why C. S. Lewis argued that a person should mix up their reading with both new and old books. New books may be easier to read while, in fact, engaging old ideas, but if you enter a conversation at 11:00 that began at 8:00, argues Lewis, “you will often not see the real bearing of what is said.” Reading the Great Books helps us see the real bearing of what is being said (and done) in the realm of human ideas.

If you are interested in reading the Great Books and would like to tackle this Parnassus with some friends, consider joining one of my online Great Books courses for students and adults.