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The books everyone bought and no one read
- tokenadult 18y agoGood catch to find this article. My dad's old set of the first printing of the Great Books came into my house recently after he died. "From the start, The Great Books of the Western World project was a paradoxical undertaking. Hutchins and his evangelising colleague Mortimer Adler were elitists on a democratic mission, popularisers who made few concessions to popular taste. The texts came unadorned with any historical or biographical materials to situate the reader, but such orientation was besides the point: Hutchins wanted the reader to confront the texts of Aristotle, Dante and Aeschylus naked, as it were, without any guidance or forethought." My biggest problem with the Great Books of the Western World has always been that they are the books of the WESTERN world only. I am a westerner myself, and I can't think of a lot of titles in that series that are wholly unimportant, but there is a lot of Chinese literature available in good English translations with at least as much worldwide influence and historical importance.