Where's Cicero?

Great Books of the Western World, published in 1952, gathered 72 authors into 54 volumes. A joint project of the University of California and Encyclopedia Britannica, the set ranged from ancient Greece to modern Europe and the US, with heavy emphasis on philosophical works and the Anglo-American tradition. University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins provided the introductory volume on “The Great Conversation,” and Mortimer Adler compiled the two-volume “Syntopicon”—a remarkable guide to 102 great ideas that thread their way through these authors, along with innumerable sub-themes.

The idea for Great Books of the Western World was launched in 1943, in the midst of the Second World War, by Senator William Benton of Connecticut, new owner of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The trauma of global war led many to ask what pillars supported Western civilization, what had led to perpetuated totalitarianism, what the Allies fought for, and what the post-war order should look like. The sense of cultural and educational crisis haunting America following the war animated Hutchins. He said he was “convinced that the West needs to recapture and re-emphasize and bring to bear upon its present problems the wisdom that lies in the works of its greatest thinkers and in the discussion that they have carried on.”

In large part, the Great Books project aimed to educate concerned citizens about the foundations of the West, to bring communities across the nation into conversation about the fundamental questions of truth, justice, order, freedom, and humanity. The editors proceeded on the faith that the great books speak for themselves, do not need historical context, and are accessible to anyone without the help of experts and specialists.

Ambitious readers who resolved to take in hand these hefty volumes encountered Homer, Aeschylus, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Lucretius, Epictetus, Virgil, Plutarch, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Chaucer, Copernicus, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Milton, Newton, Locke, Hume, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Gibbon, the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the Federalist Papers, on down to Hegel, Darwin, Marx, Tolstoy, William James, and John Dewey.

Reviewers of Great Books of the Western World—and there were many—puzzled over the editors’ principles of selection and exclusion. The Bible wasn’t included, but the editors dismissed this complaint, saying that the Bible was easily accessible and that controversy over which translation to use would be too divisive.

One of the oddest and most obvious omissions was Cicero. The great Roman statesman, orator, and philosopher did not appear at all. No list of great books is perfect; no list will make everyone happy. But it would be hard to name a more definitive author than Cicero for the entire tradition of education in the West. He bridged the Greek and Roman worlds. He stood as a living aqueduct of ideas from Athens to Rome. He reconciled the orators and philosophers. Perhaps he was not a very original thinker, not a founder of an academy or school of philosophy. Perhaps he strikes some as too eclectic, a dabble, a superficial amateur. But that assessment does no justice too him, and it overlooks his profound influence on 2,000 years of educational theory and practice.

Two notable reviewers spotted the Cicero problem immediately. Gilbert Highet, the distinguished Columbia University classics professor and translator, thought the whole collection badly skewed. The editors not only found no place for Cicero but also excluded Horace, Sallust, Racine, Moliere, Ariosto, and Tasso. In other words, the collection was less Roman and French and Italian than education in the West, including America, had been. And it erased the towering figures of Luther and Calvin.

As an alternative, Highet proposed a different way to make selections—an idea not yet pursued but well worth the effort. “It would be a valuable project,” he offered, “to make a list of the books which have been considered essential, in large areas of the West, over long periods of the past 3,000 years: to reconstruct the bookshelves of men like Cicero, Petrarch, Erasmus, Goethe, Croce. Such a list fairly accurately represents the Great Books of the Western World, but it would be very far from coinciding with this interesting but arbitrary collection. It would include Protestant thinkers like Luther, Calvin, hooker, to balance St. Thomas; it would contain law and oratory; it would have much more poetry, and much more drama; it would be broadly human.”

Highet’s friend and Columbia colleague, Jacques Barzun, also searched in vain for Cicero. The historian wondered at the inclusion of all the Greek dramatists but none of the Roman. All of Plutarch but none of Cicero. No Moliere, no Edmund Burke, no Voltaire, no Dickens, no Balzac (and yet there was Laurence Sterne and Henry Fielding). Barzun worried that these and other omissions reflected a bias among the editors toward what he called “intellectualism.” That is, the world of abstract reflection at the expense of the imagination. “To be rational with them,” he complained, “is to be full of propositions. This is important and indeed necessary to our lives as practical and reflective men. But a rational life based on no other kind of thought will almost certainly be—despite the editors’ assurance—a tyrannical order. It needs tempering by, dialectical opposition with, other types of thought, which literature and the arts inculcate without systematic exposition, but directly working on the imagination.”

I will explore Cicero’s contributions to education next week, but for now it is worth thinking about the implications of Great Books lists that have been granted canonical status, wittingly or unwittingly. We ought not to be blinded by these lists. They are not authoritative. They ought to be subject to intelligent scrutiny by those who love the tradition.  Conservatives react strongly to criticisms leveled against the whole notion of Western Civilization and Great Books curricula. But as they defend the tradition they ought not to respond with a mindless dogmatism. Debates over the inspiration, inerrancy, and authority of scripture belong in another sphere. Champions of the Great Books ought to have the courage to keep alive the question of just what it is that makes a great book great, to admit when they have made blunders, to welcome allies from unexpected sources, and maybe even to start a fresh list build on principles different from those used nearly 70 years ago and reconstruct Highet’s more historically informed bookshelf.