What Makes a Great Book?
In this space, I reprinted a copy of a list painstakingly compiled by an Ubiquitous Mr Baxter of the Great Books. It was immediately greeted with scoffers who would throw away half the list or more.
Lest the conversation be entirely occupied with criticisms of what should and should not be called a Great Book, it is useful in his space to reprint Mortimer Alder’s own description of the process which compiled this list.
The words below are his:
What were those three criteria of selection? The first was the book’s contemporary significance — relevance to the problems and issues of the twentieth century. The books were not to be regarded as archaeological relics — monuments in our intellectual tradition. They should be works that are as much of concern to us today as at the time they were written, even if that was centuries ago. They are thus essentially timeless — always contemporary, and not confined to interests that change from time to time or from place to place.
The second criterion was their infinite rereadability or, in the case of the more difficult mathematical and scientific works, their studiability again and again. Most of the 400,000 books published each year are not worth carefully reading even once; many fewer than 1,000 each year are worth reading more than once. When, infrequently in any century, a great book does appear, it is a book worth reading again and again and again. It is inexhaustibly rereadable. It cannot be fully understood on one, two, or three readings. More is to be found on all subsequent readings. This is an exacting criterion, an ideal that is fully attained by only a small number of the 511 works that we selected. It is approximated in varying degrees by the rest.
The third criterion was the relevance of the work to a very large number of great ideas and great issues that have occupied the minds of thinking individuals for the last twenty-five centuries.
The authors of these books take part in the great conversation, not only by reading the works of many of their predecessors, but also by discussing many of the 102 great ideas treated in the “Syntopicon”. In other words, the great books are the books in which the great conversation occurs about the great ideas. It is the set of great ideas that determines the choice of the great books.
In a book entitled “The Great Conversation”, which is not a part of the set’s second edition but which accompanies it as an introduction to the set and as a guide to its use, we have demonstrated this point by two devices. One is something that we called the Author-to-Author Index, which shows how many of each author’s predecessors that author has cited in his work. The other is the author-to-Idea Index, which shows in how many of the 102 great ideas treated in the “Syntopicon” readers will find references to that author’s work on one or more topics, usually many. These two indices, along with the “Syntopicon” itself, are clear evidence of the reality of the great conversation, in which the great authors and the great books have participated.
By this criterion, the difference between great books and good books is not a difference in degree, but a difference in kind. There is not a continuum that has poor books on the far left, average books in the middle, good and very good books on the right, and a few Great Books on the far right.
As I have recently written elsewhere, the adjective “great” in the phrase “great books” derives its primary meaning from its use in the phrase “great ideas.” There are many other criteria by which people make up diverse lists of the books they wish to honor by calling them “great books.” But from the primary significance of the adjustive “great” as applied to the great ideas is derived the significance of that adjective as used in the phrase, “the great conversation.”
In other words, we chose the great books on the basis of their relevance to at least 25 of the 102 great ideas. Many of the great books are relevant to a much larger number of the 102 great ideas, as many as 75 or more great ideas, a few to all 102 great ideas. In sharp contrast are the good books that are relevant to less than 10 or even as few as 4 or 5 great ideas. We placed such books in the lists of Recommended Readings to be found in the last section in each of the 102 chapters of the “Syntopicon.” Here readers will find many twentieth-century female authors, black authors, and Latin American authors whose works we recommended but did not include in the second edition of the Great Books.
To complete the picture of the criteria that controlled our editorial process of selection, it is necessary for me to mention a number of things that we definitely excluded from our deliberations.
We did not base our selections on an author’s nationality, religion, politics, or field of study; nor on an author’s race or gender [sic he means sex]. Great books were not chosen to make up quotas of any kind; there was no “affirmative action” in the process.
In the second place, we did not consider the influence exerted by an author or a book on later developments in literature or society. That factor alone did not suffice to merit inclusion. Scholars may point out the extraordinary influence exerted by an author or a book, but if the three criteria stated above were not met, that author or book was not to be chosen. Many of the great books have exerted great influence upon later generations, but that by itself was not the reason for their inclusion.
In the third place, a consideration not operative in the selection process was the truth of an author’s opinions or views, or the truth to be found in a particular work. This point is generally misunderstood; many persons think that we regard the great books as a repository of mankind’s success in its ever-continuing pursuit of the truth. “That is simply not the case”. There is much more error in the great books than there is truth. By anyone’s criteria of what is true or false, the great books will be found to contain some truths, but many more mistakes and errors.
Mortimer Adler
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
