Abstract
In July 1968—after Robert Kennedy’s shocking assassination and before the mayhem of the Democratic Convention—Charles Van Doren and Mortimer Adler traded letters about drafts of Adler’s forthcoming book, The Time of Our Lives (1970). The issue at hand was the tone of Adler’s drafts. Van Doren, son of Adler’s friend, the poet Mark Van Doren, and best known for his involvement in the famous Twenty-One television show scandal, was then a fellow with Adler’s Institute for Philosophical Research. Charles also worked for Encyclopædia Britannica, having begun with them in 1959 after leaving NBC. After moving his family to Chicago in 1965, he developed a close intellectual partnership with Adler. Van Doren’s letter on Lives contained praise and criticism, if more of the latter. His concerns centered on “certain terms” and the “adoption of a tone, at certain points, that seems to me unfortunate.” In discussing the technicalities of terms like “pleasure,” “leisure,” “playboy,” and “indulgence” (including a passage Van Doren feared might be interpreted as discussing “self-abuse”), Van Doren chided Adler for taking “a dour, Presbyterian tone” and for forcing the word “play” “back into the old, narrow, ‘Puritan’ mold.” Van Doren feared Adler was being “Quixotic.” The tone might offend the group he thought Adler might help: American youth.1
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Notes
UCSC/MJAP, Box 89, Folder: “Critical Correspondence” (Charles Van Doren to Adler, July 18, 1968); Mortimer J. Adler, Philosopher at Large: An Intellectual Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1977), 283, 320;
William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932–1972 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974), 850–852;
Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 327–328: Charles Van Doren, “Personal History: All the Answers,” The New Yorker, July 28, 2008, available at: http://www.newy-orker.com/reporting/2008/07/28/080728fa_fact_vandoren. For more on July 1968, see
David Farber, The Age of Dreams: America in the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), chapter 10 passim;
James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), chapter 22 passim; Manchester, The Glory and the Dream, 1129–1130, 1142–1144;
David Steigerwald, The Sixties and the End of Modern America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 31–32.
Mortimer J. Adler, The Time of Our Lives: The Ethics of Common Sense, with an Introduction by Deal W. Hudson (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1970; reprint, New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), 225–226. See also
Alice Echols, Shaky Ground: The ’60s and Its Aftershocks (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
Adler, Philosopher, 194, 318–319; Echols, 31–32; Albert O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University-Belknap Press, 1991), 7, 11–12, 36, 81, 84.
Echols, 20; Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, Foreword by Saul Bellow (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 65, 68, 73–74, 97–108, 235, 313–335;
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Vintage, 1996), 166–167, 326, 329–334, 417, 514, 555;
Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), 407;
Howard Brick, Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 185.
Bennie R. Crockett, “Mortimer J. Adler: An Analysis and Critique of His Eclectic Epistemology” (PhD diss., University of Wales, 2001), 9–11, 51, n.153, 83, 85; Mortimer J. Adler, The Conditions of Philosophy: Its Checkered Past, Its Present Disorder, and Its Future Promise (New York: Atheneum, 1965), 74–75, chapter 8 passim. Hereafter Conditions.
Anthony Quinton, “Analytic Philosophy” and “Continental Philosophy,” in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, (ed.) Ted Honderich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 28–30, 161–163;
Andrew Jewett, “Canonizing Dewey: Naturalism, Logical Empiricism, and the Idea of American Philosophy,” Modern Intellectual History 8, no. 1 (2011): 91–125.
On Schlesinger see The Vital Center (1949) and his 1956 essay, “Liberalism in America: A Note for Europeans,” in The Politics of Hope (1963). On four broad traits in the tradition of liberalism, see Jason Bivins, The Fracture of Good Order: Christian Antiliberalism and the Challenge to American Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 3.
Sophia Rosenfeld, Common Sense: A Political History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 15.
Mortimer J. Adler, “The Philosopher,” in The Works of the Mind, (ed.) Robert B. Heywood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), 229; Adler, Conditions, 11;
Mortimer Adler, A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 236–237.
Bruce Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 1720–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 199, 284–285;
John Higham, “The Matrix of Specialization,” in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860–1920, (eds.) Alexandra Oleson and John Voss (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 3–18.
Adler, Conditions, 21–43, 68; Brand Blanshard, “Review of The Conditions of Philosophy by Mortimer J. Adler,” Journal of Higher Education 36, no. 7 (October 1965), 409–410.
Ibid. 75–76, 276; Adler, Lives, 127–128, 224–225; Mortimer J. Adler, The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes, with an Introduction by Theodore T. Puck (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), 52–53, 112–113;
George Cotkin, Existential America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 95, 184, 189, 238–241;
Steven Crowell, “Existentialism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy available at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism (ed.) Edward N. Zalta (accessed August 17, 2001).
Adler, Politics, chapters 6 and 8 passim, 242; Adler, Lives, 225; Brick, 69, 115–117; Cotkin, 107, 118–119, 144; Steigerwald, 122–123, 184–186; Richard Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s & 1950s (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 210–215, 258–260, 405–408;
John Patrick Diggins, The Rise and Fall of the American Left (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 126, 207, 224–226.
Cotkin, 2, 6–7, 16–17, 72, 133, 141, 166, chapter 11 passim,; Adler, Lives, 20, 128, 224–225; Steigerwald, 122–123, 137, 248–249; Echols, 32; Diggins, 270–274; Herbert Marcuse, The New Left and the 1960s: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Vol. 3, ed. Douglas Kellner (New York: Routledge, 2004), 31, 83, 130.
Yves R. Simon, Nature and Functions of Authority (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1948), 32.
Adler, Politics, 26–27; Adler, Lives, 182–183; Echols, 48, 50; Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 41, 92, 282;
J. David Hoeveler, Jr., The Postmodernist Turn: American Thought and Culture in the 1970s (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996), 168–172. Nozick’s most famous work is Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
Adler, Lives, 183–184; Adler, Politics, 23; Mortimer J. Adler and William Gorman, The American Testament (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1975), 101–109. For more on the “Second Bill of Rights,” see
Donald R. Brand, “Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Second Bill of Rights,” in History of American Political Thought, (eds.) Byan-Paul Frost and Jeffrey Sikkenga (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), chapter 15 passim.
Mortimer J. Adler: Haves Without Have-Nots: Essays for the 21st Century on Democracy and Socialism (New York: Macmillan, 1991), 1–104, and “The End of the Conflict between Capitalism and Communism,” Great Ideas Today (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1990).
Manfred B. Steger, Globalization: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 8, 9;
Glenda Sluga, “The Transformation of International Relations,” in The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective, (eds.) Niall Ferguson, et al. (Cambridge: Harvard Belknap Press, 2010), 225–227, 234;
Jeremy Adelman, “International Finance and Political Legitimacy,” in Shock of the Global, 114–115. For more on the nature of cosmopolitanism in a global age, see the “Introduction” to Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Globalization: Citizens Without States, (eds.) Lee Trepanier and Khalil M. Habib (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2011), 1–10.
Charles A. Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984; reprint, 1994), 43, 146; Leon Kass, “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” The New Republic, June 2, 1997, 17–26; Rodgers, 202–204; Schulman, 32–34.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Religious Faith and John Rawls,” The New York Review of Books LVII, no. 19 (December 9, 2010): 51; Hoeveler, pp. 162–163;
Richard Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 170, 194; Crockett, 9, 45.
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard Belknap Press, 1971), 12, 136–142, 424–433; Appiah, 52–53; Hoeveler, 163–164. It seems that Adler’s only encounter with Rawls, in writing, was in the former’s 1981 book, Six Great Ideas (NY: Macmillan). Therein Adler criticized Rawls for defining down justice as “solely … fairness,” and called A Theory of Justice “a widely discussed and overpraised book” (p. 188).
Adler, Lives, 211–212; Clifford Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973; reprint, London: Fontana Press, 1993), 84.
Christopher Jencks and David Riesman, The Academic Revolution (1968; reprint, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), x; Adler, Lives, 226. See also
Richard F. Teichgraeber III, “Beyond ‘Academicization’: The Postwar American University and Intellectual History,” Modern Intellectual History 8, no. 1 (2011): 127–146.
Adler, Lives, 226–228; Steigerwald, 134–136; Adler, Politics, 195–199; Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876–1980, Vol. 3, (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1988), 376;
Clark Kerr in The Uses of the University, third ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963, 1982), chapter 1 passim. See also Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, “The Politics of Knowledge,” History of Education Quarterly (1987) and Ethan Schrum, “Administering American Modernity: The Instrumental University in the Postwar United States” (PhD diss. University of Pennsylvania, 2009). For more on Free Universities, see
William Draves, The Free University: A Model for Lifelong Learning (Chicago: Association Press, 1980) and Fred M. Hechinger, “Education: Free Universities: No Grades, No Exams—and Now, No Schools,” New York Times, August 22, 1971, E9.
Adler, Politics, xxv, 7, 193, 243(n2)–245; Robert M. Hutchins, The Learning Society (Frederick Praeger, 1968; reprint, New York: New American Library Mentor Book, 1969), 164–165.
Harris Wofford, Jr. (ed.), Embers of the World: Conversations with Scott Buchanan (Santa Barbara, CA: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1969), ii;
Scott Buchanan, “A Message to the Young,” in The Annals of America, Volume 18, 1961–1968, The Burdens of World Power (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1976), 680–681. Buchanan’s article first appeared in Center Magazine (March 1968).
Stanford University, Hoover Institution Archives, Firing Line collection (hereafter SUHIA/FLC), Episode 193 “The Idea of the Great Ideas” (broadcast March 13, 1970); Kerr, 119;
John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 358–374;
Paul Woodring, The Higher Learning in America: A Reassessment (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 167–168; Wolfgang Saxon, “Paul Dean Woodring, 87, Dies; Called For Reform in Education,” New York Times, November 18, 1994, available at: http://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/18/ obituaries/paul-dean-woodring-87-dies-called-for-reform-in-education. html (accessed January 11, 2011);
George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 301.
Firing Line, Episode 193. See also Mortimer J. Adler, How to Think about the Great Ideas: From the Great Books of Western Civilization, (ed.) Max Weismann (Chicago: Open Court, 2000), chapter 35 passim.
Firing Line, Episode 193; Adler, Lives, 192; Nash, xiii; Kim Phillips-Fein, “Conservatism: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History 98, no. 3 (December 2011): 723–773.
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© 2013 Tim Lacy
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Lacy, T. (2013). The Common Sense of Great Books Liberalism, 1965–1970. In: The Dream of a Democratic Culture. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137042620_6
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