Abstract
Great books promoters did not know it for sure as the 1970s began, but Britannica’s long-running Great Books sales boom was over. Their dreams of a democratized culture via great books were dying. The affluence that had enabled the intense consumerism of the 1950s and 1960s was crumbling. While unemployment remained low, inflation and interest rates began to rise in 1968. Concerns about the rising costs of living were prominent. Just when Mortimer Adler had developed a comprehensive commonsense philosophy that might broaden and deepen the great books idea’s connections to politics, culture, and society, the best days for Britannica sales and the larger prestige of great books had ironically come to an end. Even so, as of 1969 the momentum of the recent past caused only a hazy, preemptive concern for the business future of the set—for its prospects as a viable enterprise within the culture industry. That concern resulted in Britannica hiring Arthur Rubin, an old Adler friend and intellectual provocateur from their days at Columbia University, to study past promotional campaigns and help formulate a plan for future business.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2001), 7;
James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 639;
David Farber, The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), 237;
Mortimer J. Adler, Philosopher at Large: An Intellectual Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1977), 53–54, 77–80, 272, 280.
For more on criticisms of higher learning, from professionals and students, see Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University (1963),
Paul Goodman, Community of Scholars (1962), Students for a Democratic Society, Port Huron Statement (1964), and Mario Savo, “The Uncertain Future of the Multiversity,” Harper’s Magazine,October 1966, 88–90, 93–94. For more recent assessment of these endeavors, see
Robert H. Cohen and Reginald E. Zelnik (eds.), The Free Speech Movement, Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s (2000). For more on life adjustment (i.e., Dewey’s followers), see Mortimer J. Adler, “This Pre-War Generation,” Harper’s Magazine, October 1940, 524–534;
Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1962), chapters 13 and14 passim; and
Lawrence Cremin, The Transformation of the American School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957 (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 239, 335–347. For more recent assessment of Dewey’s legacy (and criticisms of it) in education, see
Andrew Hartman’s Education and the Cold War (2008). 5. UCSC/MJAP, Box 3, Folder: “G.B.W.W.” (“GBWW —Campaign in the Seventies” and “GBWW Campaign,” December 11, 1969);
Paul Fussell, CLASS: A Guide Through the American Status System (New York: Dorset Press, 1983), 87. See chapter 5 for more on the Marplan Study.
UCSC/MJAP, Box 3, Folder: “G.B.W.W.” (“GBWW —Campaign in the Seventies” and “GBWW Campaign,” December 11, 1969); Adler, Philosopher, 272; Sarah E. Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 4–521, 121–122, 277, 282.
UCSC/MJAP, Box 125, Folder: “GB-20th Century-EB Fall” (Adler/F. Gibney to C. Swanson, 1976); Hugh S. Moorhead, “The Great Books Movement” (PhD diss. University of Chicago, 1964), 630–631; Harry S. Ashmore, Unseasonable Truths: The Life of Robert Maynard Hutchins (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1989), 337; Adler, Philosopher, 258.
Alex Beam, A Great Idea at the Time (New York: Public Affairs, 2008), 107–110, 226.
Mary Ann Dzuback, Robert M. Hutchins: Portrait of an Educator (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 230, 262–263;
Robert M. Hutchins, The Learning Society (New York: Mentor Books, 1968), 108–130.
Nathan Huggins, “Afro-American Studies: A Report to the Ford Foundation, 1985,” in American Higher Education Transformed, 1940–2005: Documenting the National Discourse, (ed.) Wilson Smith and Thomas Bender (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 134–135;
Howard Brick, Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 170;
Terry Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), chapters 3 and4 passim.
Mortimer J. Adler, et al. (eds.), “Editor’s Preface,” The Negro in American History: I. Black Americans, 1928–1968 (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica Educational Corporation, 1969), viii–ix. Other members of Adler’s community involved in the project were Marlys A. Buswell and Arthur Rubin.
Ibid. ix-x. For more on the changed nature of history instruction in the 1960s and textbook controversies, see Gary B. Nash, et al. History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 90-91, 95-97.
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), 221–222.
Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 6, 12–17. On the emergent ethic of personal liberation, see
Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (New York: Anchor Books, 1984), 88–98;
Hugh Heclo, “The Sixties’ False Dawn: Awakenings, Movements, and Postmodern Policy-making,” in, (ed.) Brian Bologh (College Station: Penn State Press, 2004), 42, 45;
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Vintage, 1996), 333–334; Anderson, 241; Schulman, 79–80.
J. David Hoeveler, Watch on the Right: Conservative Intellectuals in the Reagan Era (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 35, 255.
Spencer, “Reading”; Rollo May, Man’s Search for Himself (New York: W. W. Norton, 1953; reprint, 2009),
Spencer, “Reading”; Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, (ed.) Samuel Lipman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 5.
Adler, Philosopher, 237; UCSC/MJAP, Box 105, Folder: “Sloves” (Adler to Joseph Sloves, November 16, 1977; Adler to Sloves, March 13, 1978); “Great Books,” KNOW (1977); Megan L. Benton, Beauty and the Book: Fine Editions and Cultural Distinction in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 5;
David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 66.
Lawrence Levine, Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 7–8, 158–160.
Adler to Sloves, March 13, 1978; Anthony Quinton, “Philosopher, Inc.,” New York Review of Books 11, no. 9 (November 21, 1968): 10.
Saul Bellow, Herzog (New York: Viking Press, 1961), 185.
UCSC/MJAP, Box 105, Folder: “Franklin Correspondence, 1977” (George Collins to Peter Norton, December 5, 1977); Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Introduction by Thomas K. McCraw (New York: Harper Collins, 2008), xxiii, chapters 5–10 passim.
Cuddihy; Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 5–9, 15, 22, 276–278, 302–305.
“Robert M. Hutchins, Long a Leader in Educational Change, Dies at 78,” New York Times, May 16, 1977, 1, 48; Jack Hemstock, “Storm Center of Education: Hutchins Dies; ex-U. of C. President,” Chicago Tribune, May 16, 1977, 3; Dzuback, chapter 12 passim; Ashmore, chapter 49 passim; Mortimer Adler, A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 40, 43.
Copyright information
© 2013 Tim Lacy
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lacy, T. (2013). Diminished Dreams: Great Books in an Age of Crisis, Fracture, and Transition, 1968–1977. In: The Dream of a Democratic Culture. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137042620_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137042620_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-34094-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-04262-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)