Mortimer J. Adler’s mid-century cultural project—A Syntopicon—turned the “Great Ideas of Western Civilization” into a concept-driven index, mapping 102 ideas across 431 Great Books from Homer to Hemingway. The ambitious tool may have felt unwieldy to som
On a quiet afternoon in suburban America, a heavy set of books could dominate a living room wall—and still leave the real question unanswered: where do you even begin?
Mortimer J. Adler rose to cultural prominence in the mid-twentieth-century United States. a path that didn’t look built for influence elsewhere or in another era. His professional and intellectual route was distinctly haphazard: copy-boy work at the New York Sun. night school. and an incomplete Columbia degree. Eventually, he landed a faculty position teaching philosophy of law at the University of Chicago.
In 1945. Adler began work on what would become The Great Books of the Western World. a 54-volume set published by Encyclopædia Britannica. It included the works of figures ranging from Homer to Virgil, from Darwin to Hemingway. Sold door-to-door. it became an unlikely success by the early nineteen-sixties and. for a time. was a fairly common—if bookshelf-dominating—sight in the aspirational homes of suburban America.
The set’s grandeur didn’t solve the problem of access. Even when families had gone through an intensive process of curation. the collection could still look intimidating. like a wall of knowledge frozen in place. Adler’s answer was characteristically ambitious and distinctly idiosyncratic: a concept-oriented index called the Syntopicon—“A Syntopicon. ” to be precise.
Jonathan White, an alumnus of St. John’s College. described what Adler was trying to do in his own way: Adler believed “these two volumes” were just the ‘assistance’ that the average man needed to dig into the books that formed Western Civilization. In White’s account. the volumes comprised “an exhaustive catalogue of each time one of the 102 ‘Great Ideas of Western Civilization’ was mentioned in the 431 ‘Great Books’ enshrined in Britannica’s collection.”.
Good and evil, logic and love, pleasure and pain, universal and particular—at least as Adler defined them—were all there in A Syntopicon. The idea was to let a reader approach the library through ideas rather than through the sprawl of titles.
Some customers reportedly found it unwieldy. Still, the notion behind it kept finding new life. It even inspired the launch of Syntopi.com. a digital successor that enables navigation of “the Great Conversation” in a variety of ways. including a 3D visualization and a personal curriculum-creation tool.
The mid-century audience for The Great Books of the Western World—professionals and businessmen looking to fill gaps in general knowledge. veterans ready to learn more after their G.I. Bill-funded college education. and housewives hoping to get a handle on what “intelligent people” were supposed to know—could plausibly have found that earnest. self-improving tool entertaining. if also a bit heavy to manage. Whether people actually pulled the Great Books off the shelf regularly is another matter. but the need Adler tried to meet—the need to make big reading navigable—hasn’t gone away.
You can view an edition of A Syntopicon on the Internet Archive, or this site. The object may be dated in its form, but its ambition still reads like a wager: that if you can map ideas across a canon, the canon becomes less like a monument and more like a conversation you can actually enter.
Mortimer J. Adler A Syntopicon Syntopicon Great Books of the Western World Encyclopædia Britannica Western canon Great Ideas of Western Civilization Great Conversation Syntopi.com Internet Archive