From Dwight Macdonald‘s 1952 review of Mortimer Adler’s Great Books series:

Thus the true reason for his set of Great Books becomes apparent. Its aim is hieratic rather than practical — not to make the books accessible to the public (which they mostly already were) but to fix the canon of the Sacred Texts by printing them in a special edition. Simply issuing a list would have been enough if practicality were the only consideration, but a list can easily be revised, and it lacks the totemistic force of a five-foot, hundredpound array of books.

…In its massiveness, its technological elaboration, its fetish of The Great, and its attempt to treat systematically and with scientific precision materials for which the method is inappropriate, Dr. Adler’s set of books is a typical expression of the religion of culture that appeals to the American academic mentality.

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