The Syntopicon: An Index to the Great Ideas

Overview

Two volumes, roughly twenty-four hundred pages, the first two of the fifty-four-volume Great Books of the Western World set published by Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1952, and revised in 1990 to cover the expanded sixty-volume second edition. Mortimer J. Adler directed the project and wrote the introductory essays; a staff of indexers, many of them graduate students, spent roughly eight years reading the entire set and classifying its contents.

It is not a work in the ordinary sense. Nobody sits down and reads the Syntopicon the way they read the Iliad. It is a reference tool built on top of a specific library, the Great Books set itself, and it only fully works if you own or can reach that set, because its currency is page and paragraph references into those particular volumes.

The word is Adler’s coinage, from syn (together) and topos (place, or topic): a topical index that brings together everything the set says about a given subject. The ambition behind it was the idea, developed at the University of Chicago in the circle around Robert Hutchins, that the great books of the Western tradition form a continuous argument, and that a properly built index could make that argument visible.

The argument

The 102 Great Ideas. Volume 1 opens with The Great Conversation, Adler’s essay defending the whole enterprise, and then the index proper begins: 102 chapters, one per idea, running alphabetically from Angel to World. The list includes Art, Beauty, Change, Citizen, Custom and Convention, Democracy, Desire, Dialectic, Duty, Education, Emotion, Eternity, Evolution, Experience, Family, Fate, God, Good and Evil, Government, Habit, Happiness, History, Honor, Hypothesis, Idea, Immortality, Induction, Infinity, Judgment, Justice, Knowledge, Labor, Language, Law, Liberty, Life and Death, Logic, Love, Man, Mathematics, Matter, Mechanics, Medicine, Memory and Imagination, Metaphysics, Mind, Monarchy, Nature, Necessity and Contingency, Oligarchy, One and Many, Opinion, Opposition, Philosophy, Physics, Pleasure and Pain, Poetry, Principle, Progress, Prophecy, Prudence, Punishment, Quality, Quantity, Reasoning, Relation, Religion, Revolution, Rhetoric, Same and Other, Science, Sense, Sign and Symbol, Sin, Slavery, Soul, Space, State, Temperance, Theology, Time, Truth, Tyranny, Universal and Particular, Virtue and Vice, War and Peace, Wealth, Will, Wisdom and World.

Each chapter’s structure. An introductory essay by Adler, usually five to ten pages, surveying how the idea has been treated: its major senses, the principal disputes about it, and how different authors in the set have used the term differently or meant the same thing by different terms. Then an outline of topics, breaking the idea into subtopics. Then the references themselves: for each topic, a list of passages across the whole set, cited by author, work and precise location, sometimes running to hundreds of entries for a major idea like Justice or God. A short bibliography of additional readings, inside and outside the set, closes each chapter.

Cross-references. The ideas are linked. The chapter on Justice sends you to Law, Punishment, Equality (folded into other entries in this edition), Government and Virtue and Vice. The whole apparatus is built so that following one idea leads naturally into its neighbors, which is the closest the Syntopicon comes to making an argument of its own: that the ideas form a network rather than a list.

The Great Conversation. Adler’s opening essay is the part most often read on its own, and it states the theory plainly. Western civilization, he argues, is distinguished by a genuinely continuous argument: Aquinas is answering Aristotle, Marx is answering Hegel who is answering Kant who is answering Hume, and the participants, though centuries apart, are recognizably discussing the same questions. A great book, on his definition, is one that is inexhaustible, that repays rereading differently at different stages of life, and that is relevant to the questions any age still asks. He defends the set’s near-total absence of non-Western authors as a limitation of scope rather than a judgment of value, an explanation that satisfied few of his later critics.

The Appendix. A shorter essay explaining the method: how the 102 ideas were chosen, how the staff decided what counted as a genuine treatment of an idea rather than a passing mention, and why the Syntopicon offers no interpretation of its own, only the material for the reader to interpret.

How to read it

Do not try to read it. Use it. Pick a question you actually have, look up the relevant idea, and follow two or three of the references into the primary texts. That is the whole design, and reading the volumes straight through defeats the purpose.

Start with The Great Conversation. It is the one genuinely readable essay in the set, it states the philosophy behind the whole project, and it is short enough to finish in an hour.

Then pick one idea you care about, Justice or Love or Happiness are good places to start, and read Adler’s introductory essay for it. These essays are compact intellectual histories and several of them, Love and Progress especially, are excellent on their own terms.

Try the exercise the whole thing was built for. Pick a question, say whether happiness requires virtue, and pull three or four of the referenced passages, one from Aristotle, one from a medieval author, one from a modern one, and read them against each other. That comparative reading is what the Syntopicon exists to make possible, and it is genuinely useful once you try it.

Treat the list of 102 ideas as a historical artifact as much as a tool. It was fixed in 1952 by a small group of mostly white, mostly American, mostly male academics working from a set of almost entirely European and American authors, and both the selection of ideas and the selection of authors reflect that moment. Reading the list critically, asking what it assumes and what it leaves out, is one of the more interesting things you can do with it now.

Know the standard objections going in. Critics have argued that treating a hundred and two abstract categories as the natural joints of human thought imposes a false unity on genuinely incompatible worldviews, that the near-exclusion of non-Western and non-canonical voices undercuts the claim to universality, and that the whole apparatus reflects a mid-century faith in a fixed canon that the following decades dismantled. The Syntopicon is best read with these objections in mind rather than as a neutral tool.

Questions it raises

• Is there really one continuous Great Conversation, or does the index create the appearance of one by sorting incompatible arguments under shared labels?
• What is gained and lost when a philosophical dispute is reduced to a cross-reference?
• The 102 ideas were fixed in 1952. Which ideas would a similar project choose today, and which would it drop?
• Adler defends the set’s narrow geographic and cultural range as a limit of scope. Is that a fair defense of an index that claims to map the whole of important human thought?
• Can an index be neutral, or does the act of classification already argue for a position?
• Is the Syntopicon still useful without the fifty-four volumes it indexes, now that most of its texts are searchable online by other means?