Birthday: Encyclopedia Man

Mortimer Jerome Adler (1902-2001)

Author, philosopher

In the annals of American literary oddballs, Mortimer Adler rests in the pantheon. He was born a Jew, then, successively, became a pagan, an Episcopalian and a Catholic. Without a high school of college degree, he obtained a Ph.D. and launched a decades-long academic career. Partisans considered him an all-American success story; critics, a charlatan- the Harold Hill of philosophy.

Adler grew up in New York City. His parents were Bavarian immigrants. At fifteen, Adler announced high school bored him and, henceforth, he would school himself. He got a job as secretary to the editor of The New York Sun, but then read The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill (1873). He fell in love with utilitarianism, and then, as if to resolve Mill’s contest between freedom and the state, swooned for Plato.

Resolved to be a philosopher, Adler took extension courses from Columbia University and racked up enough credits to enter as a sophomore. He was set to graduate in 1923 but didn’t graduate because he couldn’t pass the mandatory swimming requirement and refused to learn. Undeterred, he wangled a job as a teaching assistant in the psychology department and taught on the side at City College.

By 1929 he had already published a book and written a second that became his Ph.D. thesis on the measurement of music appreciation. He chanced to meet the Boy Dean of the Yale Law School, Robert M. Hutchins; when Hutchins became president of the University of Chicago in 1929, he invited Adler along for the ride.

The Chicago philosophy department balked at Adler’s appointment, given his decidedly non-standard credentials. Unfazed, Hutchins installed Adler as the first non-lawyer member of the law school faculty, teaching the philosophy of law. By 1942 he was a full professor.

Always one to keep an extra iron hot, Adler also worked as a visiting professor at St John’s College, which based its curriculum on the great Greek and Roman writers, plus Thomas Aquinas. Adler, in part from his classicist readings, and in part from the economic efficiencies American law schools found in the Socratic method, came to champion it as the best of all teaching worlds. Of course, as in all teaching methods, its effectiveness depends entirely on the abilities of the teacher (in law schools it is valued for leveraging a few faculty over very large, lucrative classes), but once Adler had a Platonic form in his teeth he never let loose. For all the virtues of a system reliant on the inherent worth of ancient texts (Hutchins argued they were “teacher-proof”, even as he and Adler pumped the Socratic method), the University of Chicago rejected the all-in classics curriculum three times.

Aquinas offered the authority figure Adler’s world needed, in a far more satisfyingly omnipotent and mysterious guise than Plato’s guardians, and for decades he remained the darling infidel of Catholic philosophers. He also set himself up as the opponent of John Dewey, whose progressive notions of education had irked Adler since he was Dewey’s student at Columbia. Dewey’s visions, Adler maintained, were wishy-washy and let to moral decay.

Ader could have carried on as a fairly successful academic for decades, but chance intervened. Anxious to make some extra money, he contracted to write a DIY guide called How To Read A Book. It came out in 1940 and became a bestseller.

The book argued learning is a lifelong activity, and a skill that can be learned in the manner of riding a bicycle, or making shoes. Adler’s premise- still a popular one- was that 20th century Americans were less literate than their 18th century forebears, and needed to up their game. Critics thought the book shallow and self-helpy; one suggested Professor Adler next tackle How To Write A Book. Another dubbed him “the Lawrence Welk of Western intellection”, and Adler usually responded in kind, bragging that anyone could read and understand his books.

Adler had discovered popularization, and rode it for all it was worth. Among his later hits were  'How to Think About War and Peace (1944), Aristotle for Everybody: Difficult Thought Made Easy' (1978), How to Think About God: A Guide for the 20th-Century Pagan (1980) Six Great Ideas (1981); and Ten Philosophical Mistakes (1985). HIs last book of over sixty was How to Think About the Great Ideas (2000).

By 1946 he had the sinecures of his future career in place. He and Hutchins, with the backing of the University of Chicago and Encyclopedia Britannica, launched the Great Books Foundation, producing a 52-volume set of Adler’s and Hutchins’ 144 top ornaments of the well-furnished mind. They sold reasonably well over the coming decades, even as they fell into critical disregard.

Adler’s vision was white and European. It was an increasingly unpopular view. As late as 1988, he and William F. Buckley, Jr., on whose program The Firing Line Adler was a regular, agreed that from Homer to the 19th century, no great writer had existed in any non-western culture.

Adler, for his part, was unrepentant. In a 1990 interview he said the reason Spanish-language writers were excluded was that Octavio Paz, the Mexican writer on the selections committee, was a slacker who didn’t turn in many names.

Adler’s exclusion of black writers was simply unbelievable. He said there just weren’t any good ones. As the editor of a three-volume 1969 work, The Negro In American History, this seemed a reach even for the intellectually nimble Adler. The series was reissued in a 1990 edition, with a somewhat broader scope. The underlying premise, that all that was worth knowing had long since been said, came to seem a bit dated as Adler’s long life progressed.

Relocating to San Francisco in 1952 to head his own great ideas think tank (Hutchins left Chicago in 1951 to head The Ford Foundation, leaving Afler without a patron; he moved back to Chicago after a decade), Adler championed a rethinking of education curricula based on his concept of a Propedia, a bigger successor to his Great Books survey, The Syntopicon. He was a regular speaker at the Aspen Institute, where famous people gathered to be lectured to by other famous people; and spoke and wrote widely in defense of what he considered a beleaguered American capitalism.

Adler and Hutchins cranked out more anthologies of great thought. The Great Books led to the Great Ideas Today (1961) and Gateway to the Great Ideas (1963). A historical series, The Annals of America, followed in 1968.

When Hutchins gave up the post in 1973, Adler succeeded him as chairman of Encyclopedia Britannica in 1974. He was an original board member from 1949, and chaired the planning committee for the 15th edition from 1965 until it appeared in 1974.

In Adler’s vision, the Britannica should not only to be a good reference work and educational tool but it should systematise all human knowledge. It featured a one-volume index of sorts (Adler’s Propedia); a 12 volume Micropedia (a short-format survey of knowledge); and the 19 volume Macropedia, to which one moved for more detailed articles. The absence of a separate index and the grouping of articles into what amounted to two encyclopedias provoked withering criticism after the new edition’s rollout. Sullying Adler’s claims for economic freedom was a widely publicized Federal Trade Commission case enjoining the company from a variety of deceptive and high-pressure sales tactics in 1976.

Redoing an encyclopedia is no small task. It took ten years for the 15th edition to be completely re-organised and indexed; billed as The New Encyclopedia Britannica, it was published through 2010 before running smack into the Age of the Internet. In 1990 sales peaked at 190,000 sets; by 1996 they were down to 40,000. The 2010 edition was only 12,000 sets, and by 2012 the work had shifted entirely to digital and internet formats.

In 1993, Adler retired from Britannica and puttered with another great ideas think tank he set up in 1990. After fifteen years as an Episcopalian, he changed trains for Rome in 1999 and died two years later, at 98.

Both Adler’s high school and Columbia University broke down and gave him honorary diplomas for those unfinished degrees, in 1983.

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