A Celebration of the Contributions of Dr. Mortimer J. Adler

August 19-21,1994 Aspen, Colorado

Contents (interactive)

Mortimer J. Adler: Philosopher at Midday- Jeffrey D. Wallin...... 51

MJA, POLITICS: Summary - John Van Doren...... 76

Mortimer Adler: The Political Writings - John Van Doren...... 79

Remarks – Mortimer J. Adler...... 93

From the Editor’s Desk - Sydney Hyman...... 95

Mortimer Adler and The Aspen Institute - Sidney Hyman...... 99

Authors...... 118

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Mortimer J. Adler: Philosopher at Midday

Jeffrey D. Wallin

ortimer J. Adler has made an unusual number of difficult M accessible to “everybody.” Perhaps that is why he has been so uncharitably dismissed as a “popular” philosopher by his critics, a good number of whom come from that narrow breed of specialists once dismissed by Nietzsche as equipped at best to study the of a single species of insect, say, the leech, or that too broad, perhaps only the leech’s brain. Adler is not a spe- cialist. He speaks to broad issues, issues of importance to all of us as men and women. Even more surprising, he speaks without jar- gon, evasion or irony. Unlike the owl of Minerva, which is said to begin its flight at dusk, this is one philosopher who learns and teaches in direct sunlight.

Among the most important topics Adler has shed light upon are liberal , and human . Adler favors all of them, by the way. And nothing could further distance him from the strongest trends in American education.

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In early May 1994 The New York carried a story about a controversy raging in Lake County, Florida. It seems that the county school board passed a resolution requiring teachers to teach 52

students that American culture, values and political institutions are “superior to foreign or historic cultures.” The local teachers’ union is, as The Washington Times put it, up in arms. So are a lot of other people, including the editors of most of the nation’s pres- tigious periodicals.

And well they might be, for this declaration does have something of the “whiff of grapeshot” about it. These folks have fired a meta- phorical cannonball across the bow of the good ship Multicultural- ism, the premise of which is either (take your pick): (a) no culture is superior to any other, or (b) no culture is superior to any other, except that non-Western cultures are superior to Western ones. To put the choice in a nutshell: cultural nihilism or cultural romanti- cism; but please, no good words for the West.

Earlier this year the California State Assembly unanimously passed an act requiring all California schoolchildren to read the Constitu- tion, the Bill of Rights, and The Federalist Papers. Of course, this was before the professional educators got involved. The Senate Education Committee, headed by a former social teacher, stopped this mighty danger to our in its tracks by a vote of four to two.

One hopes that people are still capable of being shocked by official objections to American students being required to read the U.S. . This was not, after all, a bill requiring that any par- ticular opinion about American be taught: It merely required that students read the founding texts of the system that was proposing to educate them.

Yet even a teaching regarding the superiority of the American sys- tem should hardly be considered embarrassing to democratic sen- sibilities. This country’s founders argued for public education on the ground that it would strengthen the people’s attachment to re- publican forms of government. No one then thought it strange that Americans should be taught that and , to say nothing of ethnic tribalism and racist romanticism, whether in Europe or elsewhere, were inferior forms of government. The founders were broad-minded on the whole and not much given to burning books. But they knew where they stood. Read all you can, the founders might have said in a generous moment: but neglect John Locke and James Madison at the peril of your liberties!1

1 This is not to say that teaching the of our system without a serious con- sideration of other forms of government is the best way to stimulate rational attachment to republicanism. Consider the following insightful comment on Thomas Jefferson’s views on political education: “Basic questions about the 53

What is interesting about the current debate over America’s and, in general, the West’s “values,” as people like to call them today, is that a country founded on specific political , well articu- lated in its relevant documents, is at such a loss to defend them to its young, even when these principles have been so clearly success- ful. And yet that is the case.

Of course, the attack on American democracy—and from now on I say simply modern democracy—is not altogether new. Morti- mer Adler wrote to defend the of constitutional democ- racy well before the term multiculturalism was coined. That he should have done so is characteristic of his , with its demon- strated to speak out in favor of the with little or no regard for whether the truth offends or comforts. And about mod- ern democracy he is right—although I warn in advance of caveats to come later.2 Democracy, claims Adler in the face of all those “sensitive” to the claims of both Western and non-Western despot- ism, is the only “perfectly just form of government.”3

By this Adler does not mean that any political system, including our own, is in fact perfectly just. It would be hard enough to find a single court whose every decision was perfectly just, let alone an entire legal system that could be considered just in every respect. How much harder then to expect perfection in a political system, especially in such a rough-and-ready, such a downright rambunc- tious one, as democracy? No, what is meant, I suspect, is that in principle democracy is the best regime, and that our efforts ought to be devoted to perfecting in practice what is perfect in principle.

nature of man, of freedom, and of just government were open and alive in Jef- ferson’s day; he thought them through for himself and hence had a deep appre- ciation for his country’s fundamental principles. But his pro-posed curriculum transmits to posterity the answers without the questions; it runs the risk of turn- ing burning issues into dead dogma and leaving students with beliefs that are mere opinions.” Lorraine Smith Pangle and Thomas L. Pangle, The Learning of : The Educational Ideas of the American Founders. University Press of Kansas, 1993, p. 174.

2 Indeed, readers familiar with Adler’s views on democracy will note that I dif- fer with him already when I distinguished between ancient and modern democ- racy, since for Adler only modern democracy—that is, democracy based on full adult suffrage—is real democracy. What most commentators refer to as earlier or less-developed forms of democracy Adler refers to as forms of .

3 Mortimer J. Adler, A Vision of the Future: Twelve Ideas for a Better Life and a Better Society. New York: Macmillan, 1984, p. 210.

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But even saying this much is flying in the face of sophisticated opinion. It does not recommend itself to today’s political acolytes of that great Cultural Pluralism, nor does it even recommend itself to professional political scientists, since most of them still operate on the basis of the fact/value distinction, in spite of deny- ing that they do so. So what is the basis of Adler’s “privileging,” as the literary theorists might put it, democracy?

Nothing could be more straightforward than Adler’s answer: De- mocracy is the best form of government because other forms are based on a false view of human nature. Other systems assume that the observable differences between human , especially dif- ferences between the rich and the poor, and the rulers and the ruled, are permanent and natural. In the 20th century this has been augmented by an identification of superior and inferior according to race- or class-based ideology. The result is the same: a concen- tration of power into the hands of one or a few. Democracy, how- ever, is built upon the truth of human nature, namely, that “all men are created equal,” as the Declaration of Independence puts it, or are by nature equal, as Adler puts it. Because no man is the natural superior of any other man in the same way that a human is the master of his dog or his cow or his goat, no man may justly rule another without his consent.

This is a principle that, through long familiarity, seems obvious. Yet few principles have been as misunderstood as the principle of democracy, as a glance at any “people’s republic” or “people’s democratic order” of this century will show. The most common mistake is to assume that since government based on the principle of equality leads to majority rule (the permanent rule of a perma- nent minority would be an obvious violation of the principle of equality), a majority—usually called the people, or those acting in its name—may do anything it likes. This is why a small portion of the American left in earlier decades was so susceptible to the claims of Soviet communism: It seemed to promise perfect equal- ity under the banner of perfect power of the people. And this is also why so few Americans—although there were more than we like to admit—were attracted to Nazi-style fascism: It, after all, visibly proclaimed the rule of the few, which is not such a great attraction for a people brought up on the Declaration and the Get- tysburg Address.

But government by consent must maintain the principle of consent. Unbounded rule by any group—including a majority, is by nature unjust for the simple that it ignores the purpose of that con- sent: to protect the lives and liberties of every individual against 55

the depredations of those who have no right to them. Free govern- ment does not include the right to deny freedom to others, as Abraham Lincoln pointed out in criticizing Stephen A. Douglas’s plan for “popular sovereignty.” According to Douglas, democracy means that any people has a right to rule its own affairs, which, of course, is true. But when People A includes in its affairs denying that same right to People B in its midst, the ground of People A’s right to freedom has been denied by no other than People A itself. As Lincoln pointed out, there is no argument one can make in fa- vor of enslaving others that cannot be turned around to enslave oneself. To hold slaves may be in one’s interest. Certainly, to abol- ish where it already exists may raise serious prudential considerations—it was not for nothing that Jefferson characterized the problem by saying: “We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. . . . is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”4 But slavery, as Jefferson well knew, can never be said to be just, for it can never be squared with the principle that all men are by nature equal.

The prevalence of attacks on democracy and human rights these days requires that we respect Mortimer Adler’s arguments on their behalf, which are among the clearest and most forcefully issued since the Second World War. This agreement on democracy as the best form of government cannot be reduced to a of mere parochialism: We do not democracy because it is ours, but because it, more than any other form of government, is in accord with our nature as human beings. Indeed, were we not Americans, were we in fact from the other side of the globe, we would, if we understood ourselves and our interests rightly and if external con- ditions were right, opt for a system of limited constitutional de- mocracy.

To say that one agrees with someone in principle, however, does not imply that one agrees with all the conclusions that have been drawn from these principles. Mortimer Adler, for instance, has ad- vanced a number of practical political positions that are, in my view, far more questionable than the argument for grounding de- mocracy in human equality. These include his very long attach- ment to some form of world government,5 and his expansive view

4 Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, April 22, 1820.

5 See Mortimer J. Adler, How to Think About War and Peace. New York Simon and Schuster, 1944; and Philosopher at Large: An Intellectual Autobiography, 1902-1976. New York: Macmillan, 1977, Ch. 10.

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of human rights.6

Generally speaking, the concept of rights held by the American founders were what we today call “negative” rights: the right not to have one’s life or taken. From these negative human rights flow several negative civil rights: the right not to be com- pelled to give testimony against oneself, to proclaim a faith one does not adhere to, and so on. Even rights that were couched in positive terms, such as the right to a trial by one’s peers, to due process, and the like, were based on the right to protect one’s life, which, according to the doctrine of natural equality, no one else can make a rightful claim to. Adler, however, would go much far- ther than this: To be perfectly just, constitutional democracy must secure “not only the rights to political liberty and to enfranchised , but other political and economic rights as well. It must do whatever is possible to provide human beings with the external conditions of life that they need in their effort to pursue . It must help them in their attempt to obtain all the real goods that enrich a decent human life, many of which, being external goods, they cannot obtain for themselves by their own unaided efforts.”7

This expansion may appear to be no more than an extension of common sense. And surely there is some warrant for such a view in the fact that the Declaration of Independence substituted a right to pursue happiness for John Locke’s narrower right to property (or “estates” as Locke put it). Indeed, were it not for his insistence on the word rights when Adler speaks of providing the external condi- tions for pursuing happiness, there might be little with which to quarrel. One suspects trouble, however, when one reflects that this is a view of rights characteristic of countries far more noted for their denial of human rights than for their enforcement of them. Both the People’s Republic of North Vietnam and the former USSR, for example, have claimed to provide such rights, whereas the United States, most European countries, and the increasingly prosperous countries of the Pacific Rim do not.

Historically, the most thoughtful commentators on rights have concentrated on what their critics refer to as “negative” rights be- cause most of them accept the view that our system is based largely on a Lockean conception of nature and government. And since the state of nature, whether for Hobbes or for Locke, is not a very nice place, the emphasis tends to be placed on protection from harm rather than on provisions for living the good life. Adler, on

6 See A Vision of the Future, Ch. 7.

7 A Vision of the Future, pp. 213-14. 57

the other hand, rejects the state of nature as a useful concept, and prefers to ground his political theory in Aristotle, whose view of political life is determined by man’s final end. Interestingly, how- ever, Adler believes in human rights, something of which Aristotle never speaks.

The value of Adler’s rejection of such a notion is clear: The state of nature—especially in such radical formulations as that of Jean Jacques Rousseau—implies that there are no natural connections between men, that there is in fact no natural sociality, since there are no natural or final ends that transcend questions of survival. In such a view there is little need for social relations that might tran- scend the need for protection (and Rousseau does not even admit a need for protection), let alone any sense of traditional natural (Locke does in fact speak much about natural law, but the term natural, as Locke uses it, is much more akin to the meaning as- signed to it by Hobbes than by, say, Thomas Aquinas).

Adler’s rejection of the concept of the state of nature returns us to the view that man is by nature a social , that while civil so- ciety may have come into being due to the need of individuals and for protection, once in existence society makes possible not only life itself but the good life. The natural ends of man, in this view, are capable of being realized only in society, a perspec- tive which reduces the conflict between the good of society and the good of the individual so characteristic of modern political thought, and also so characteristic of extreme forms of contempo- rary individualism.8

Clearly the modern tradition of political philosophy, whatever else one might find admirable about it, can be said to lack the nobility characteristic of Aristotle. This is not to suggest that Aristotle was unconcerned with life, but reading Aristotle—as opposed to read- ing Hobbes or Locke—one can certainly think of many actions, deeds and events more fearful than . Moreover, classical po- litical philosophy, by beginning with social life, encourages us to focus on what may be accomplished together, which is to say just about everything that distinguishes human from other animal life. As Adler has put it: “Human beings cannot lead good lives in total isolation from one another. We are social, not solitary, .”9

8 “The pursuit of happiness is cooperative, not competitive.” Adler, Reforming Education. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1977, pp. 234-35.

9 A Vision of the Future, p. 130.

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Yet we may not, I believe, leave it at the suggestion that classical political thought is simply superior in all respects to modern politi- cal thought. Adler himself not only condemns Aristotle when he thinks him wrong; he also adopts the concept of human rights, which is altogether a product of modern political thought. What is puzzling is the fact that Adler appears to believe that he can aban- don the concept of a state of nature—from which the of natu- ral or human rights was derived—without abandoning human rights. In what follows I intend to suggest that it is not necessary for an Aristotelian to altogether reject the concept of the state of nature, at least the Lockean version of it, once that concept is well understood.

Let us return now to the question of whether the state of nature ever existed. At the risk of oversimplification, I will put the matter directly: Adler thinks the whole concept is a fraud, that there never was a state of nature, that man is by nature a social being, and that to consider him otherwise is to begin with something that never was and never can be.10

If Locke had spoken of a merely historical state of nature, such a claim would, of course, be wholly within the realm of conjecture or “myth” as Adler terms it. But in fact, Locke speaks of the state of nature as a presently existing state, one which can be seen to be in existence here and now. After all, according to Locke, all heads of state are in the state of nature with one another at all times. But Locke goes considerably further than this, as one begins to suspect when one notes the tense in which he couches his most famous phrase about man and nature: “To understand Political Power right, we must consider what State all Men are naturally in....”11

To understand the usefulness of Locke’s understanding of the state of nature—and that of the framers of the American Constitution as well—it is necessary to clarify Locke’s of the states of nature, civil society, war and peace.

For Locke, civil society is defined by the presence of a known, promulgated law, and a judicial magistrate with the power and au- thority to enforce the law and to whom disputants may appeal to settle their differences. The state of nature is the opposite of civil society, since there is no agreed-upon law or magistrate with the power and authority to settle disputes. War is defined as the use of

10 A Vision of the Future, p. 142.

11 John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, 1690, Sect. 4.

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force without right. The opposite of war is peace, where no force is used without right.

On the basis of these definitions we can understand Locke’s re- mark that every head of state is in the state of nature with every other head of state. Or as we would say today, every state is in the state of nature with every other state. This is so because, in the event of a dispute between them, there is no law or magistrate to whom appeal may be made. In such a case, whenever force is used, this state of nature, which previously was also a state of peace, necessarily becomes a state of war, as force can hardly be used “with right” when there is no commonly agreed upon notion of right or law. Clearly, the state of nature, far from being a distant historical condition, a “myth” of some sort, is something that can be seen every day. The international order, which is characterized by nations existing in a state of nature, can be at peace or at war, although it is usually a case of both war and peace being present, depending upon the part of the globe on which one’s gaze is fixed.

Moreover, one might consider, as Locke might say, all the times within civil society during which men may also find themselves in the state of nature, and sometimes even at war, to use a grand con- cept where a petty one would do. Imagine this, as Robert A. Gold- win12 says to illustrate this point: You find yourself walking along a dark uninhabited street in the industrial part of a large American city at 3:00 A.M. You know that the police patrol it about once an hour. You observed a patrol car leave the area a few minutes ago. Now, continuing your walk, you notice a man approaching you in the near distance. At this moment, according to Locke, in what state are you? Are you in the state of war, the state of peace, the state of nature, or the state of civil society?

As it turns out, you are both in and out of the state of civil society. In the larger sense, a community is still present, and you are still a member of it. On the other hand, there is in fact no one to appeal to right now should a dispute break out between you and this stranger. In that very real respect you are, at that moment, in the state of nature. And if force is used or threatened, you are in a state of war as well.

Perhaps, however, nothing unpleasant happens. Let us say that you walk past each other without a hostile word spoken or a blow struck: You have done so in the state of nature but at the same

12 Robert A. Goldwin, “St. John’s College Asks John Locke Some Questions,” The College, April 1971, pp. 1-10.

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in peace, for we now see that peace is possible in the state of na- ture, something that Hobbes apparently did not consider ade- quately. Then again, you may be attacked or threatened, and in that case, you are at war because, as we have seen, the state of war can break out precisely to the degree that the state of nature can break out within civil society, an event that does in fact occur with some frequency. We see then, that Locke’s state of nature has nothing at all imaginary about it. To the contrary, this view of the state of na- ture complements natural sociality by reminding us of the harsh transcultural reality that encourages the formation of law: To be in society is a requirement of both life and the good life; but being in society does not lead to a state of permanent peace.13

From this perspective, an unintended consequence of Adler’s ac- ceptance of the naturalness of society appears to be a measure of forgetfulness concerning the ever-present fragility of civil exis- tence, a forgetfulness that allows him to speak of almost all the good things of life as if they were natural or human rights. This awareness is never lost by Locke because, contrary to the view that the state of nature existed only in the distant past, Locke holds that the state of nature is never fully eradicated: Its dangers are with us always, although they are far less evident in civil society than out- side of it.

Locke’s teaching regarding the state of nature tends to concentrate the on how difficult it is to guarantee peace, even within so- ciety. Indeed, when I hear of all the plans we are bombarded with to make life better for everyone, I am often struck by how poor a job we do just in guaranteeing the physical safety and property of our citizens. This is not to say, as some libertarians do, that secur- ing life and property are the only just purposes of government, and that all else is just force and fraud put to public use. But it is a sharp reminder of why it is that the societies that take these reali- ties seriously, instead of making wild claims to guarantee jobs or an income or health or happiness for everyone, tend in fact to pro- duce a better chance for life, and even for the good life, than those in which the harsh reality of the world is forgotten. It also indicates why the movement toward world government, even if well- federated, is far more utopian—and therefore dangerous—than Adler is willing to admit. Let me remind us that Adler’s stated rea- son for preferring this solution to war—for it was the desire for

13 This is so even if we admit, as Locke does not, a form of natural law that would impose standards of behavior even upon those who happen to be in a state of nature and even in a state of war with one another, as these states are defined by Locke.

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peace that drove the Hutchins/Adler movement for world govern- ment—was the primary concern also of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes rightly understood that the only guarantee of peace—that is, the only guarantee for completely banishing the state of nature—is monarchy, or, from the founder’s point of view, . And unrestrained monarchy, as Locke points out in correcting Hobbes, has as its major drawback the fact that, to be effective, its powers must be so extensive as to endanger the very liberties that such powers were intended to protect. Government by consent requires agreement on the need for consent, which is to say it requires agreement concerning the human equality from which consent arises. Without that agreement—and it is difficult to see that the world is in much agreement regarding anything at all let alone such an earth-shaking principle as this—world government, regardless of what form it took, would have to assume measures of power a prudent Lockeanism would guard against relinquishing.

Given what has just been said about the importance of protecting life and property, it might be well to emphasize that there is some- thing profoundly rich and instructive about Adler’s concentration on an older, more positive notion of happiness than is appreciated by modern political theory. For that older view of happiness is in accord with the highest truth of human nature.

One hears a great deal these days about the differences between the “ancients” and the “moderns.” That difference is often said to rest on the distinction between the Aristotelian notion of happiness, final ends and natural right on the one hand, and the modern view, characterized by a preoccupation with individual rights and self- preservation and by a denial of final ends. Another way to view this quarrel is to say that the classical view takes its bearings by a standard grounded in nature, while the modern view denies the very concept of nature, and therefore of any natural limit to per- sonal desires and interests. The exemption from limits is said to result in an emphasis on the right to pursue any notion of happiness that one feels inclined to, so long as it does not interfere with the rights of others to pursue their visions of happiness. The former view would ask, not Do I have a right to behave this way? but Is it right to behave this way? To put it bluntly: Aristotle would not grant the right of a man to live the life of a pig; today we would only ask him to refrain from hurting others.

Of course, merely historical issues are not live issues: While one may observe the past, one cannot choose to live in it. If the ancient perspective is not open to us today, of what use is it? Perhaps in this respect, the terms ancient and modern may be misleading, 62

since they appear to imply a difference in time for what is in fact a difference in views about what is important in life. The most im- portant question today may well be what it has always been: Is there such a thing as human nature, and if so, what does an under- standing of it say to us about how life should be led?

The Declaration of Independence is a very modern, a very new document. It emphasizes rights rather than duties. On the other hand, as Adler among others has demonstrated, the truth of its claims for democracy lies in its appeal to a timeless nature and human nature. As a consequence, the Declaration, although clearly a political document, and in that respect properly oriented toward the protection of our lives and our liberties, may yet serve a higher purpose by pointing us, its creatures, in the direction of nature and human nature.

Nature, to be sure, is fraught with claims of tooth and claw, blood and bone. Yet when one reflects upon the relation of nature, human nature, and consent, the following broader issues emerge: Justice demands that one obtain the consent of human beings because, in the order of things, men fall between two categories of beings, nei- ther of which, in itself, poses a problem of consent. On the one hand, one can imagine something higher than man. That would be God. Whether or not one believes there is a God, one can certainly imagine such a being: Its attributes, as Thomas has pointed out, would be perfect justice, , mercy, love and power un- adulterated by self-interest. What, in a political sense, would be such a God’s relation to human beings? For one thing, such a be- ing, even if he exercised authority over us without our consent, could hardly be said to rule us unjustly: For on what grounds could one withhold consent from a being too powerful to question, who knows our interests better than we do, and who cannot but have our interests at heart? The rule of God is absolute, and just.

On the other hand, although not , neither are we simply ani- mals. Indeed, the degree of difference between the human animal and all other animals is such that, in any relationship at all, the lat- ter must be ruled without their consent. By the very nature of the case, animals cannot be asked for their consent and, if asked, can- not give it. We rule our cats, dogs, sheep and cattle despotically and legitimately, just as God, if there is one, may rule us despoti- cally and legitimately. This relationship between what may be higher in the order of being and what certainly is lower does not obtain among human beings themselves. Hence no man may justly 63

rule another man for his—the ruler’s—own advantage.14 And thus it is that consent is a necessary precondition for just government.

Does not reflection on this “modern” political truth lead to an in- quiry into just what this thing man is? By of what is man distinguished from the other animals, and from God? Mortimer Adler appears to be most comfortable with saying that man is de- fined by his potential, something which animals do not have. But since man’s potential is essentially defined by his reason and all that stems from his reason, it may not be taking too much of a lib- erty to say that the distinguishing feature of man is or speech or reason or the ability to see the world as an object, or any other such traditional view of the unique capacities of human be- ings. In any event, does not such an inquiry, as Adler has persua- sively argued, lead one pretty far along the path of the Nico- machean Ethics? And here we find that there is an answer to the question, What is the good for man? For man there is indeed a final end: It is happiness, and it is to be pursued through the moral and intellectual virtues. Now this may or may not be augmented by the Christian view that this life is but a vale of tears, and that man’s complete happiness can be reached only after death in this world. But either way, it seems to me, Adler’s agreement with Aristotle’s distinction between real and apparent goods holds true, and with it a powerful impulse to provide the necessary conditions not only for life but for the good life.

This link between modernity, with its focus on protecting life, and the ancient or classical focus on leading the good life is reflected not only in the Declaration’s references to nature, human nature and happiness, but also in the fact that the founders concerned themselves a great deal with education and , as may be seen in the very first act passed by the new Congress of 1791. This was the Northwest Ordinance (originally passed by the Continental Congress in 1787), which declared that “religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged,” and by the fact that every president until John Quincy Adams sought to establish a national university.15 Hence, in spite of my reservations regarding Adler’s rejection of state-of-

14 For a full discussion of the argument being made here, see Harry V. Jaffa, “What Is Equality? The Declaration of Independence Revisited,” in Harry V. Jaffa, The Conditions of Freedom: Essays in Political Philosophy. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.

15 The Learning of Liberty, p. 151.

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nature theory and my consequent emphasis on the limitations proper to government, it does seem to me that talk of rights must be supplemented by the talk of ends. Let government look to the protection of our rights, but let it also look to promoting the high- est human ends, not because there is a right to the good life, but because it is right to promote it.

* * *

It is not without interest, perhaps, that our discussion of democracy turned on an interpretation of figures like Locke and Aristotle. Since modern democracy is founded on a principle of human na- ture—and therefore on nature itself—one might say that the entire regime points toward the need for clarity on principles and ideas, which is the life-blood of liberal education. If Mortimer J. Adler is known for anything among the general public, and of course he is, it is for his promotion of liberal education, from the Paideia pro- gram right up through undergraduate education. And in all cases liberal education is, for Adler, a matter of reading good books, or, as they are more widely known, .

Adler’s place in the of the Great Books movement and also his Paideia proposal are widely known, or in any event should be widely known, since they have been very clearly stated by Adler himself; hence I will not detail them here. We are interested here in the connection between liberal education, democracy and human nature.

Although it is a cliche to say that American education is in crisis today, it is, I think, something that cannot be denied. Indeed, public education in this country is now chiefly characterized by two fac- tors: Students learn very little, while at the same time they and their parents are very proud of the little they learn. Surveys have even shown that (a) parents now believe that their children do very poorly on tests of mathematical knowledge (which is true) and (b) parents are proud of their children’s achievements—as are the children themselves—in this very same subject! Clearly the self- esteem movement has a lot to answer for. Things have gotten so bad that it is probably true to say that almost any reform will work, simply because it will have the helpful effect of disrupting the pre- sent state of affairs. Of course, there is a big difference between reforms that, like all diets, work for a short time, and reform that works for the long run. In this respect, I believe that Mortimer Adler’s proposals, at least in principle, have the greatest potential for a true and lasting reform of American education.

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One of the treats of reading Adler is his insistence on being clear about principles and ideas. In the case of liberal education, for in- stance, it is abundantly clear that in order to speak about the pur- pose of education one must speak about the end of man, and in or- der to do this, one must speak of human nature. “If man is a ra- tional animal,” he says in a recent book, “constant in nature throughout history, then there must be certain constant features in every sound educational program, regardless of culture or epoch. The basic education of a rational animal is the discipline of his ra- tional powers and the cultivation of his intellect.”16 The rest of this article easily could be devoted to two of the premises contained in this statement: that man is a rational animal and that it is possible to speak of or transcultural constants concerning what is good for human beings. Fortunately for us, Adler has himself al- ready devoted several persuasive books to these topics. But it is worth recalling yet again that these concepts are under severe and unrelenting pressure from the same forms of positivism, extreme scientism, moral skepticism and cultural determinism that Adler has been fighting since his Chicago days, although they usually go under different names today.

Unlike many reformers, Adler’s concentration on human equality leads, not to a “dumbing down” approach geared to the lowest common denominator, but to a rigorous system in which all—not just the best and the brightest—are challenged to come to grips with the world’s most difficult literature and ideas. That this should be so, and that it should be so for basic education from the early years on up through college, is because the ends of education for life (as opposed to training for specific tasks) are the same for everyone. Over the years Adler has stated these aims in a variety of ways, but I am inclined to the following short formulation: “The direct product of liberal education is a good mind, well disciplined in its processes of inquiry and judging, knowing, and under- standing, and well furnished with knowledge, well cultivated by ideas.”17 Of course, there are concrete components to such a defi- nition, and in this respect one might say that liberal education seeks to develop the basic intellectual skills, such as critical read- ing, attentive listening, precise speech and reflective thought, nec- essary to make possible a life of learning.18 What could possibly

16 Reforming Education, p. 80 (italics in original).

17 Reforming Education, p. 111.

18 Reforming Education, p. 11.

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be better adapted to producing such skills than a dialectical educa- tion in the great books, where the world’s greatest present the fundamental alternatives regarding what Adler calls the “basic ideas”?

As the reader may suspect, I am powerfully persuaded by most of what Adler has written about liberal education, whether in respect of higher or lower education, and I count myself as a supporter of both the Paideia reform and a Great Books approach to under- graduate education. Nevertheless, a discussion of Great Books learning might profit from delving into this matter a little deeper.

Many advocates of liberal education these days are met with a charge that may be characterized as saying that, far from being concerned with universal ideas and issues, as is claimed by its ad- vocates, liberal education is concerned with only one view of life, that of the West. Hence liberal education is essentially and funda- mentally parochial: Its emphasis on and maybe laudable, but its concentration on Western civilization, seen in its advocates’ attempts to reinvigorate the old Western Civ class, is nothing more than a subtle way for the West to indoctrinate its young in the “superiority” of the West. While one can imagine many responses to this charge (not least among them the fact that Western history includes all the acts of the past, deplorable as well as laudable), Adler goes much further, cutting the critic off at the pass, as it were, by denying that such classes have anything to do with liberal education. According to Adler, “The educational pur- pose of the great books program is not to study Western civiliza- tion. Its aim is not to acquire knowledge of historical facts. It is rather to understand the great ideas.”19

This statement makes perfect sense when we combine two aspects of Adler’s teaching, namely that (a) the focus of learning is ideas, and (b) the aim of learning—other than understanding, of course— is the production of the skills necessary for learning and expres- sion. What is important about ideas has little to do with the effort to “contextualize” them, as is so often done today. To be sure, one does not want to be guilty of judging people by the standards of one’s own time, but judging, in this sense, has little to do with learning. The sort of judging that counts is judging the arguments by which ideas have been advanced so as to get to the truth or falsehood of the idea. Slavery may have been prevalent in the time of Aristotle, and also, for that matter, in most of the world, includ-

19 Reforming Education, p. 12.

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ing Africa, that existed at the time the New World was settled. But that in no way tells us what we want to know: Is slavery just or un- just? If it is unjust, is it so always and everywhere, or are there cir- cumstances that would justify either its introduction or perpetua- tion? If so, what are these circumstances?

Notice that the first question admits of a purely theoretical answer: Slavery is or is not just. Yet further inquiry unveils the possibility that practical circumstances may come into play. This is proper, because all ideas that relate to human practice enter into the con- tingent world of practical life, where as well as prevails. Yet this is not the same as saying that history, as we usu- ally understand that term, is critical for resolving the issue. After all, if it were true that one could envision circumstances in which slavery were just, it would not matter a whit whether these circum- stances had been, in fact, a part of the historical record. Given the same circumstances, the same practices would be just, whether they took place in the past or in the present, or for that matter, in the future. One may defend the teaching of history on a variety of grounds, but Adler is, it seems to me, quite right to say that teach- ing the ideas of the Western intellectual tradition is a very different thing than teaching the tradition itself.

* * *

Being as thorough as he is, Adler also gives much advice about how to teach ideas and books. And in considering this for the most part sound advice Adler’s audience might be somewhat puzzled to find him going out of his way to pick a quarrel with Allan Bloom, and Bloom’s teacher Leo Strauss, given how both Bloom and Strauss are associated in the public mind with the careful reading of great books. Although this recent quarrel may not appear to be of great interest when seen in the larger context of Adler’s life, an examination of it might help to illuminate an important aspect of Adler’s views on education, and not incidentally, democracy.

Adler’s criticism of Bloom and Strauss may be found in the first chapter of Reforming Education. I will skip for the moment Adler’s charge that Bloom was an elitist, which may or may not be true. (That is, I do not see that it follows from the fact that Bloom was interested in the best minds that he would have opposed a Great Books education for the masses. Practical difficulties aside, he might well have subscribed to Hutchins’s view that the best education for the best is the best education for all.) We will also ignore the criticism that Bloom misunderstood the origin of the crisis in education, believing it to stem from Nietzsche’s nihilism 68 rather than “philosophical positivism and the relativism of sociol- ogy and cultural anthropology.”20 These are criticisms of fact, and whether Adler or Strauss/Bloom is correct can teach us little about our subject, which again, is liberal education.

According to Adler, there is a fundamental difference between his method of teaching the Great Books and the way advocated by Strauss /Bloom. Since Adler is very clear about this, I will quote him at length from Reforming Education:

The difference between Strauss’s method of reading and teach- ing the great books and the method that Hutchins and I had adopted . . . lies in the distinction between a doctrinal and a dialectical approach. The doctrinal method is an attempt to read as much truth as possible (and no errors) into the work of a par- ticular author, usually devising a special interpretation, or by discovering that special secret of an author’s intentions. The method may have some merit in the graduate school where stu- dents aim to acquire narrowly specialized scholarship about a particular author. But it is the opposite of the right method to be used in conducting great books seminars in schools and col- leges where the aim is learning to think and the pursuit of truth (p. 8, emphasis added).

Adler clarifies just what he means by the distinction between the doctrinal and the dialectical approach:

The doctrinal teaching of disciples enables them to learn what the master thinks. The dialectical teaching of students enables them to think for themselves. I would go further and say that the doctrinal method indoctrinates and only the dialectical method teaches (p. 9)

There are a number of issues here. Let me begin by restricting my remarks to the appropriateness of teaching the Great Books, not in schools, but in colleges, since I am not aware that either Strauss or Bloom ever addressed teaching great books in the schools, other than to indicate a general approval of teaching through books rather than textbooks at all levels. And even here the ground is somewhat uncertain, for while Bloom certainly taught a good many undergraduate courses in his career, most if not all of Strauss’s courses were at the graduate level (although in many in- stances, of course, undergraduate students attended). I am not

20 Reforming Education, p. 11.

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aware that Strauss advocated the universal adoption of his meth- ods. Certainly his most famous students did not, on the whole, teach undergraduate courses the way he taught graduate ones. On the other hand, neither are they known for adhering rigorously to the methods espoused by Adler, so perhaps it is fair game to try to flesh out what this quarrel is all about.

Adler’s charge that Strauss/Bloom indoctrinate rather than teach is a serious one. But is it true? Is it in fact the case that the dialectical method enables students to think for themselves while the Strauss/Bloom view only produces disciples, or that this view fails to appreciate what is false as well as what is true in the Great Books? Adler also raises the issue of Strauss’s famous—perhaps it would be better to say infamous—way of reading, his “special in- terpretation,” as Adler calls it. Now this is precisely where the dif- ficulty, as it seems to me, lies. For Strauss’s students are known for teaching particular interpretations of the great authors, which Adler abhors, and these teachings are based on an acceptance, which Adler rejects, of Strauss’s method of reading. We therefore must delve into this matter of interpretation, for there would appear to be no other way of joining the issue between Adler and Strauss /Bloom.

Strauss’s reason for “digging beneath the surface” of some of the world’s most important books is based on two assumptions, both of which run against the grain of contemporary culture. Our culture is a product of the Enlightenment, with its clarion call for shedding light on every aspect of existence: One may even say that the core of the Enlightenment is the belief that the truth can never harm one, that, in fact, the truth and the good are one and the same. However, most of the world’s greatest books were written before the Enlightenment, or were part of what ushered the Enlightenment in, and therefore certainly are not the product of the openness char- acteristic of a post-Enlightenment age.

The first assumption made by Strauss is that some writers may be forced to hide their true meaning because of the threat of political persecution. It is based on the undeniable historical fact that sup- pression of independent thought “occurred fairly frequently in the past.”21 Socrates’s blunt questions did nothing to endear him to the demos: Death and not lifelong meals in the Praetaneum were his reward for speaking openly. Algernon Sydney was hung for writ- ing much the same sort of thing that John Locke, a very prudent

21 Leo Strauss, Persecution and the of Writing. Illinois: The Free Press, 1952, p. 26.

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writer, was able to publish only a few years later. It would not take many more such examples to convince a thoughtful man of the dangerous fate of impolitic atheists in a believing age, republicans in , or democrats in either fascist or communist re- gimes. Faced with the choice of not writing at all or writing very carefully, such a man might reasonably choose to write carefully; that is, he might choose to praise the existing orthodoxies loudly and quite often, while indicating in a quiet and subtle manner his true opinion about these orthodoxies. Of course, this sort of writing would fail utterly if a superficial reading indicated just what had been written “between the lines.” The book would have to fool a good number of people in a position to make heretics pay for their thoughts. And this means that it would be very difficult to demon- strate that the surface teaching was not the whole and true teach- ing. One would at the very least expect disputes to arise regarding the interpretation of such books.

As far as this aspect of the method is concerned, let us just observe that Strauss provided a number of clues or rules about how to read such literature. He advises the careful reader to bear in mind, for example, that it is unlikely that a great writer would commit seri- ous errors without meaning to, especially if he has said something about the significance of such “careless” writing. As Strauss has put it: “If a master of the art of writing commits such blunders as would shame an intelligent high school boy, it is reasonable to as- sume that they are intentional, especially if the author discusses, however incidentally, the possibility of intentional blunders in writing.” Similarly, assuming that a book has been written in a time of persecution, another indication of the author’s true view would be “if an able writer who has a clear mind and a perfect knowledge of the orthodox view and all its ramifications, contra- dicts surreptitiously and as it were in passing one of its necessary presuppositions or consequences which he explicitly recognizes and maintains everywhere else, we can reasonably suspect that he was opposed to the orthodox system as such and—we must study his whole book all over again, with much greater care and much less naiveté than ever before.”22 There are other things to look for, but the point here is that unless one denies that there has ever been a reason for fearing to express the truth in public—and it seems to me that this cannot be denied by anyone possessing even a rudi- mentary acquaintance with intellectual history—then the only le- gitimate objection to Strauss on this point would have to be based on: (a) the discovery of better rules for uncovering the truth of an

22 Persecution and the Art of Writing, p. 30.

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author’s opinions, or (b) differing critical analyses of interpreta- tions Strauss has made of such authors. Agreeing with the principle that there is a place for prudence in writing as well as in life, espe- cially if one writes in an age of proscribed ideas, one might still object that Strauss had got the particulars wrong. Thus the proper way of criticizing him would be to take issue with his detailed in- terpretations of, say, Plato, Xenophon, Machiavelli, Hobbes or Spinoza.

Yet even if Strauss and Adler could be brought to agree on the ef- fect of persecution on writing, there is a much deeper issue, one that has to do with the nature of truth itself. The issue of persecu- tion, at least on the level presented here, presumes that the reason an author conceals the truth is because he would be harmed if he took issue with the reigning orthodoxies of thought or belief. This says nothing about his view of whether the truth is a good or a bad thing for most people. Indeed, in the case of republicans writing in monarchies and free-thinkers writing in religious times, one might at least presume that a good number of these authors believed that the advancement of their ideas in broad daylight, were it only pos- sible, would have been beneficial.

Strauss reminds us, however, of an older view, one which accepted the existence of a permanent gulf separating “the wise” from “the vulgar,” a “basic fact of human nature which could not be influ- enced by any of popular education: a view which held that philosophy, or , was essentially a privilege of ‘the few.’ This older perspective accepted the vulgar view that philosophy was capable of harm as well as good. Expanding on the concept of persecution, Strauss says: “Exoteric literature presupposes that there are basic which would not be pronounced in public by any decent man, because they would do harm to many people who, having been hurt, would naturally be inclined to hurt in turn him who pronounces the unpleasant truths.”23 If Strauss is right about this, we ought to expect thoughtful writers who are also decent men to write in a less than forthright manner, and we might expect them to do so even when they do not write in times of persecution. To such an author an ironic mode of discourse would appear to be the best method of indicating his true intention to patient, hard- working and thoughtful readers, while at the same time instructing less careful and duller readers with-out unduly shaking their confi- dence in perhaps question-able moral convictions. Such a view im- plies a distinction not only between the true and the good but be-

23 Persecution and the Art of Writing, pp. 34, 36.

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tween capable and less capable writers and readers, something that Adler appears to object to on the grounds that it is “elitist.” Of course, to say that something is elitist is not to refute it, especially if the charge is issued by a man known throughout the world for his superior mental capacities.

Now, perhaps, we can see why Adler believes that Strauss did not so much teach as indoctrinate his students. Let us take a hypotheti- cal example: After very careful reading, a scholar concludes that an author’s real intention is much more radical than is usually thought to be the case. For instance, he concludes that Plato’s Apology of Socrates contains evidence that its author accepted at least part of the charge that what Socrates engaged in was, from the standpoint of the city, dangerous, perhaps because this activity cast doubt on the most fundamental moral conviction that held the city together: its belief in the gods of Athens (see Aristophanes’ Clouds for a comic presentation of this sort of Socratic danger). Would not the student of such a scholar be inclined to read and to teach the Apology differently than if he had not been convinced of this reading, and even to repeat, as Adler says, “the master’s” in- terpretation when discussing the Apology? At the very least he might be inclined to suspect that philosophy is not an altogether unqualified good for everyday political life. He might even be led to read other works by the same author with a certain curiosity about claims regarding the of the true with the good. Per- haps, for instance, he would proceed to read the Republic’s argu- ment for the rule of philosopher/kings or for the abolition of fami- lies a little more skeptically, at least if there were indications in the text that such skepticism was in order.

Once again one begins to suspect why Strauss/Bloom were con- cerned with superior students, and why this interest had nothing to do with any criticism implied or otherwise of everyone reading good books. It had everything to do with a recognition of the his- torical phenomenon of persecution, and with holding open the question of whether the truth is always and everywhere good for every human being, regardless of their moral and intellectual ca- pacities, and regardless of the sometimes questionable moral con- victions upon which their adherence to a decent regime may rest. On this, we might observe, it may not be going too far to say that decent men may be expected to disagree.

Adler may wish to say that this is a bit like splitting hairs. What is needed to improve education is not esoteric but exoteric teaching. Quite so. Better to have our children read good books than what, if anything, they read now. But beyond saying this, may we not also 73

say that something of real value may be lost if we refuse to take seriously what can be learned, and learned certainly by the time one is of college age, by a reasonably close reading of books, both esoteric and exoteric?

The concern with an earlier age’s necessity to guard against perse- cution tends to raise questions about how to cope with orthodoxy in general and, more specifically, how to deal with it in one’s own time. For while it is true that ours is a free society, one in which the right to speak freely is fenced with unusual protections, it is nevertheless also true that public orthodoxies are always with us, and that a price may yet be extracted from those who fail to con- form to them. Moreover, liberal education, if it is to be truly lib- eral—if it is to free the mind from unexamined certainties— requires coming to grips with one’s deepest convictions, many of which are provided by the peculiar time in which one happens to find oneself. It would appear that questioning the reigning ortho- doxies of one’s time possesses aspects of danger, even in enlight- ened times like our own. It is perhaps for this reason that those who have been taught to read the literature written in times of per- secution tend to see liberal education some-what differently than Adler does, even if they would concede the value of his efforts to have students at all ages read good books, and even if they would welcome the Paideia proposal with open arms.

For one thing, such readers do tend to assign a more prominent place to history and biography in a serious education than does Adler. I suspect this is because they are interested in examining the different ways of life that come to light in such works as Plutarch’s Lives, in Thucydides’s History (both of which, of course, are in Adler’s list of Great Books), or even in individual lives, such as those of an Achilles, a Marlborough, an Abraham Lincoln or a Winston S. Churchill. Such readers may live in an age of democ- racy without becoming convinced that democratic man is the high- est human possibility. Nor is this difference confined to history. Adler’s famous reading of Aristotle, for instance,24 is certainly re- markable for its wonderful clarity. But as Ken Masugi has pointed out, it is also remarkable for its tendency to ignore human splen- dor25 as a goal of moral virtue. On the basis of Adler’s reading of Aristotle, but not of a reading of Aristotle himself, it would be dif- ficult to see the attraction of the life of a Napoleon, a Lincoln, a

24 Mortimer J. Adler, Aristotle for Everybody. New York: Macmillan, 1978.

25 See Ken Masugi, “Splendor, Ethics, and Philosophy,” Claremont Review of Books, March 1982, pp. 3-5.

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Patton or a Churchill. This playing down of heroic deeds and splendid acts results from Adler’s reversal of Aristotle’s order of the virtues of courage and , which has the effect of re- ducing the visibility of courage in battle, and therefore of reducing the urgency with which the question is asked, For what is life worth risking?26

But is this not the same as asking, What is the good life? And is it not the question that all readers, especially the young, ought to be most concerned with?

Before leaving the subject of indoctrination versus teaching let us recall that, for Adler, the purpose of liberal education is learning the truth as well as developing the skills necessary for lifelong learning. To learn the truth about some ideas requires no more than a serious intellectual engagement with competing arguments and ideas. But moral as well as intellectual difficulties arise when one reflects that the most obdurate prejudices one is confronted with are usually the prejudices of one’s own time: the worth of a war- rior’s life in republican Rome, that of commerce in Shakespeare’s Venice, honor in aristocratic times, piety in the Middle Ages, or democratic values and passions in our own time. The cave analogy in Plato’s Republic indicates that one often needs help in turning from strong public orthodoxies to the truth; but it also indicates that “dragging” into the light of truth students chained to darkness and error is not the most profitable way to proceed. The more sub- tle, ironic, approach of Plato may lack the comfortable clarity of Adler’s statements regarding what is true and what is false. But given the difficulty of approaching the truth in life’s most serious , such an approach may have something to recommend it. In his account of why, around 1935, he abandoned the “dialectical stance” he had favored at Columbia, Adler noted in a passionate letter to Robert M. Hutchins concerning his differ- ences with Richard McKeon that “he can take any position and jus- tify it by interpreting it as one method of approaching the problem. This, it seems to me, is simply a way of avoiding the dilemma of having to decide which position is true, and which false. I’ll be damned if they do not contradict one another and I’ll be damned if, contradicting one another, one of them isn’t right and the other

26 I find it especially interesting that Adler should be so little concerned, appar- ently, with the life aimed at splendid acts when his own life clearly evidences a strong and competent ambition that is difficult to understand solely on the basis of a philosopher’s quest for the truth. How many philosophers have come to occupy a public position in our time comparable to Adler’s?

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wrong.”27 The question of who best teaches students to think for themselves is partly resolved by asking whether the teacher merely espouses his own opinions, however persuasively, or whether he points the student to the best books, so as to be able to read the ar- guments for himself. But it also depends on whether the search for truth, at least in some matters, is not fraught with indirection and irony, that is to say, whether it can be approached directly, always and everywhere, like a Euclidean proposition, or whether it must be stalked warily at times, with all senses alert, and with an appre- ciation that sometimes one’s quarry is better armed and more dan- gerous than oneself. If we are speaking of the latter, a guide may be helpful, especially one that would have us look in unexpected places, perhaps even in the dark. I believe I would call such a guide a teacher.

* * *

We live in a time remarkable for its ignorance of the principles of nature and equality that form the backdrop of all that we hold pre- cious in public life. And ours is an age of extreme paradox: Scien- tific knowledge advances at a speed blinding to all but the most advanced and sophisticated practitioners, while education, whether in scientific principles or in permanent ideas, seems caught in a struggle between those who would destroy it through inattention and bureaucratic dullness and those who would revive and enliven it only to strengthen prejudice, superstition and gullibility. What is needed is a return to reading good books—indeed, not just a return, but a vigorous expansion through all grade levels—an engagement with political and intellectual forgetfulness and wrong-headedness regarding human nature, and a serious appreciation of modern de- mocracy, perhaps the only form of government capable of combin- ing political power with justice. On all these matters Mortimer J. Adler has been a vital and reliable guide. Since they are not mat- ters likely to be resolved soon, one can only hope that his ideas and arguments will continue to provide a focus, and indeed a rallying point, for those who, whatever their reservations regarding the reading of difficult books, suspect that in searching for the truth lies both the end and the means of human happiness.

27 Philosopher at Large, pp. 175-76.

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MJA, POLITICS: Summary

John Van Doren

y Mr. Adler’s politics, which we are now to discuss, is meant B his political philosophy, which is set forth in The Common Sense of Politics, Haves Without Have-Nots, and other writings he has published over his long career.

Politics so understood is for Mr. Adler not a discipline in itself but a branch of moral philosophy, which is concerned with the good life that as individuals we ought to make for ourselves—that is, with our happiness, regarded as the sum of this. Happiness is the object, too, of politics, as Jefferson said, and insofar as we are all citizens of the body politic it is the happiness of all of us that we seek—the same for all. But insofar as we are all human beings there is a larger and more comprehensive happiness—the “good life” in its most complete sense—which we must also seek for our- selves, and politics can only create the conditions necessary for the realization of this—again, the same for all—which remains our human task. Politics in Mr. Adler’s meaning of the term is thus subsidiary to ethics, which it serves as means to end.

What are the necessary conditions? Rather, what would they be, for no actual society or government embodies them. Mr. Adler’s conception of the state in which they would exist is an ideal one— 77

a vision, as he frankly says—which existing states at best ap- proximate. Such a state would have a constitution that placed its rulers under the authority of those they governed; it would be de- mocratic, insuring that every competent person would enjoy equal rights in the choice of these rulers and the right to make their wishes heard; it would be socialistic in the sense that an equality of conditions would be, maintained so that none would have unmet human needs that would prevent their pursuit of happiness; it would also be capitalistic, in that all, not just some, would share in ownership of the means of production—but as individuals, not in the name of the state—and so as to limit the redistribution of wealth required for social purposes.

Is such a vision appealing to us, and if it is, can we think it some- thing possible? Mr. Adler maintains that nothing in it is beyond the capacity of human beings anywhere to achieve, though it requires for its fullest realization that human beings everywhere do achieve it—that a world government comes into being established on the same principles, bringing to an end the era of international anarchy in which mankind has lived since states were invented.

Whether we agree that it would be the ideal political condition de- pends on whether we understand his terms in the same way. Some of us may not. We may doubt that it would be as he imagines, or that we are such creatures as he says. He says that human nature would transcend our differences, though whether we even have a human nature is nowadays disputed. He says that democracy re- quires constitutional limits—which some, however, think would nullify it. He says that democracy so constituted is just—indeed the only perfectly just form of government there is, in his consid- ered view—and despite the fact that actual , so far as they exist, have often been unjust, not least in their tendency to- ward what Tocqueville called the tyranny of the majority. We are asked to believe that democracy could fully realize both liberty and equality, when both in fact would be limited by justice—“as much liberty as justice allows, as much equality as justice requires,” is Mr. Adler’s formula—and the protagonists of neither principle are likely to be satisfied. We are told that “socialism” can mean the welfare state without control of the means of production, and we are told also that “capitalism” can mean ownership by the many of these means, as if that could really be arranged, to begin with, and as if, supposing it were, its effect would not be compromised by business cycles or the managerial control of profits.

In each of these cases, the ordinary meaning of the term Mr. Adler uses has connotations different from the one he offers— 78

connotations we may find it difficult to forget. Yet only if we do forget them can we believe in his political vision—believe in its possibility, that is, as distinct from its merely ideal formulation. Otherwise we may suspect him of being like the Caterpillar of Al- ice in Wonderland who says words mean anything he pleases and rules by his control of language. Such a figure, if he were king, might invoke any political order he liked, but he would fail to con- vince us that it was real, or ever could be. How can we save Mr. Adler from the charge that he is like that—or, what is more impor- tant, save ourselves from thinking so?

But let us suppose that we believe—as most of us here, I think, do believe—that his use of terms is after all the right one, the only one that sense can finally accept, how shall we get from here to there, from the world as we now have it to the world in which his use prevails? For it is necessary that we think this possible if Mr. Adler is to be satisfied he has convinced us. He is not content with Plato’s vision of the ideal state as something that only can exist in ideal terms, and of which we can be citizens only in an ideal way. He is—it is superfluous to say—an Aristotelian in this regard and, scorning utopia, insists that his ideal is within our powers to real- ize, otherwise we could have no obligation, as he thinks we do have, to consider it. And if we believe that we at least possess such powers, how shall the other six or eight or ten billion people on people on the globe be included in the enterprise? It is an undertak- ing that would give pause even to La Mancha’s famous knight.

Education is the answer, Mr. Adler might assert, and did with his Paideia Plan for the reform of basic schooling. The kind of educa- tion it proposed may well be needed if the population of the world is to create a congregation of ideal societies. Yet can it do the job? Are politics the natural and inevitable consequence of education, or do they have to have some cause of their own, some practical source by means of which we acquire capabilities—as the Greeks did in the polis, as the Founding Fathers did in their colonial as- semblies, as the Russian workers were to do, and partly did do, for a time, in what were called the soviets. Do we not have to have some praxis of this sort antecedent to the society it would sustain? Yet only such a society as that would be capable, we must suspect, of creating it. How do we resolve this difficulty? Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?

Again, however, let us suppose the task accomplished, or if not accomplished at least within some measure of realization, like Greek constitutionalism, or American democracy, or the welfare state of modern times. What would it then require of us—each of 79 us—as individuals? What would it be like to be well governed? If Mr. Adler is right, or if we understand him rightly, once the ideal society has been created we can then go on to the business of creat- ing really good lives for ourselves, of realizing our moral potential. Politics having done its job, or fairly in the position of doing it, we shall be able, each of us, to look after ourselves—that is to say, of our moral being. But will it really work like that, and will we want it to?

We are talking now of the ideal situation, one in which there is no quarrel, nor even any imposition, as between the private and the public dimension of our lives. And the question in whether, in that situation, there will be the separation between the two that we now take for granted, that we insist upon in free societies, at least. It is possible—I am willing to argue it is necessary—that the ideal gov- ernment Mr. Adler imagines will require more of us than is toler- able to conceive under any existing one, and that we will wish to give more of ourselves to it, as we will find more of ourselves in it, than we do at present. The Greeks invented politics, but politics defined them also—as democracy has defined the American people and as their soviets had begun to define the modern Russians— teaching them who they really were, in each case. Of course the was never perfectly achieved; Socrates is witness enough of its failure in the first instance—but was any critic of the polis ever more clearly its child, and can we imagine him without that connection, as he could not imagine himself? In any case, whatever the really good life is that we ought to live for ourselves, will it not require the participation of others in the ideal society, and will not this participation be, in important ways, defining of us? We will not even know what the good life really is for us ex- cept as we participate in the common life of that society—as the student in a good school learns through the companionship of oth- ers and comes to understand his or her own mind in the process. Is that not what Aristotle really meant when he said man was a politi- cal animal—that he could not become himself except in a political context?

I leave this question with you, along with the others I have raised, in the hope that they may start the discussion that will follow after the response which I understand is to come next.

Mortimer Adler: The Political Writings

John Van Doren

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“There’s glory for you!” “I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’ Alice said. “I meant, there’s a nice knock-down ar- gument for you!” “But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock- down argument,’ Alice objected. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is, whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “who is to be master—that’s all.” - Through the Looking Glass

The political writings of Mortimer Adler, while extensive and spread over 50 years, tend to be subsidiary to those he has pro- vided on ethics. That is because politics itself, not-withstanding Aristotle’s characterization of it as the “architectonic science,” is for Adler subsidiary to ethics, serving as means to the end of the good life that in moral terms we should live for ourselves, but not as the source or government of this.1 He believes that two of his political books, The Common Sense of Politics (1970) and Haves Without Have-Nots (1991) sufficiently set forth his position, though other political works would have to be considered in the fullest treatment of his thought. Among them are five long articles written with Walter Farrell and published at intervals in The Thomist as “The Theory of Democracy” (1941-44); also How to Think About War and Peace (1942); and also The Capitalist Mani- festo (1958, with Louis Kelso). One might add to these the more recent We Hold These Truths (1987). This article takes up only the books Adler has asked us to look at. Some of the others will be mentioned in footnotes.

I.

The Common Sense of Politics is dedicated to the proposition that politics regarded as a part of moral philosophy has its basis in “common sense,” which is the kind of sense we need to decide questions of “what is good and bad, right and wrong” in the aims

1 See The Common Sense of Politics. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, p. 21: “The good life provides the standard or measure for judging the goodness of organized society; in this respect, politics presupposes ethics, and ethics is architectonic or primary. The good society is indispensable as a means to the good life, and in providing the conditions that the individual cannot pro- vide for himself, it serves the general happiness rather than the happiness of a single individual. In this sense, and only in this sense, is politics architectonic.”

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and institutions of society.

Common sense so considered includes knowledge of historical de- velopments that have contributed to the formation of these aims and institutions—knowledge that is within our common experi- ence, and without which we cannot under-stand, or understand so well, how fundamental political truths have been established in human affairs.

Common sense does not include, though certainly it may be im- proved by, the work of “definitions, distinctions, analyses, and ar- guments,” which are the business of the moral philosopher, and by which the truths of common sense may be philosophically de- fended.

Neither does it include, except in the case of certain historical cri- ses and changes which have been the occasion of important politi- cal insights, an understanding of political operations, which as in- stances of human behavior are the business of political science to describe, nor a study of the of power that the word politics now largely signifies for us, and for which, as Adler says, “Ma- chiavelli wrote the rules.”

What Adler means by common sense comprehends primarily the reflection, aided by common , which we are capable of as human beings, and which we call upon when faced with politi- cal questions of a fundamental kind, as what constitutes the good society, and what means are appropriate to achieve it. These are ideal concerns, and the politics in which common sense can func- tion are ideal politics. We must decide for ourselves whether such politics have any bearing on real politics, and whether the sense necessary to the problems of the one is of any use in solving the problems of the other—whether a work of “normative political philosophy,” which Adler says he has contributed to what he con- cedes is a nearly extinct discipline, can “restore faith in politics” when most people despair of it.

The Common Sense of Politics is divided into four parts. The first undertakes to place politics as subsidiary to ethics in our effort to make a good life for ourselves; reminds us that as human beings we can make whatever political organization we choose; asserts that this has been and still is subject to historical development; and describes three “” which have realized fundamental principles. These revolutions are the Greek invention of constitu- tional government in the fifth century B.C., the American com- mitment at the end of the 18th century to the democratic ideal, and 82

the Russian one to an equality of conditions at the beginning of the 20th. The three revolutions are seen as having established, how- ever incompletely, the ideas of justice, liberty and equality in our progression toward a good society.2

Part Two, inspired by the anarchist tendencies of the 1960s, is de- voted to the question of whether government of any sort is a hu- man requirement, and assuming it is, whether it can be considered as good or as only a necessary . This is followed by a discus- sion of what Adler calls “the anti-political philosophers,” by which he means the anarchist tradition in European thought, of which an echo is heard in Thoreau, and which insists that government can never justify itself—a challenge so serious, in Adler’s view, as to require the defense he offers in Part Three. There, the injustices to which government is prone are acknowledged, as is the need for liberty and equality, which are held to require the institution of both democracy and socialism if justice is to be served—that is, if the injustice which the anarchists regard as endemic to government is to be avoided. These two institutions are seen, however, both as sufficient to reason (contra the anarchists) and as historically pos- sible.

Possible is not the same as certain. Part Four, the concluding sec- tion of the book, offers three “prescriptions” for the good society which are held to achievement. One is the control of technology, which if it is not restrained will create malignant natural and social conditions beyond the powers of government to cure; the second is the creation of a world government to replace the international an- archy that limits the capacity of societies to solve their problems; and the third is the devising of a system of education that will en- able the peoples of the world to make the wise choices that are re- quired if good government and the good society are to be realized. These prescriptions may not be followed, Adler admits, and if they are, it may require revolutionary change instead of institutional means to accomplish them.3 In either case, he insists, what we are seeking should be regarded as unrealized

2 The Russian is included among the others, not for its socialist pro- gram but for the ideal which that program was supposed to serve. See The Common Sense of Politics, p. 57

3 By “revolutionary change,” Adler means, not a course of action to which hu- man beings have “a natural right in and of itself,” but one that “may be justified by an appeal to natural rights that have been violated.” See The Common Sense of Politics, Ch. 9, note 6. Cf. Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence, para- graph two.

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until the rights of all men everywhere are secured by the justice of the state and its government and until the conditions of a good human life are provided all men everywhere by the effort of the organized community to supply its people with goods that they need but which they, as individuals, cannot obtain for themselves.

Only when those aims are achieved, Adler says, will we have the ideal society, or as much of it as we can now conceive.

Haves Without Have-Nots comprises what Adler calls “Essays for the 21st Century on Democracy and Socialism.” It indicates his overriding concern with those two principles and amplifies the point made in The Common Sense of Politics about the need for an equality of conditions in the ideal society—what Adler regards as “socialism”—arguing again that this, far from being inconsistent with democracy, is required by it. There are six “essays” in the book, of which the first, called “The End of the Conflict Between Capitalism and Communism,” written in 1990, and the second, “A Disputation on the Future of Democracy,” dating from 1977, are the most important.

The salient feature of this first essay, which is based upon one of Adler’s Aspen seminars, is the sharp distinction it makes between socialism and communism—that is, the totalitarian communism of the 20th century rather than what Marx meant by the term, though this, too, Adler has always rejected, not as tyrannical but as anar- chic—as assuming that perfect social relations would make gov- ernment unnecessary, which he thinks incorrect.

The “Disputation on Democracy,” which is the transcript of a pub- lic debate held at Aspen with Adler, Maurice Cranston, and An- thony Quinton, is remarkable as a defense of democracy in terms not of liberty or equality—which would have been ordinary, in ei- ther case—but of justice, a principle that neither of his two dispu- tants could comfortably accept as the democratic ideal.4

Other essays deal with the failed nomination of Robert Bork to the United States Supreme Court, where the question was not, Adler thinks, whether Judge Bork held this or that view, but whether he could offer any principle of justice (as distinct from existing lan-

4 Cranston found it easier to do this than did Quinton, for whom the term de- mocracy had fatal populistic connotations inimical to constitutional government. See Haves Without Have-Nots, pp. 156-74, esp. p. 162.

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guage or its supposed intent) on which he would rely to sustain them.5 They deal also with Abraham Lincoln and his recogni- tion—his insistence that the Declaration of Independence was a promise to the future of liberty and equality, not a limitation of them to that time or that occasion, and that the American people, as masters (not subjects) of their government, have the right as well as the power to seek the realization of this future. And a conclud- ing essay exhorts us, yet once more, to create a world government of, by, and for the peoples of the world, in what Adler calls a vi- sion of the future—a union, as he imagines it, of socialist, democ- ratic republics around the globe—where again, as in each of these essays, the underlying argument is that, under the government of principles, human beings are always free, as indeed they are also obliged, to seek their common happiness.

Is there any reason to suppose they can ever have such happiness, in the sense of bringing about the institutional reforms that could accomplish it? Is there an imaginable end to political progress, re- garded as the aim of civil society? Adler thinks there is, and that it is within reach, although there will remain the realization of human potentiality in moral and intellectual terms still to be achieved. “There is nothing in the nature of man or of society and its institu- tions,” he says at the end of the volume,

that makes it impossible to rectify all injustices and to remove all deprivations. If the limit of institutional progress is defined formally as the best possible society, in which all men have the opportunity to make good lives for themselves, then that limit will be reached, or at least very closely approached, when revo- lutionary or civil progress has brought into existence a classless society that embraces all men in a world state under a world government that is constitutional, democratic, and socialistic. Nothing less than this will completely abolish war, racism, and poverty from the face of the earth; or maximize, through jus- tice, freedom and for all.

II.

Certain propositions underlie Adler’s vision of the good society. First among them is that human beings are by nature political, and that when they set about the establishment of a political order for

5 As the failure of the Bork nomination has become a flash point for conserva- tive tempers of the day, it should be pointed out that the defect Adler found in Judge Bork was one he finds also in Holmes and Frankfurter, and also in Judge Learned Hand. Haves Without Have-Nots, p. 197.

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themselves they do so in accordance with a natural imperative, as necessary to the fulfillment of their natural needs. This follows Ar- istotle, of course, as does the further proposition that since men are also rational, the political organization they create will be such as they deter-mine, not what is determined for them by an instinct of their species (as is the case with bees or wolves), and will thus vary with their judgment and their circumstances.6

What they judge of is their happiness, which consists in living really good lives as individuals, but which cannot be achieved without political institutions that serve needs they cannot as indi- viduals provide for, or provide for so well. Politics, again, is sub- ordinate to ethics in Adler’s view, again following Aristotle, the state or body politic being for the sake of the individual and not the other way around (though Plato would indeed seem to have it the other way around, at least in the Republic, if that is really a politi- cal dialogue).

Not all bodies politic serve this end equally well. Some, such as tyrannies, do not serve it in any degree; others, like , serve it imperfectly, because incompletely. Clearly the state that serves it best is that which aims at the happiness not of one of its members, or even of some, but of all. Such a state will have a con- stitution by which the rulers are ruled. The number of rulers will at best be the same as the number of ruled—that is, the government will be democratic—and the democracy that best serves its mem- bers in their pursuit of happiness will be that which best meets their social needs, as conditions of its fulfillment. Among these is that of making a decent living, which will best be accomplished when every citizen owns at least a portion of the means of produc- tion, in addition to whatever wages they earn for labor.

The best democracy will thus be at once socialistic and capitalistic. It will serve liberty in the sense that no one will be owned or un- fairly controlled by another; it will serve equality in that all are citizens without reservation and have the necessary means to live good lives, so far as these can be socially contrived; it will serve justice in that each citizen is his own master, politically speaking, and participates in the government of the whole.

6 This does not allow the elimination of any of the progressive principles— constitutional government, democracy, an equality of conditions—which are held to be essential to the ideal society; it does allow variation in the institutions which are devised to realize them. See The Common Sense of Politics, pp. 30- 32.

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Will not the first two of these principles, liberty and equality, for- ever quarrel with each other, as Hamilton and Madison once feared, each wanting more scope than the other can grant? Not if they are limited by justice, the third principle, Adler insists. He is as opposed to the libertarians as he is to an all-encompassing egali- tarianism. We will avoid the conflict inherent in them if we confine ourselves to “as much liberty as justice allows, as much equality as justice requires.”

It is hard to argue with any of the Adler propositions, or the writ- ings that follow from them, even if one were so disposed—and as far as that goes, the arguments that support them are perfectly sound. But it is evident that they rest upon terms which have been carefully defined and often carefully restricted in their meaning, which—contrary to what we might assume, given Adler’s assur- ance—is usually not the meaning that common sense or common experience would supply.

Human nature, for example, is usually taken to mean something altogether determined; but what Adler wishes us to understand by it is what Aristotle does, which in its political application is pre- cisely what is not so: Only human beings can have politics because only they are capable of happiness, which is potential, not actual— not given.

Nor is the term politics defined in the ordinary way, as indicating processes and means to some end, but rather in the normative sense that says what the end is, or ought to be. We find nothing in Adler’s writings about how we are to achieve this, if that means the steps that should be taken, the that must be passed. These are the business of politics in quite another meaning of the term— the one, however, that common sense and common experience would tend to supply.

Happiness itself is defined in a moral, not psychological sense, again following Aristotle, but again not in the commonly accepted sense of the term, to which Adler has so often taken exception. Liberty is not absolute, in turn, and neither is equality, which in his meaning allows, even requires, limits that challenge the meaning that most people give the word. Both socialism and capitalism are used in uncommon ways—the first meaning the welfare state, but not state ownership of the means of production; the second mean- ing private ownership of those means, but by all, not merely by some, or by few. And democracy is defined, and strenuously de- fended, not as the best form of government, still less the best among others that are worse, but because it is held to be most just. 87

This is closer to the common notion of the matter than is the case with others of these terms, but it reminds us, as the common notion does not, of how much good may be lost while justice is being served—that is, while the work of self-government is carried on.

Adler does not flinch from this. Justice, for him, dictates not only democracy but socialism for the ideal society—a society in which all persons are “haves” and none are “have-nots.” In democratic terms, the latter are those deprived of the rights of citizenship; in social terms, they are those “deprived of what any human being needs to lead a decent human life,” as food, shelter, education, medical care and so forth. As justice in democratic terms requires the rejection not only of all forms of government which are worse, as tyranny or oligarchy, but of those which in some way are better, as enlightened despotism or aristocracy, so justice in socialist terms requires the rejection not only of communist that are totalitarian, but of “bourgeois capitalism” that, putting lib- erty first, provides the best for the few—and in some ways even for “all,” as in the case of great monuments, high culture and good manners—but insufficiently for the many.

But if “justice” here is quite in accord with our common sense of it, it is now at odds with the philosophical tradition on which Adler himself mostly relies. For as Plato would have rejected such a cor- respondence between justice and democracy, so would Aristotle and so would others who thought justice was a function not of numbers but of knowledge—of study—which the many have not acquired. Adler is aware of this tradition. But he rejects it.7

Do his unusual definitions, so deviant from the mainstream as in some cases they are, make doubtful the prescriptions that are based upon them, render suspect the politics—that is, the political phi- losophy—in which they take essential place? Is Adler like Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass, who rules, or would rule, by controlling the meaning of language? Human nature, politics, happiness, democracy, justice, and all the rest are persuasive terms as he defines them—that is, they are arrived at by convincing ar- guments—but do they correspond to any world we recognize, any life that human beings actually live? In that life, do not such terms mean very different things, supposing they mean anything at all

7 As Maurice Cranston notes, “most philosophers, most intellectuals, prefer enlightened despotism. . . . Naturally, if you think knowledge is what you need to govern, and that knowledge is something acquired by scientific method, you cannot have rule by the people; the people know nothing about science.” Haves Without Have-Nots, p. 147. Adler would obviously reply that the cure for igno- rance is not injustice but education.

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and are not mere fictions, as now is held to be the case with human nature?

If Adler were a Platonist he could say this does not matter, that the state for which he makes prescription does not exist, nor ever can except as a pattern laid up in heaven, but that thoughtful men will always live in it even as they live elsewhere at the same time, and that his terms at least are true for them. But Adler’s philosopher is Aristotle, who cares for common things and common earth, who must stand or fall based on how his definition of these terms makes sense of the world we actually inhabit.

This difficulty is possible to resolve only if we remember that Adler’s politics and the world to which they apply are ideal, and that the ideal for him is the possible condition of this world, not as for Plato the name for some higher one beyond our reach. It cannot be described, since it does not yet exist, but it can be prescribed, normatively, as what ought to exist, and may. That is what Adler has undertaken to do. His authority for doing it is a single Aristote- lian sentence on which he has built a moral philosophy with claims of truth that extend to politics as well—that is, to political philoso- phy, comprising the politics we ought to have if we are to live good lives, which are not the same as, though they are not radically distinct from, the politics we do have, living lives of imperfection. The point is in the possibility—we cannot have a moral imperative to achieve what is beyond our powers—and this being so, the end, the ideal, is within the compass of the real. Indeed, the conditions of the good life in the political realm cannot be realized except as the ideal is attained. Humpty Dumpty can rule, but only if he un- derstands that his kingdom will exist when he uses words in the right way.

III.

Will that suffice? Adler does not offer programs or policies that will bring about the political future he sees ahead of us, and we can hardly expect him to. He is a philosopher, not a statesman, and it is enough that he provides the terms by which such measures should be guided. But we must be interested in whether that future can really come about, and if so, what exertions that will require of human beings and whether they are capable of them. Maurice Cranston, in the “Disputation on the Future of Democracy,” was convinced that democracy was the only fully just form of govern- ment that could be conceived, but he was not as sure as Adler that it should prevail everywhere, and he was very doubtful that it ever would. His reason was that human beings are no longer political 89

animals as Adler believes, but have become instead creatures of ideology and culture incapable of the thought and purpose that any just society would require.

It is not necessary to share this dismal view to wonder if the thing can after all be done, if we have the capacity for it, and the strength. And if it can be done, if the good society can be realized, will not that entail more than the clarification of terms Adler has offered, the patient tutelage he has provided to those who go about it? Must we not have some better idea of how to go about the task than his definitions, by themselves, can provide?

One casts about for precedents. The Republic of Plato may be one. It cannot be taken literally as the blueprint of a state, but as a par- able of the ordering itself according to the virtues, and espe- cially the virtue of justice, it has some relevance. The relevance is that it is not so much a prescription as an action; the ordering of the virtues is its actual business, and what it is about is what may be said to happen in it. This is true of the intellect, too, which in the dialogue is not so much told the steps it has to follow as it is taken through them. Whatever else the Republic may be, it is the most exciting intellectual adventure ever written, in which we do not merely see the mind at work but discover that we have one.

Is there a more direct political example that we can turn to? Scott Buchanan has maintained that the Constitution of the United States is such. He sees it as a document setting up instruments and proce- dures of deliberation and decision by which the body politic can accomplish the aims set forth in the Preamble. Read and used properly, it does not tell us what to do, but shows us how to do it. In this lies its vitality, its permanent usefulness to the people who speak through its words. It is the product of deliberation and choice by a body of men inspired to that undertaking, and its achievement is to include us in the same work.8

8 Buchanan’s thesis is set forth in “So Reason Can Rule,” in the volume of Bu- chanan essays by that name (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1982). “There is a great public realm which is envisioned for [our own] constitution,” Buchanan has written elsewhere. “It has never been fulfilled. . . . We have never become public citizens in the form that the constitution imagines. God knows how they imagined it. It’s kind of wonderful to think of, but they did imagine something. In the Declaration of Independence, the phrase ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ originally, before it got written, was ‘life, liberty, and the public happiness.’ [But] the pursuit of happiness fell under a common law interpreta- tion, and became the pursuit of private happiness under any conditions you like. . . . If it were ‘the pursuit of public happiness,’ then we would have a different story.” See Res Publica, the report of an undated staff meeting at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Santa Barbara, Calif. Perhaps this is the story that Adler obliges us to try to live. 90

Adler’s own writings are not without power of this kind, of course, as their usefulness in Aspen seminars and on other occasions indi- cates. Those who know them know that they, too, cause excitement in us, and it may be supposed that if the world as a whole would read them, the ideal society Adler is daring enough to conceive would be very much nearer to its realization than is now the case. But as he knows perfectly well, it is better to discover than to be told - better in the sense that in the first case we understand while in the second we merely know (as if that were not a great thing, too). And understanding comes through having to work the prob- lem out for ourselves.

What we really need is what even Adler cannot very well give us: a prior politics by means of which we can summon the society he outlines for us into existence—as the writers of the American con- stitution had a prior politics in colonial affairs, not to speak of an education in law and political philosophy—and not have to wait for the moment to arrive. Whereas that kind of politics is not likely to exist before such a society has been created.

Adler has seen the problem. He has attempted to solve it by mak- ing education one of the conditions or prerequisites of the ideal society he imagines—and by education he means liberal education, not any kind of vocational training. If that is not forthcoming, he says, then every other development toward this ideal will be either frustrated or rendered futile. When he wrote The Common Sense of Politics in 1970 he acknowledged that he did not know how such a program of education for all children, as a truly democratic society would require of its citizens, could be constructed. But 10 years later, with the help of associates whose advice he solicited, he be- gan work on what became known as the Paideia Proposal for common schooling, which in the decade that followed was adopted by a number of public schools around the country, and in some of them is still going. While the realization of the ideal society was not listed as one of its objectives, it is clear that this was among the concerns—very likely the principal concern—with which Adler designed it, and with which for many years he spoke and wrote tirelessly on its behalf.

He has thus been active himself, so far as possible, to the end of having the kind of politics which the ideal society would require, and which could not arise or be sustained without the kind of edu- cation he conceived. But that is not the same as putting the ques- tion itself up for discussion, as something not yet settled, as need-

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ing everyone to find the good of it (the “good” likely as Mr. Adler has defined it) for themselves. Not to themselves, as individuals, which is something different, but in their own right, by which their real citizenship would be achieved, as real membership in an aca- demic community is achieved by learning, not by formal status.

This was not the business of the Paideia Proposal, nor could it have been. Perhaps it has been the business of one or another of Adler’s Aspen seminars. Perhaps it requires some institution such as the early Russian soviets, which were formed with the idea of creating a workers’ commonwealth from the ground up, or the early New England town meetings, which made government a local concern. In any case, the focus of attention in such an undertaking would be the real needs of its members, what is really good for them, what the common happiness would be if they could have it. No doubt they would judge best of these matters if they were liberally edu- cated—Adler is surely right about that—but the effort afterward would be much more than voting or holding office or simply carry- ing on the political life of the state; it would be formative of this, to begin with, and after the state had been created, it would provide continuous study and discussion. In this sense, the ideal society would have something of the character of a school.

If that were to happen, Adler being as pleased as anyone, the result would be that the good life and good citizenship would come much closer together than they appear to stand in his conception of them, where they are indispensable to one another but, each having dis- charged its obligations to the other, do not in any further sense combine. If Adler is to be asked to accept any criticism of his po- litical vision, it might be that he does not allow for this combina- tion, which in the ideal would make a seamless whole. We can guess, perhaps, why he does not suggest that. Such a result would hardly be agreeable even in the best of existing states, and in the worst would be a totalitarian nightmare—the very opposite of what he wishes to invoke. But we are talking of ideal things, which ex- ceed all our experience. There, the line between the one and the many would not have to be maintained in the same way, would not have to exist at all save as, with an eye to , we had as indi- viduals each to look after our . It would seem that in other re- spects a marriage of public and private goods is what we ought to seek, and what the pursuit of happiness entails.

Apart from this, what exception can we take to Adler’s vision? None, unless we reject visions altogether, which would mean that we prefer to make our way in darkness, low-ceilinged, mole-safe. And how can we honor him sufficiently for having set his vision 92

down where we can see it, for having restored the basic terms of politics to good meaning, as most of us agree that he has done, and for showing us what lies in that—what a world those terms of his can make, and will when we decide? That we may not decide, or may decide against them for the moment, is not so discouraging as it would be if we had no such store, were left with nothing but the sick doubts, the inane certainties, that otherwise surround us. In this predicament, nothing is so reassuring as to be reminded that ideas still exist and can point us out of our confusion, even if the way seems very far to go. That is what Mortimer Adler has done, and he has done it in the only terms that we can trust, which are those that we have not to take on faith but which are demonstra- ble—which strike us as plainly true.

Perhaps truth, then, is really what we honor, honoring him—the philosopher’s candle that flickers feebly in most of us, but in him burns with a fierce flame. He may think us silly to thank him for showing us no more than what is obviously there. How can we not see it for ourselves, he wonders, shaking his head. For he has owl eyes, and hardly knows the shadows of our ignorance, from which he rescues us with endless faith and tireless determination, saying it over again, and still again, until we understand.

93

Remarks – Mortimer J. Adler

et me begin with an expression of gratitude to everyone who L has participated in this celebration—the presenters, the com- mentators and all the rest of you who have played a role. I am sure you know how much I have enjoyed all the exchanges, but you may not know the part that two institutions have played in my life. They are the Aspen Institute and the Encyclopedia Britan- nica—not the usual academic institutions. There is one exception. The story of my own education begins in 1921—at the College of Columbia University. There I was intro- duced to seminars about the great books by John Erskine. There with Mark Van Doren, I lead great books seminars for 7 years, and then brought them to Chicago. Thence, with the help of Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke, they were brought to Aspen, and became the basis of Aspen's great educational contribution—the Aspen Execu- tive Seminar. 94

Before Erskine, there were no great books and no undergraduate seminars. Erskine himself called them Classics of the Western World In the German universities and their American imitators, a seminar was the place that graduate students assembled with their professo- rial advisors to report on the progress of their work for the Ph.D. The seminar as a place where a book read by everyone was dis- cussed by everyone—be they in school or adults out of school — was an invention by John Erskine. It was in such seminars that my own liberal education began and in them it has continued for almost fifty years at Aspen and at the Wye campus in Maryland. Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke were in a Great Books seminar at the University Club in Chicago that Bob Hutchins and I conducted. After the Goethe Celebration in Aspen in 1949, Walter and Eliza- beth Paepcke invited me to come to Aspen in 1950. They tried to set up great book seminars here of the kind they enjoyed so much in Chicago. But the floating population of Aspen in the summer time defeated that purpose, and we were saved by a Yale classmate of Walter's—Harry Luce—from giving up. He told us we were not serving the intellectually unwashed in America. When we asked who that was, Harry told us it was the American businessman. So after a few years of experimentation, we first produced the Aspen Executive Seminar, which met out- doors around the swimming pool of the Hotel Jerome. By using readings we culled from The People Shall Judge, used at the U of C., we finally developed in five years, the two-week read- ing list for the AEP. In my Aspen summer, I have written 18 philosophical books since 1977. Those who have read one or more of these books and who have also been in one or more of my seminars will note how many of the crucial insights in those books were points I learned from the seminars discussion. I have learned more from the seminars I have been in than from any other source. The Aspen Institute has been my teacher. The books I have written reflect much that I have learned in Aspen. On this occasion, it seems proper and fitting for me to mention three pieces of work in which I take particular pride because they are things, (I hope I can say without undue immodesty), that are 95

my very special contribution. There are three such pieces of work that have origin with me. The philosophical books I have written are like philosophical books written by others. But these three pieces of work are peculiarly mine; they are in a sense inventions of mine. 1. The first is the Syntopicon—which is an index to the discussion of the great ideas in the great books. The Syntopicon as the word indicates, is a collection of three thousand topics. A topic, though not phrased as a question, really asks a question about what is said about this or that aspect of a great idea. In constructing the Syntopicon, I invented—yes invented—a new kind of indexing—topical indexing... That was the only way we would record the 500,000 man-hours of reading done by the staff who produced all the references. No one had ever done topical in- dexing before. 2. In each of the 102 chapters dealing with the 102 great ideas, there is an introductory essay impartially presenting all points of view from no point of view. These essays are dialectical summa- ries of all the important aspects of a great idea. This took 26 months of writing, with no Saturdays and Sundays off, and with no time off at all. The writing of the 102 essays was the most difficult and the best piece of writing I have ever done. 3. Finally, with the Syntopicon as my mode, I produced the Propaedia when we edited the 15th edition of Encyclopedia Bri- tannica. This was another piece of syntopical indexing. The Propaedia was a topical table of contents in an encyclopedia that would have a two volume ordinary index. These three achievements are, in my opinion, especially worth celebrating.

From the Editor’s Desk

Sydney Hyman

hen Emerson looked from afar at the 1848 revolution in WFrance, he wondered aloud whether the end result would be 96

worth the trees that went into the barricades. So, too, with assorted books, magazines, monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, official reports, etcetera, produced over the decades: Were they worth the lives of the trees that went into the paper on which they were printed? That same question hovered over issues of The Aspen In- stitute Quarterly in years past, and I naturally hoped that the an- swer would be in the affirmative. Now, however, a point has been reached where the gap between the cost of producing AQ without advertising and the income from subscriptions alone can no longer be closed merely by congratulatory regrets. With this issue, and with heartfelt thanks to supportive readers, AQ ceases publication.

The decision regarding AQ coincided with Mortimer J. Adler’s de- cision to retire (at least provisionally) from his intimate association with The Aspen Institute over the course of 45 years. To mark the moment, some of his friends and associates came together in Au- gust 1994 at the Institute in Aspen for a symposium focused on aspects of his spacious work as a philosopher at large and as the organizer and editor of vast publishing projects. The papers pre- pared for the symposium were no exercise in anticipatory hagiog- raphy; rather, each set the stage for a dialectical exchange between the author and Mortimer.

It was later agreed that AQ’s final issue could best be used to pub- lish the papers prepared for the symposium. Hence what is now in the hands of the reader, subject to one ex post facto addition. The addition is my sketch of Mortimer’s role in creating and guarding the development of The Aspen Institute’s unique Executive Semi- nar—the foundation on which the superstructure of the Institute came to be built.

* * *

I’ve always believed that what Mortimer brought to the inner life of The Aspen Institute as a whole was coequal in importance with his contributions to its institutional structure. What he brought was his enthusiasm as a teacher ceaselessly searching for clear ideas that could lead to still clearer ideas. He belonged to the handful of men I’ve known whose enthusiasm for what they were doing ap- proached the meaning of the Greek root of the word—which is “the God within.”

I first encountered that enthusiasm when I was a teenage student in the Great Books seminar Mortimer offered undergraduates at the University of Chicago. The time was the eve of America’s entry into World War II following the irrational Japanese attack on Pearl 97

Harbor. The moment Mortimer walked into the seminar room, he conveyed the sense of his eagerness to get to the heart of the prob- lems in the text planned for discussion. He was engaged in a race against the absolute of time itself, with no time left for chitchat. He cared about what was to be discussed, and though he knew that a good seminar follows a of its own, the importance he at- tached to preventing a seminar from becoming a “bull session” ac- counted for the leading questions he straightforwardly laid on the table as points of departure and return for our discussions.

When a point was reached when dark things were forced into the light, he seemed to become airborne with enthusiasm. He would half rise from his chair, clap his hands, his eyes would dance, and he would proclaim his delight over what had been gained on the side of understanding.

* * *

Former students of Mortimer could eventually hold views in later years that differed from those he entertained. What did not change, however, was the certainty that any matter put to him would re- ceive a thoughtful response. An instance of this in my own case occurred when I was a junior officer in the First Armored Division during World War II. The division had been in the thick of fighting in Tunisia (including the disaster at the Kasserine Pass) and the Liri Valley, dominated by Mount Cassino in Italy. From there, an end run starting on January 22, 1944, put the division on the Anzio beachhead, where it remained until the breakout attack started four months later.

Near the end of the first months on the beachhead, I wrote Morti- mer to say that I wished I could compare what some of the authors of the Great Books had to say about war with my own . I told him that I was surprised by what went through my head once as I crouched down in my foxhole on a barren plain in Tunisia close to the Kasserine Pass, while overhead, German Stuka dive- bombers wheeled into position for their attack. I could feel the heat rise from the contracted muscles of my body, but at that instant, my thoughts were strangely identical to those of young Count Rostov in War and Peace, who, when seeing a French lancer bear down on him, said to himself: “Is it really true that this man wants my life—I, whom my mother ?” I told Mortimer that I was not sure I had the sentence exactly right word for word, but if I survived the war, I was going to read with fresh eyes some of the Great Books that dealt with war.

98

Around the third month on the Anzio beachhead, I received a package from Mortimer that had been in transit for some time. It contained three books: Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Tacitus and Thu- cydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War.

When the breakout from the Anzio beachhead began at around 4:30 on the morning of May 22, the element of the First Armored Division to which I belonged was held in reserve during the first phase of the battle. In the dawn’s early light, three young war cor- respondents suddenly materialized out of nowhere and drew close to where I was marking time. The three introduced themselves as Eric Sevareid of CBS, John Van der Cook of NBC and Robert Sedgewick of . They had been told at II Corps headquarters that if they meant to follow the course of the battle, the place to start was where elements of the First Armored Divi- sion were being held in reserve.

After a cup of coffee and some questions and answers, they made their way in the direction of the battle. A long half hour later, they returned to where I was. They were covered with dust and at a loss to know what was going on. One said they could not see anything beyond a radius of 50 yards but they could hear the crackle of small-arms fire, the bark of outgoing artillery shells and the whine of those that were incoming. They had broadcasts to make and sto- ries to file. What could they possibly report at so early an hour in the clash?

With a shameless flourish, I said they had no problem at all. Their stories had been written for them already. They merely had to change the names, the dates and the locations. With that, I went to my jeep and returned carrying the three Great Books Mortimer had sent me.

To Sedgewick I gave the copy of War and Peace, saying he could use the passages which told how Prince Andre was wounded while waiting in reserve—as we were at that very moment. To Van der Cook I gave the copy of Tacitus, saying he could copy some pas- sages in the Annals which told of battles between the Roman le- gions and the German tribes—of which we were the latest episode. The copy of Thucydides I gave to Sevareid. He could draw on what it had to say about the battle of Syracuse, which was fought on land and sea—as was the breakout attack from Anzio, since al- lied ships offshore were firing their big guns in support of allied ground forces.

For extra measure, I repeated the ritualistic words of Roman 99

gladiators when they faced emperors in the coliseum, and on whose thumbs, up or down, their lives might depend: “We who are about to die salute you.”

Well, I obviously didn’t die. Nor did they. But the strange encoun- ter with a youth on the Anzio beachhead who carried Great Books into battle was retained in Eric Sevareid’s memory as the years glided by. When he got around to writing his book Not So Wild a Dream, he recalled the encounter to illustrate a point he was mak- ing. On my part, I am using it by way of recalling my personal debt to Mortimer for what he contributed to my education in both war and peace. Others can add their recollections to mine.

Mortimer Adler and The Aspen Institute

Sidney Hyman

t takes the passing years to reveal what the days hide, and not I the least of the things they reveal about Mortimer Adler is this: He was never awed by academic signs reading, “Keep off the Grass,” “No Thoroughfare,” “No Passing,” “No U Turn.” He never learned that the word no, as used by the barons guarding their pro- prietary academic enclaves, has a negative meaning. On tempera- mental grounds alone, it was congenial work for him to drain ac- cepted meanings out of the word don’t. The work was all the more congenial when it meant removing barriers to the promotion of a learning society. More congenial, because the work was to him a way of life, an , a murmur of the blood, a work of art.

The fruits of Mortimer Adler’s aspirations for a learning society take many forms. But among these, the one I place at the center of my attention here is his role as the creator of the Executive Semi- nar, the heart within the heart of The Aspen Institute over the last 45 years. It is right to recall what he did in that connection, and the reason goes beyond an imperative in equity to give credit where credit is due. The larger reason is the need to guard against the am- nesia which can afflict institutions as well as persons—for when an institution suffers a loss of memory about its origins it can lose a sense of what it is, and what it is likely to be. Hence what follows. 100

I. Prehistory

The prehistory of the Executive Seminar starts with Mortimer Adler’s experiences at Columbia University, and more particularly, with his relationship with Robert M. Hutchins.

Adler’s doctoral studies at Columbia had been in psychology, and when Hutchins was dean of the Yale Law School he had worked with him on the law of evidence with its obvious link to psychol- ogy. Hutchins at the time invited Adler to join his faculty, but the invitation was declined. Adler, as a “big city boy” born and bred in New York, could not imagine himself living in a “village” such as New Haven. When Hutchins was appointed president of the Uni- versity of Chicago, however, Adler accepted his invitation to join him there. Adler recalls the circumstances:

I had dinner with Bob at the Yale Club in New York soon af- ter the announcement was made in 1929 that he would be the new president of the University of Chicago. He said to me that night: “I am now the head of a great university and I had never thought about what an ideal educational institution would be like, especially an undergraduate college. Tell me about your experience as an undergraduate at Columbia. What did you get out of it? What do you remember the most?” I said that my most memorable experience was in the Great Books seminar that John Erskine began in 1921-23, fol- lowed by my teaching experience between 1923 and 1929 when I conducted Great Books seminars with Mark Van Doren.

Bob then asked about the books we read. I happened to have the list of readings for the two-year course in my briefcase which I had checked in the cloakroom of the Yale Club. I left our table for a few moments to get the list, and on returning, gave it to Bob. He spent some time studying the names of the authors and their texts, but then said: “I have a Phi Beta Kappa key and graduated from Yale with honors, but I have read only three of the authors on your list. I am an uneducated man. I want you to come to Chicago and teach a Great Books seminar with me because if I am not obliged to read those books on assignment week after week, the business of being president of the University will keep me from reading them.

That same evening we also talked about philosophy at Co- 101

lumbia, Harvard and Yale. I told Bob about the great philoso- phy department at Harvard when James, Santayna, Palmer and Royce were there together. I recommended for possible appointments to the philosophy department at the University of Chicago the names of three youngish men with whom I had had “fruitful” philosophical conversations. Bob had read my first book, entitled Dialectic, published in 1927. This fact lay behind my expression of interest in preparing a Summa Dialectica which would formulate major philosophical ques- tions and their respective pro and con arguments. As a totally non-Thomistic enterprise, it would undertake to do for the 20th century what Thomas Aquinas’s Summa had done for the 13th.

Adler joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in September 1930 with a three-pronged appointment: one in the Philosophy De- partment, one in the Psychology Department, and one in the Law School. Hutchins compounded Adler’s difficulties with the Phi- losophy Department when he vetoed the choice of a professor the department had nominated, while he tried—without prior faculty consent—to appoint the three professors Adler had previously rec- ommended. An uprising by the philosopher kings of the Midway forced Hutchins to withdraw Adler’s appointment to the Philoso- phy Department, though the latter retained the one to the Law School where he taught two courses besides teaching a course in the Psychology Department.

Adler was also busy from the start as Hutchins’s deputy in an at- tempt to replace the “New Plan”—which the faculty had approved on the eve of Hutchins’s arrival in Chicago—with a different order of things. The New Plan, applicable to the first two years of the college, was based on required survey sources in each of the four divisions of instruction: humanities, social science, biological sci- ence and physical science. In place of the once-over-lightly nature of the survey courses, Hutchins wanted to introduce two-year Great Books seminars in each of the four divisions.

Adler compiled the reading lists applicable to the respective divi- sions, and at Hutchins’s request, went to meetings of the college curriculum committee where he tried to persuade the faculty to re- place the survey courses—despite their popularity—with Great Books-reading courses and discussion seminars. In this instance, however, intellectual “virtue” was not its own reward. What en- sued was a Hutchins-Adler duel of three or four years’ duration with potent heads of faculty enclaves. Contrary to ex post facto secondary accounts of the event, the scholasticism associated with 102

St. Thomas Aquinas was not a factor in the duel. The attacks mounted by opponents of the reading list as a whole were triggered by their objections to the presence on it of the “dry works” of Aris- totle.

It was not until 1942 that an authentic “Hutchins College” came to birth at the University of Chicago; it survived for only four years, but its organizing concepts became and remained the basis for St. John’s College in Annapolis. From the very start of their presence on the Midway, however, Hutchins and Adler generated a rare in- tellectual excitement that was recalled with gratitude by their for- mer students. In the conviction that good teaching in the college was coequal in importance with good research in the graduate de- partments and professional school, Hutchins joined Adler in teach- ing a two-year “Great Books” course to a select group of under- graduates. No student ever took that course simply because it came at a convenient hour or because it was a “snap” way to accumulate credits toward graduation. The course was sometimes given in the late afternoon and sometimes at night. To hold one’s own under a barrage of questions, a student had to spend a week in a close read- ing and rereading of the assigned portions of the book to be dis- cussed in a two-hour session. No academic trusses, no “ponies,” no predigested summaries of a classic, no notes borrowed from some- one in a preceding class were of use to a participant. Students had to stand on their own, had to be open to a direct, personal encoun- ter with original texts, had to converse with their authors even as the authors “talked back” to each other over the ages.

Not all students were equal to the demands made on them. Some dropped out. But those who stayed the full route included indi- viduals destined in later life to be among the university’s most dis- tinguished graduates in the professions, in the arts and sciences, in business and government. What those students derived from a study of the Great Books often became the invisible hand that shaped the order of their values, judgments and personal commit- ments.

Meanwhile, Hutchins’s vital interest in “continuing education” be- yond the bounds of formal schooling was expressed in many ways. Beginning in 1931, he saw in the new media of radio broadcasting and talking motion pictures instruments not merely for mass enter- tainment but for mass education. He made the University of Chi- cago the national leader in educational broadcasting and in educa- tional films after he induced William Benton—a master of com- munications—to join the university as a vice president. To the same end—continuing adult education—he worked closely with 103

Benton in giving the University of Chicago a major stake in the acquisition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and in radically up- grading its quality. Again to the same end, starting in 1942, he joined Mortimer Adler in teaching what was known as “The Fat Man’s Seminar,” based on the Great Books and offered to inter- ested University of Chicago trustees and to leading Chicago busi- nessmen and their wives. Walter Paepcke, then president of the Container Corporation, a trustee of the University of Chicago, a trustee of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the patron of the New Bauhaus, was among the regular participants, as was his wife, Elizabeth. Another participant was Meyer Kestenbaum, president of Hart, Schaffner and Marx, who in later years would “moderate” with Adler the first offering of The Aspen Institute’s Executive Seminar.

The Fat Man’s Seminar needed texts that were not readily accessi- ble, and the need in turn led directly to a Hutchins-Adler-Benton collaboration in a vast two-pronged publishing venture. One en- tailed the publication of a 54-volume set of the Great Books of the Western World. The second prong, entrusted to Adler directly and begun in 1943, had no parallel in the intellectual history of West- ern man. It extended over 10 years and entailed the preparation of a Syntopicon containing indexed references to 102 Great Ideas that recurred in the Great Books in a range from “” to “world.” A reader in college, after college, or who never went to college could find in the Syntopicon a guide to the debates about ageless human issues addressed over the millennia by the authors of the Great Books. Some among the student indexers—about 38 during a pe- riod of five years—would emerge in later life in the front ranks of American writers and distinguished professors. One among these was Saul Bellow, later a participant in Aspen Institute programs and a Nobel laureate in literature. Another was Richard W. B. Lewis, a celebrated professor of English at Yale and a winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his biog- raphy of Edith Wharton.

It was Adler, however, who wrote each of the essays that intro- duced the indexed cross-references to the 102 Great Ideas covered by the Syntopicon. The essays recalled his aspirations as a young professor to prepare a Summa Dialectica which would formulate major philosophical questions and their respective pro and con ar- guments. The result could not have been the work of a dogmatic mind. Nor was it. Adler did not tip his hand in any direction. Each of the essays, subject to the limitations of governing the choice of representative quotations, presented all opposing points of view germane to a particular Great Idea. 104

II. Enter Walter Paepcke

This is the place where Walter Paepcke, as president of the Con- tainer Corporation of America, entered the prehistory of The As- pen Institute’s Executive Seminar.

In his approach to what his company manufactured, Paepcke preached the gospel of elegance in design. “Elegance,” he said, “doesn’t mean expensive. It just means the best possible taste.” Further, on the advice of Egbert Jacobson, the art director of the Container Corporation, he applied to his affairs the Bauhaus- inspired idea of the “designed corporate image.” Everything about a corporation was cast in a distinctive style, beginning with the trademark and stationery and extending to advertising, office de- sign, architecture and so on.

In Paepcke’s hands, however, this concept was given a humane and sophisticated application. Instead of pressing the “hard sell” approach in his business, he reasoned that if the Container Corpo- ration published a series of advertisements in which modern design was the common denominator and whose text was limited to only a few words, the reader would see something interesting and associ- ate it with the Container Corporation. The techniques of the mod- ern artists would also identify the enterprise with current develop- ments in applied graphic arts, which were becoming increasingly important to packaging.

In 1937 he began a series of 12 black-and-white designs by the great Paris artist, A. M. Cassandre. During the next few years, the names of such artists as Herbert Bayer, Toni Zepf, Fernand Leger, Jean Corlu and Leo Lionni appeared on advertisements, each of which made a simple brief statement about the company. Later, during the war years, the Container Corporation brought out the United Nations series and, following that, the State series, where advertisements in full color introduced many new artists. They in- cluded Willem de Kooning, Ben Shahn, Rufino Tamayo, Jean Varda, Paul Rand, Henry Moore, Miguel Covarrubias and Mario Carreno for the United Nations series, and Stuart Davis, Morris Graves, Mark Tobey, Lester Beall, Charles Howard, Hazzard Dur- fee, Bernard Perline and Karl Knaths for the State series. Illustra- tion, with a brilliant use of color, completely dominated layout. Though mention of packaging was held to a minimum, these ad- vertisements helped establish the company as the best known in the industry, made it a magnet for talented young men and women in search of a congenial place to work and, no less significantly, gen- 105

erated more investors in its stocks.

About a year before the State series ended, Paepcke began to think about what to do next. He concluded that his company’s advertis- ing should serve a public interest as well as his own and that this was all the more important in the postwar period, when concepts central to a “good society” were placed at risk because of the na- tion’s preoccupation with physical security. The ideas he wished to present were fairly clear in his mind, but that still left in doubt the questions of statement and authorship.

By this time, Paepcke had been for six years a member of the Fat Man’s Great Books Seminar offered to Chicago business leaders. He was also by now a trustee of the University of Chicago and one of its representatives on the board of directors of the Encyclopae- dia Britannica Company. In the latter capacity, he had joined Hut- chins, Adler and William Benton in pushing through the decision to publish the Great Books of the Western World and its Syntopi- con—at a time when the financial prospects for that work looked very dim to virtually everyone else. As he carefully followed Mortimer Adler’s prodigious labors in bringing the Syntopicon closer to the point of publication, he found assembled in one place an index to many great statements of the ideas that were at the foundation of the Western tradition. Here, then, was a vast reser- voir of material on which he could draw for use by his own com- pany in its advertising campaign, while at the same time focusing public attention on the moral, philosophical and political ideas con- tained in the Great Books.

In the spring of 1948, when discussions were under way that would eventually lead to the Container Corporation’s series of advertise- ments based on the “Great Ideas of Western Man,” Paepcke was approached by Hutchins concerning a proposed bicentennial cele- bration of the birth of Wolfgang von Goethe—this by way of pro- viding a forum for discussions bearing on the imperative need to draw postwar Germany back into the of Western culture. As a student of Goethe and of the German tradition of arts and letters, Paepcke shared Hutchins’s interest in reintegrating Germany into the world intellectual community. But during the discussions be- tween the two men, Paepcke urged that the proposed bicentennial celebration should have a musical component because the literary works of Goethe had inspired a great literature of lieder, orchestral compositions and operas. He also urged that the affair be staged not in Chicago, as Hutchins proposed, but in the close-to-nature setting of Aspen, Colorado. His motives in the latter matter were not entirely altruistic. They were linked to his gestating plans to 106

develop the near-moribund former silver mining town beyond its newly emergent role as a winter sports resort. And that is how mat- ters were ultimately arranged.

III. Enter Jose Ortega y Gasset

Reporters and music critics from the nation’s major newspapers who were present at the Goethe bicentennial and savored its intel- lectual and musical components helped broadcast the news to the outer world that Aspen was something more than a place for ski- ing. It was an emergent new cultural center, a fact semaphored in the captions over representative press reports:

U. S. CULTURE MOVES WEST WHEN IT’S TIME TO THINK IN THE ROCKIES BRAIN SPA

In Hutchins’s terms, the Goethe bicentennial was also a marked success in “adult education.” Men and women from diverse walks of life had come together not only to listen to what eminent schol- ars had to say, but also to communicate with them and with each other about a great range of common concerns. It was something he had long struggled to bring about in the context of a great uni- versity. Now here it was, suddenly, an authentic community of dis- course. Could it be recreated and kept alive in some form once the convocation was over? The same point was raised by many other people who shared in the experiences of the convocation, and they signed a “petition” to Hutchins, asking that he lead the search for an affirmative answer to the question.

Clarence Faust, the dean of the college at the University of Chi- cago, recalled that when a group of the signers met with Hutchins and Paepcke to discuss Aspen’s postconvocation future, Paepcke revealed that he had been toying with the idea of creating in Aspen “something like a university” but with none of the depressing as- pects of university life. It would be a place with no degrees, no ex- aminations, no football teams, no problems with alumni, no faculty committees, no squalid infighting over faculty tenure and promo- tions.

“No tenure and promotions?” asked a skeptic wise in the ways of academic life. “Who would come?”

“Young scholars,” said Paepcke, “who want a chance to pursue their natural interests without worrying about how to get ahead in the academic pecking order. They would be joined by retired scholars who had allowed their life to be drained off in academic 107

housekeeping chores, and who would grab at a last chance to be scholars.”

“Well,” asked another skeptic, “what would you do about a li- brary? You can’t have a great university without a library, and the building of a great library is a work of generations.”

Paepcke parried the challenge by asking Faust, “How many Great Books are there?” The discussions ended in laughter.

“Form,” said Goethe, “creates substance.” And the form of what was to be done after the end of the convocation was visible only with respect to two matters. First, Aspen could be the home of an annual summer music festival and perhaps of a music school — considering the number of established musicians who said they would like to bring some of their students to Aspen for summer- time instruction. To this end, Paepcke said his Aspen Development Company would buy from the Goethe Bicentennial Foundation the $55,000 tent which Eero Saarinen had designed and built. The tent would continue to serve as the “amphitheater” for summertime concerts, while music students would be lodged in the ski dormito- ries that would otherwise be empty in the summer.

Secondly, Paepcke’s concern over ways to use the facilities of the Aspen Company in the period after the end of the winter sports season but before the start of the summer inspired a Bayer-Paepcke plan for an Aspen Conference on Design to be held in the spring of 1950. When the two men checked their ideas with Egbert Jacob- son, director of design for the Container Corporation of America, he agreed that there was no event and no one place in the manner of the Bauhaus where artists, publishers, architects, engineers, manufacturers and other business executives from around the na- tion could come together and seriously discuss the many-faceted aspects of design. A conference on design held in Aspen could fill that vacuum in communications—as well as the Aspen Develop- ment Company’s empty houses during the Spring season. With Ja- cobson in the lead, steps were taken to bring such a conference into being.

But what else could be done?

After the main participants in the Goethe bicentennial had left As- pen, it occurred to Paepcke that Jose Ortega y Gasset—who with Albert Schweitzer was one of the stars of the event—might have some thoughts on the subject. So, in a letter to Ortega, who had returned to Europe, he enclosed a copy of the “petition” that had 108

been submitted to Hutchins, and after alluding to it, went on to say something else. He had in mind, he said, the creation in Aspen of “something like a university.” Perhaps the Spanish philosopher “would laugh at the idea,” but in any case, Paepcke would wel- come his candid reaction.

Ortega responded with a 10-page single-spaced letter which reached Paepcke in late October 1949. The text gave form to many inchoate things that were in the air, suggested the name for the As- pen Institute for Humanistic Studies, and anticipated some of the structural features the Institute would eventually incorporate.

Ortega “unreservedly applauded” Paepcke for the proposed univer- sity, but he urged him for the time being to lay aside the term uni- versity. The term, said he, had many connotations, and its use would serve only to obscure what Paepcke was reaching for. Once the term was laid aside and attention was focused on its nuclear meaning “advanced studies” or “hochshule (high school) educa- tion”—it would be possible to be more precise “in defining the new undertaking for a most novel institution.”

He proposed the creation at Aspen of a “High School of Humani- ties.” “By humanities,” said he, “I have in mind not only the tradi- tional humanities which are summed up in the study of Greece and Rome, but all those matters which are concerned with specifically human facts, including—and even most principally—current hu- man problems.” The proposed High School for the Humanities should not for the moment be a research center. Its educational mission should be to promote a total synthesis of human life, to “make a single discipline of the physical and biological sciences and the humanities.” The synthesis to be achieved would be made “on the basis of a library with very few but masterly chosen vol- umes. This scarcity would not carry with it a sense of privation, of deficiency, but on the contrary would have a deliberately positive sense, for the aim would be to teach how to really absorb an im- portant book” and to apply to the reading “the principles of con- centration and synthesis.” “The idea then,” said Ortega, is to “cre- ate in the Aspen summer a world.” A world, however, “is not a for- tuitous gathering of individuals. It is a living together informed by unity. To that end, it may help if individuals attend courses and lectures, concerts and festivals—as was the case at the Goethe Bi- centennial, with its musical counterpart. Such unity, however, will not crystallize unless there is a permanent instrument of general collective life in Aspen.”

Paepcke was in Chicago when he received Ortega’s letter, written 109 in Spanish. Within hours after he read an English translation of the text, he telephoned Mortimer Adler and invited him to lunch. When the two men met, Paepcke did most of the talking. The Goethe convocation, he said, had been a great success, but the more he thought about the matter, the more he thought that it was a waste of money to maintain Aspen only as a winter ski resort. To do so would be to leave the resources of the place unused for the other half of the year. While he meant for Aspen to be the home of a summertime music festival—and to that end, would form an As- pen music association and possibly an affiliated Aspen music school—he was concerned about the intellectual side of the sum- mertime program. “Why not,” he said to Adler, “offer in Aspen a summertime version of the Fat Man’s Seminar in the Great Books?” Adler later recalled that he confined his reply to a single word—yes—whereupon he thanked Paepcke for the lunch and thought no more about what had been discussed. Neither man stopped to reflect on the fact that Ortega has used the term “hu- manities” in its traditional European sense—meaning, simply, the “liberal arts.” The term humanities, converted into “humanistic,” thus cropped up in the eventual title of The Aspen Institute—until it was quietly dropped in 1988.

IV. A Telephone Call

In April 1950, on the eve of the first Aspen Conference on Design, a telephone exchange took place in Chicago between Walter Paep- cke and Mortimer Adler that went something like this:

PAEPCKE: “I am going to Aspen with Pussy [the name by which his wife, Elizabeth, was known] for a conference on de- sign that Herbert Bayer and I have put together. Why don’t you come out with us so that we can work on the schedule?”

ADLER: “What schedule?”

PAEPCKE: “The schedule for the seminar in Aspen.”

ADLER: “What seminar?”

PAEPCKE: “The one we discussed last fall. The Great Books seminar. Remember, you said yes?”

ADLER: “Yes, what?”

PAEPCKE: “Yes, it was a great idea to have one like it in As- pen.” 110

Adler at the time was absorbed in the final round of work on the 54 volumes of the Great Books of the Western World, and with its in- dispensable two-volume Syntopicon. He could not readily absent himself from the task for an indeterminate number of days. Though he had never been to Aspen, the “village” held no interest for him, not even as a place for recreation. He could not ride a bicycle, and it was a matter of principle with him to not know how to swim — something carried over from his days as an undergraduate at Co- lumbia University (to which he had been admitted on a scholar- ship, though he had never secured a high school diploma). He had raced through the four-year undergraduate course in three years with top marks that earned him a Phi Beta Kappa key. But he was denied a B.A. degree because he did not take the required course in physical education, nor for that matter, ever went to a gym.

Still, because the Paepckes were among Adler’s best friends, he agreed to go to Aspen. His first impression of the place was a bit bleak. The spring thaw had begun, and in the absence of paved streets or cement sidewalks, the thoroughfares were seas of mud. Nevertheless, the Paepckes’ hospitality, their lovely home, the company of the Bayers and other friends of the Paepckes — combined with the promise of the future—overcame Adler’s initial distaste for the as yet unreconstructed ghost town. In a weekend of work, Adler designed the format for a reading list of Great Books that would be tried out in the coming summer. He also compiled a provisional list of notable figures who might participate in the pub- lic discussions of the texts and whose names might attract audi- ences.

To help launch the 1950 trial run of the Great Books seminar, Adler recruited the support of Reinhold Niebuhr, Clarence Faust, William Gorman, Robert M. Hutchins, Lawrence Kimpton, Karl Menninger, Alexander Meiklejohn, Meredith Wilson, Yves Simon, Clare Boothe Luce, Olin Downes, and others. They were to press the “search for greatness” through colloquia on man and his insti- tutions, the fundamental ideals that provide the good life and the relation of the “search for greatness” to contemporary American conditions.

The “Tuesday night lecture,” open to the public, was to become a regular feature of The Aspen Institute, and the roster of its speakers over the decades now reads like a Who’s Who of the Who’s Who in American intellectual, economic and governmental life. Adler in a sense launched the series on July 1, 1950, with a lecture in the mu- sic tent at 10:00 in the morning. There were about 150 people in 111

the audience, with stray dogs walking across the platform, birds pecking away at Adler’s notes on the music stand and gusts of wind blowing the notes all over the stage.

Since the Institute was to be dedicated to the study of man and of human values as they relate to all aspects of human life, Adler chose the nature of man as his theme. His central thesis was that man differs from all other animals and everything else on earth, not in degree, but in kind. Man has species-specific properties such as speech and conceptual thought not possessed to any degree or at all by other animals. Man, certainly, is the only animal on earth who can consciously think about the extinction of his own species. All else on the human scene—all aspects of the human environment— may change, but man’s specific nature is an unchanging constant and will remain so as long as the human race endures as a species. Nearly 20 years later, Adler would return to the theme and refine it further (The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes, pub- lished by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1967), then do so again in a magisterial statement published in 1989 in The Aspen Institute Quarterly.

V. Enter Henry Luce, Jr.

Although the interior of Aspen’s Wheeler Opera House had been refurbished under Herbert Bayer’s direction, in the absence of paved streets and concrete sidewalks the route to the building led through a sea of mud after a rain or through clouds of dust when the sun was shining. The same conditions were true— metaphori- cally—of the Great Books seminars initially held inside the Opera House: Here, as Adler and his collaborators readily agreed, the en- vironment could be as parched or bemired as Aspen’s streets. This was partly due to a mismatch between the structure of Adler’s reading list and the nature of his Aspen audience. The seminar structure assumed a situation similar to a classroom at the Univer- sity of Chicago or to the Fat Man’s Seminar in downtown Chicago: In both places, the continuity of the participants enabled Adler and Hutchins to move back and forth among the themes of successive books and to weave them into a tapestry of understanding. In As- pen, however, the people who came for the first summer offering of the Great Books programs comprised a floating population. Some stayed one week, some two, some three, making it impossi- ble to treat the material so that ideas would be as interwoven strands on a loom. Discussions tended to be confined to the frame of just one book each week.

In addition, because few members of the audience had read the 112

book under discussion, either they were reduced to being passive eavesdroppers on what was said or, when they did speak up, they could not cogently challenge or be challenged by a discussion leader. The mismatch extended to the discussion leaders them- selves. Depending on the book to be analyzed in a given week, four “panelists” chosen by Adler served as discussion leaders. As they sat on the stage of the Wheeler Opera House and talked among themselves, their individual “performances” could be daz- zling, but that did not make for a seminar in which the roles of the teachers and the taught are interchangeable.

A saving suggestion was at hand, however, and its source was Henry Luce, Jr., the creator and head of the Time, Inc., publishing empire. Luce (Yale ‘19) had a natural interest in the business ca- reer of Paepcke (Yale ‘17), since the Container Corporation regu- larly placed handsome advertisements in the pages of Time, Life and Fortune. He had also been drawn into the affairs of the Uni- versity of Chicago through his friendships with Hutchins and Wil- liam Benton, both graduates of Yale in 1920 and both coming, as Luce did, from missionary families. He had served, for example, as a member of the American Policy Commission, formed at the Uni- versity of Chicago in 1940 on the initiative of Paul Hoffman, a university trustee, and of Benton, a university vice president; the Commission was the forerunner of the Hoffman-Benton-led Com- mittee for Economic Development. Luce was also a director of the University of Chicago-affiliated Encyclopaedia Britannica Com- pany and had financed the Commission on a Free Press, whose headquarters were at the university.

In the summer of 1950 Luce spent three weeks in Aspen, where his wife, Clare Boothe Luce, participated in a Great Books seminar. He was in the audience on the night when she shared the stage of the Wheeler Opera House with Adler, William Gorman* and Elizabeth Paepcke for a discussion of Aquinas’s Treatise on Law. He was fascinated by the turns and twists of what he heard, but as a very successful consumer-minded publisher, he was also troubled by the profile of the people who comprised his fellow listeners. They were personally attractive, but were they the best audience for what was being offered on the stage?

After the seminar, when the participants went to the Paepcke home for refreshments, Henry Luce laid down a “law” of his own, which Adler later recalled. “It was a wonderful evening in the Opera

* Gorman had been the general editor of the Syntopicon of the Great Books of the Western World, and is credited with having invented the descriptive term.

113

House,” Luce said, “and I enjoyed myself thoroughly. Yet in what you are offering, you are guilty of a great oversight. Your audience is now made up of students, schoolteachers, lawyers and the like. But what about the forgotten man in the cultural life of our soci- ety? What about the great, unwashed American businessman? Get the American businessman to come to Aspen, to share and experi- ence directly what I saw occur here tonight. He is the man you want, because he is the man who needs you the most.”

That thought led to a swirl of excited talk back and forth that ex- tended well into the night. It was recognized that the postwar Committee for Economic Development was doing important work in getting businessmen to devote time, energy and money to the task of clarifying the major alternatives of national economic pol- icy for a free society. But the need was for something that went beyond the limits of economics—or even beyond the Fat Man’s Seminar on the Great Books that Hutchins and Adler had con- ducted in Chicago. The need was for business leaders to sit at the same table with leaders in the world of letters, , govern- ment, labor and science to discuss a broad range of fundamental problems of contemporary society and Western civilization. The governing maxim for saving a nation’s soil, “Start with the hilltop and not the river bottom,” applied as well to saving a nation’s soul: “Start with the men on top.” American business executives had shown the world how to use men in order to make things great, but it was now imperative that they should try harder to make great men, starting with their own lives as citizens.

By the time everyone was bedded down for the night, it was agreed that The Aspen Institute would offer a program in the summer of 1951 to be known as the Aspen Executive Seminar. Many deci- sions on vital details still had to be made. They included the method for recruiting business executives, the number of partici- pants at the seminar table, the place they would be quartered, the fees that would be charged, the length of the seminar, the choice of seminar leaders and special guests, and the design of an appropri- ate reading program combining the classics with significant con- temporary works of particular interest to established or potential heads of corporations.

VI. The Aspen Executive Seminar

With the help of Clarence Faust (dean of the college at the Univer- sity of Chicago), Adler drew part of his list of readings for the seminar designed for business executives from The People Shall Judge. This was a two-volume collection of primary documents 114

compiled by social scientists at the University of Chicago for use in connection with the liberal education of undergraduates. Adler conducted the first “Executive Seminar”; his comoderator was Meyer Kestenbaum, president of Hart, Schaffner and Marx in Chi- cago and an alumnus of the Fat Man’s class. Later seminars were held in various places: on the grounds of the Paepcke home, around the edge of the Hotel Jerome swimming pool, on the porch of the Four Seasons Club where the music school now stands, or in a meadow come upon in the course of a hike over a mountain trail.

The overall design, as worked out for the summer of 1951, did not stand in one place forever like a painted soldier on a battle canvas. It underwent many experimental changes in the passing years. Yet for all the changes—including fee increases that played a ceaseless game of tag with rising costs—the Executive Seminar itself would remain the cornerstone of The Aspen Institute from 1951 to the present. It would remain so, despite recurrent financial crises, re- current doubts about the survival powers of the Institute, recurrent internal strains and recurrent town-and-gown tensions.

In Adler’s design for the Executive Seminars, the point of depar- ture and return was set forth in the readings, a set of works contain- ing tough thinking about social, economic and political problems. Some of the thinking was done several thousand years ago, as in the case of selections from the Bible, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles and Thucydides. Some was done in modern times as in the case of selections from the Federalist Papers, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and even Senator Robert A. Taft. All dealt with ideas such as equality, liberty, justice and property—ideas of central importance to an understanding of democracy and capitalism as well as of their opposites, totalitarianism and communism.

In a sequence of sessions spread over 12 days, the readings were meant to open up in fanlike fashion, to widen the arc of perception about the same four fundamental ideas, so that participants could see and grasp more as each day’s discussion built on those of the preceding days. At the same time, to avoid seeing an issue from only one side, the readings for a given day would include conflict- ing views about major issues. Seminar participants would be asked to formulate the terms of the conflict, to state where they stood with respect to the rival sides, and to defend their positions under challenge.

Although the premise of the readings and discussion assumed that truth was in principle discoverable—else, why bother to seek it by means of argument—the seminars would teach no dogmas, but 115

would encourage the participants to examine all dogmas, starting with their own. Further, the Executive Seminar would neither try to preach businessmen into “goodness,” nor seek to provide them with pat answers to any practical problems they faced. It was rec- ognized that any two practical problems might have the same in- gredients but in very different proportions. The purpose of the Ex- ecutive Seminar would be to provide thoughtful executives with a unique opportunity to look with fresh eyes at the routine of their own lives, to test their own governing concepts in the light of im- portant utterances in the intellectual legacy of the West, to gain a certain critical distance from which they could better focus on the dynamics of the society of which they were a part.

Adler’s view was Paepcke’s as well, and it was the leitmotif of the case he made to business executives he personally tried to recruit for the Aspen reading-discussion program. “It is not the aim of the Aspen Executive Seminars,” he would say simply, “to make a bet- ter treasurer out of a treasurer, or a better credit manager, or to show how an advertising vice president can be more effective in promoting a product. The aim is to help American business leaders lift their sights above the possessions which possess them, to con- front their own nature as human beings, to regain control over their own humanity by becoming more self-aware, more self-correcting, and hence more self-fulfilling.”

The simple message, however, did not simplify the task of recruit- ing participants for the first Executive Seminar or for those follow- ing. Although the Committee for Economic Development was by now providing the American business community with carefully reasoned statements about socioeconomic issues, the greater part of that community still took its intellectual bearing from utterances prepared by the entrenched staffs of old-line business organizations such as the National Manufacturers Association and the United States Chamber of Commerce. In the first years of the 1950s, many businessmen joined willy-nilly in the hysteria about “communist conspiracies” that threatened to shatter the foundations for rational order in American public life. They would eventually learn that “dissent” from orthodox dogmas was not the same as “subversion,” but this would take time.

VII. As Things Stand

Today, the mix of participants in these seminars is richer than in earlier years when Henry Luce, Jr., could with some justice refer to the “unwashed” American businessman as “the forgotten man in the cultural life” of the nation. In a typical seminar, business ex- 116

ecutives—both men and women—now account for around half of the participants. The rest are from other segments of society— judges, artists, political leaders, writers, rising young scholars and so on. Although many of the texts of the reading lists remain what they were in 1951, there has been a conscious tilting of the list to- ward contemporary sources of thought, especially in connection with international issues—due in part to certain interrelated facts: The economy is now a global economy; politics is played on a worldwide chessboard; modern transportation and communications have converted the earth into a global village.

Still, for all this, participants in the Executive Seminars have ex- hibited the same pattern of responses, regardless of the year when they came to Aspen or the people who flanked them. In the open- ing sessions, for example, some business-men seem restrained, wary, noncommittal, afraid to speak in an unfamiliar vocabulary lest they stammer and appear ridiculous in the eyes of their peers. Others seem unbuttoned, voluble, confident that when they spoke, the gods in heaven would be edified. But as the days pass, both types find it increasingly difficult to adhere to their initial stance. The first cannot evade questions when they are asked to explain themselves. The second cannot speak and go unchallenged. Both groups in this way can be badly shaken, wounded in their pride of intellect, embarrassed by the exposure of their limited perceptions, angry on that account—and often all the more angry when their spouses are onlookers. Most seminars, however, reach a moment where the crisis of self-esteem passes and participants begin to speak their minds freely.

Once, for example, the discussion put Aristotle’s Politics and its thesis about “natural slaves” in opposition to the thesis about “eco- nomic slavery” advanced by Karl Marx in the Communist Mani- festo. An East Coast banker, who was used to making decisions and having them carried out, protested that the discussion up to that point had settled nothing. “I want to say where I stand, and I want to know where everybody else stands,” he declared with white-lipped heat. “We talk and talk, and then jump on to some- thing else, and we’re always up in the air.”

“Can’t help that,” replied a Midwestern manufacturer. “We start on the ground at an altitude of 8,000 feet and take off from there. It’s sure different at home. When I open my mouth in the plant, by God they listen. Here I find that when I open my mouth, someone just jumps down my throat.”

At another seminar, for which the moderator was Barnaby C. 117

Kenney, president of Brown University, the subject under discus- sion was Plato’s Republic and the executives were giving Socrates the business. Summing up the feelings of many of his 15 col- leagues, one television executive said, “Socrates seems to have been a cunning fellow who used words in a slippery fashion. In fact, I can’t see much difference between Socrates and those Soph- ists he’s always criticizing.” Across the table, Kenney puffed on the last half-inch of a cigarette and added a minor complaint of his own. “Well,” he said with a mischievous smile, “there was one im- portant difference. Unlike the Sophists, Socrates didn’t accept any money for his teaching. This has had an unfortunate effect on the teaching profession ever since.” “But that doesn’t explain,” said an investment banker, “why teachers can get emotional about abstract ideas.” “You better than anyone else,” responded a steel manufac- turer sitting across the table, “should know the reason why. You personally deal in the most abstract thing in the world—money. And I don’t have to remind you that people can get very emotional about money.”

It was unlikely that the executives would enroll as Ph.D. candi- dates at the end of the two-week seminars. Some of the participants sent by unions were shaken by what they learned from representa- tives of other segments of American society. At another extreme, a financial institution, which over a short period sent three of its bright officers to an Executive Seminar, saw two of them leave the bank for what they thought would be more useful and exciting lives. In most cases, participants whose readings had been confined to stock tables had their appetites whetted for other things.

“The seminars have opened windows in my mind that have been closed for a long time,” said a vice president of a New York adver- tising agency. “It may change back on Madison Avenue, but once you start thinking about some of these ideas, it’s hard to stop.” “I’ll have to watch how I talk when I get back to the plant,” a factory owner commented. “I don’t know if I can get away there with some of the things I’ve said here.” “Well, I’m spoiled for televi- sion and half of my neighbors,” another member remarked. “Know what I want to go home and do? Talk!”

There is in all this a feeling of shared adventure, of having climbed a short distance up the high mountains of the mind. On returning home, one executive was asked to write a report for the president of his company evaluating the seminar experiences. He ended by writing two. The first said that he had enjoyed himself thoroughly, but couldn’t see any benefit to the company from the money it had spent in sending him to the seminar. The second, written just a few 118

months later, stated the reverse: “Every day,” he said, “I find that the subjects I discussed in an abstract way in Aspen have a direct bearing on the problems that flow across my desk.” Thousands of other businesspeople who have participated in the Executive Semi- nars could say the same thing—and all can thank Mortimer Adler for that.

The Authors

“Philosophy is everybody’s business,” says Charles Van Doren quoting Mortimer Adler’s credo. Van Doren’s essay, “The Tri- umph of Mortimer Adler,” condenses Adler’s uphill battle against the bulwarks of philosophy’s elite into this one notion—that phi- losophy is not just for academicians, but should be understood by each of us. Van Doren has spent decades in the world-of-ideas business, as coeditor (with Adler) of the Great Treasury of West- ern Thought and the 20-volume Annals of America; as author of The Idea of Progress and The Book of Knowledge (among other works); as an Aspen Institute Executive Seminar moderator for 25 years; and as vice president/editorial of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Since 1960 he has been associate director of Adler’s own Institute for Philosophical Research in Chicago.

Sidney Hyman’s The Aspen Idea is a book-length history of The Aspen Institute; his article in this issue offers some details on Mortimer Adler’s role in the big picture of the Institute’s forma- tion. His lively descriptions of the characters and events surround- ing its birth and growth reflect the many facets of his own history. While in Washington he was a regular contributor to the New York Times Sunday Magazine and served as an aide to the publisher of The Washington Post. In between times, he was closely associated with Senators Paul H. Douglas, J. William Fulbright and Hubert Humphrey, and with former Secretary of State Dean Acheson. When he returned to his home base in Chicago, he was a senior fellow at the Adalai Stevenson Institute, served on the faculty of the University of Chicago as the director of a degree-granting pro- gram in public affairs, and designed and taught jurisprudence courses in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Illinois in Chicago. He has written and edited dozens of books and 119

close to 100 articles on topics of public concern, and has published four biographies. Hyman has been editor of The Aspen Institute Quarterly since its inception in 1989. His new book, The Presi- dency and Its Discretionary Powers, will be published by the Uni- versity of Chicago Press in late 1995.

As president of the American Academy for Liberal Education, Jef- frey D. Wallin has an interest in Mortimer Adler’s view not only of what is taught about democracy, but of the purpose of teaching about it. Harumphing along with Adler at a current trend to subor- dinate democracy as a method of government in our multicultural world, Wallin goes on to examine Adler’s emphasis on the practi- cality of philosophy and his justification for reading great books with two goals in mind: “learning to think and the pursuit of truth.” Wallin was director of the Office of the Bicentennial for the U.S. Constitution for the National Endowment for the Humanities, and is the author of By Ships Alone: Churchill and the Dardanelles.

While Mortimer Adler’s primary philosophical concern has been ethics, he takes off from the same starting point when it comes to politics: common sense. In “Mortimer Adler: The Political Writ- ings,” John Van Doren reviews Adler’s The Common Sense of Politics and Haves Without Have-Nots to aid the reader in under- standing Adler’s belief that politics is simply a means toward achieving the good life. He explains the importance Adler places on defining one’s terms, then analyzes the role of politics in creat- ing the good society. Van Doren is executive editor of The Great Ideas Today, published by Encyclopaedia Britannica, and is presi- dent of the Center. He has worked intimately with Adler in promoting the cause of classical education for children, starting at an early age in secondary schools.

The philosophical extremes of angelism and animalism are exam- ined by Deal W. Hudson in “Adler from an Angel’s Eye.” Both are philosophical errors, according to “commonsense realist” Adler: The first denies objective truth and the second leans too heavily toward the physical. And, explains Hudson, both lines of thinking can have serious consequences for human action. The au- thor is associate professor of history at Fordham University and is editor of Crisis, a Journal of Lay Catholic Opinion. He is the edi- tor of books on Jacques Maritain, Sigrid Undset and modern Thomism.

Russell Hittinger, who has written more than 30 articles on the philosophy of law, undertakes a definition of what Mortimer Adler calls “wrong desires” in his article “Adlerian Desire and the Meas- 120

ure of Morality.” What is the difference, he asks, between right and wrong desires? What bearing do private excesses have on public society? At what point do wrong desires affect the common good? Hittinger is author of A Critique of the New Natural Law Theory and is associate professor of philosophy at The Catholic University of America.

In his critique in this issue of Adler’s book How to Think About God, Lord Anthony Quinton begins by summarizing the philoso- phical history of proving God’s existence. He then tackles Adler’s best argument: that contingent beings—those which can possibly not exist, such as man and other creatures of the universe—must have a cause that exists at every moment they do, but which is not itself contingent, i.e., God. Quinton dissects and challenges Adler’s suppositions as “Mortimer Adler Meets God” develops. Quinton was president of Trinity College in Oxford from 1978-1987, chaired the British Library from 1985-1990, and has been a mem- ber of the board of editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica since 1985. His books include The Nature of Things, Utilitarian Ethics, and The Politics of Imperfection.

Remember how your grade-school English teacher suggested that an outline was a good way to organize your thoughts? Try compos- ing one for a distinguished scholarly encyclopedia teeming with information. Or if you want a further challenge, why not outline 100 or so great ideas from the beginning of mankind’s existence to the present? Mortimer Adler’s two consummate outlines, the Propaedia, knowledge outline of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the Syntopicon, analytical index to the Great Books of the Western World, are discussed by Otto Bird in the final essay in this issue. Bird was assistant editor of the Syntopicon when it originated, was executive editor of The Great Ideas Today from 1964-1970, and served on the faculty of the University of Notre Dame from 1959-1976. His most recent book is his autobiography, completed in 1991, Seeking a Center: My Life as a Great Bookie.

PUBLISHER & EDITOR MAX WEISMANN EDITORIAL ASSISTANT MARIE E. COTTER

CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF THE GREAT IDEAS

Founded in 1990 by Mortimer J. Adler and Max Weismann

A NOT-FOR-PROFIT 501 (C)(3) EDUCATIONAL ORGANIZATION DONATIONS ARE TAX DEDUCTIBLE AS THE LAW ALLOWS