The Battle of the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today

These are troubling days for the humanities. In response, a recent proliferation of works defending the humanities has emerged. But, taken together, what are these works really saying, and how persuasive do they prove? The Battle of the Classics demonstrates the crucial downsides of contemporary apologetics for the humanities and presents in its place a historically informed case for a different approach to rescuing the humanistic disciplines in higher education. It reopens the passionate debates about the classics that took place in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America as a springboard for crafting a novel foundation for the humanistic tradition. Eric Adler demonstrates that current defenses of the humanities rely on the humanistic disciplines as inculcators of certain poorly defined skills such as "critical thinking." It criticizes this conventional approach, contending that humanists cannot hope to save their disciplines without arguing in favor of particular humanities content. As the uninspired defenses of the classical humanities in the late nineteenth century prove, instrumental apologetics are bound to fail. All the same, the book shows that proponents of the Great Books favor a curriculum that is too intellectually narrow for the twenty-first century. The Battle of the Classics thus lays out a substance-based approach to undergraduate education that will revive the humanities, even as it steers clear of overreliance on the Western canon. The book envisions a global humanities based on the examination of masterworks from manifold cultures as the heart of an intellectually and morally sound education.

About the Author :
Eric Adler is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Maryland and the author of Classics, the Culture Wars, and Beyond and Valorizing the Barbarians: Enemy Speeches in Roman Historiography.

Review :
"I can't imagine a more vivid or important book for our times in higher education. Eric Adler is a clear-eyed, unflappable, humane scholar and culture critic who looks to the past, especially the nineteenth century in American education, to find arguments that may help us see our way forward through the swamp that seeps around us.�He advocates for intellectual rigor, for keeping a steady eye on quality, for addressing questions of central concern to everyone who lives and breathes. He sees, quite rightly, that a diverse curriculum will force students (often against their inclinations) to look beyond themselves at the things that all of us share. Education represents a drawing out, as the root word indicates. It's a move toward the universal, finding common ground in a kind of plurality that never loses sight of quality. I love this book, which speaks to our current confusion, and recommend it strongly." -- Jay Parini, author of Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America "Professor Adler's case for the humanities is lively, incisive, historically informed, and, above all, timely. There has never been a greater need for such a defense. A thorough researcher and a clear writer who understands the issues and the stakes and conveys them logically yet with an appropriate affection for the hard-won literary heritage bequeathed us, Professor Adler is the ideal person to undertake it." -- Carl J. Richard, author of Greeks and Romans Bearing Gifts: How the Ancients Inspired the Founding Fathers