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.
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