Although Philip’s name appears in the book’s title, and although he is mentioned often in the work, he is not after all very important in it. This is not a biography of Philip II of Spain (who was an interesting man and deserves a good biography). Nor is it a conventional history of Spain at that time or of any other country or region. In fact, as Braudel says in one of the reflective chapters appearing at the end of the work, it is not a conventional history in any sense. Instead, as he notes, it is written backward, and the “history” part is short and comes at the end, after nine hundred pages of preparation, as we may think of it, or background of the narrative. These nine hundred wonderful pages—for they certainly are wonderful—could, Braudel says, have come at the end of Volume II, in which case they would have formed a sort of super-appendix to the conventional history. But then we might be tempted not to read them.
Many Americans, including myself, have a soft spot in their hearts for the Mediterranean. We have recurrent images of it: blue sky and blue sea, olive trees and vineyards on terraced hillsides, white columns gleaming in the sun, a profound and eternal silence. None of these images is completely wrong, but the reality is in many respects very different—now as well as during the last half of the sixteenth century. Then, the Mediterranean was a poor but busy world, full of ideas and projects, ambitious to change and to rule. Rent by religious and every other kind of schism, it nevertheless was unified by its enormous resources of energy—not the kind of energy we talk about today, sucked out of the ground and not of our making, but the kind that works in minds and breasts.
Twice since history began, this Mediterranean world has controlled and dominated the known world: under the Romans, two millennia ago, and again from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries—our own time. What kind of place was it, what kind of people were they who did so much with so little? Braudel tells us. No one has ever understood that world better, or made it so intelligible.
In the history of history, Braudel’s Mediterranean is one of the most important and influential books. What was unconventional when the book was first published, in 1949, has now, in a few decades, become commonplace: the depiction of deep structures, as Braudel calls them; the emphasis on everyday life and on the longue durée, the conception of “civilization” as something that persists in a large region among ordinary folk and not as the conscious creation of a distinct and privileged class. Not, “this painter influenced that, and this poet read that,” but, “how did people really live?”—these are the basic considerations of Braudel and of an entire school of contemporary historians.
These considerations, which are not after all completely new, can be dull and uninteresting when written about, or reported by second-rate historians. But in the hands of a master—and Braudel is the master historian of our age—they possess a fascination unequaled by anything else. What people ate, how they dressed, what their homes were like, how they traveled, worked, traded, invested their money, what kind of family life they had and how they thought about love and sex, what sort of cities they built and what kinds of institutions their cities made possible that small towns did not—all these are the stuff of Braudel’s Mediterranean. Reading him, you reflect on your own time and realize how little you know about it—but how much you can learn if you think about it in Braudel’s way. You put down the volumes and muse about that, about the past and the future, about what history can tell you and what it cannot. But you cannot leave the pages unturned for long. Few books ever written have an equal capacity to draw you on, from story to story, from fact to fact.
Reading The Mediterranean is not the work (or the delight) of an evening; many readers will want to devote months to these two long volumes. I think you will not regret that, for what you will learn from Braudel is so new it is as if your mind has begun to think again about all the old, ordinary things that have always been there, have always been a basic part of it. In short, this is a book that may change you deeply.
After publishing a revised edition of The Mediterranean in 1959 (that is the version to read), Braudel went on to write a second great work of history, The Structures of Everyday Life. This, too, is eminently readable, and fascinating; but I recommend that you read The Mediterranean first.
MORTIMER J. ADLER
1902–1998
Synopticon of Great Books of the
Western World
Mortimer J. Adler was born in New York City in 1902, the son of serious, intellectual parents who believed in the sacredness of education. Despite this belief, or because of it, Adler did badly in school. He was expelled from high school for having defied the administration over a matter not of justice but of power (Adler called it prin-ciple), and he failed to graduate from Columbia College for refusing to swim the length of the college pool (he said he was unable to do it). He quickly caught up with others’ expectations of him, however, gaining a doctorate from Columbia when he was twenty-five and joining Robert M. Hutchins at the University of Chicago before he was thirty. There, for fifteen eventful years, he and President Hutchins attempted to revolutionize American higher education.
These valiant efforts gained them some friends as well as many enemies. One of the friends was William Benton, later to be both a U.S. senator and the publisher of Encyclopaedia Britannica. For Benton, an inveterate reader, Adler and Hutchins edited the fifty-four-volume Great Books of the Western World, a collection of classics of philosophy, history, science, fiction, and drama that was published, after years of work, in 1952.
A set of books is merely a set of physical objects unless something ties it together, something more than just splendid bindings. In his first published book, Dialectic (1927), Adler had proposed an ideal intellectual project, a “Summa Dialectica,” as he called it, which would organize and place in their right relation to one another all the great ideas of Western man. In 1927, he had seen this as only a dream and one that was not ever likely of realization. Now, with Benton and Britannica behind him, he conceived a first step that could actually happen.
The great books that he and Hutchins were gathering for their collection had much in common, both men agreed; among them, a shared set of notions about what the world is and how it works, and a universe of discourse in which later authors could, as it were, speak and respond to their predecessors. (Virgil could, and did, “talk” to Homer, although Homer had not been able, of course, to address Virgil.) Given this commonalty, would it not be possible, asked Adler, to read all these books and identify their individual discussions of shared notions or ideas? The result would be a kind of index of thought, a map of the great ideas that Western men and women have been thinking and arguing about for three millennia.