# Western canon The **Western canon** is the body of literature, philosophy and art held to be foundational to [[Western Civilization]] — Homer to Joyce by way of [[Plato]], [[Aristotle]], Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, [[John Locke]] and Goethe — and, since the 1980s, the name of a fight over what universities should require students to read. The vault keeps it separate from the Western Civilization page because the *canon* is an institutional artifact with a history of its own: a reading list, assembled at particular moments for particular purposes, that the right now treats as the inheritance itself. ## Where the list came from The canon as curriculum is American and twentieth-century. Columbia's Contemporary Civilization course (1919) and its Literature Humanities sequence were built to give a mass, immigrant-fed student body a common culture; Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler turned the idea into the "Great Books" program at Chicago in the 1930s and into Britannica's *Great Books of the Western World* (1952), a 54-volume set sold door to door. The list was always contested — Adler's exclusion of women and non-Europeans was a choice, not a discovery — but it was a *liberal* project in the older sense: the claim that any citizen could be educated into a shared inheritance. ## The canon wars The fight became political in 1987–88. Allan Bloom's *[[The Closing of the American Mind]]* (1987) argued that relativism had hollowed the university; the next year Stanford replaced its required "Western Culture" course with "Cultures, Ideas and Values," and the Jesse Jackson-led chant — "Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture's got to go" — became the right's proof that the left meant to abolish the inheritance rather than widen it. Harold Bloom's *The Western Canon* (1994) defended aesthetic value against what he called the "School of Resentment" (feminist, Marxist, New Historicist and post-structural criticism), while disowning the publisher's appendix list that made the book a shopping guide. Both Blooms were secular liberals; their argument was absorbed by a movement that was neither. ## What the right does with it now Three uses, which the vault keeps distinct. **Classical education** — [[Hillsdale College]]'s curriculum and the classical-charter movement — treats the canon as a pedagogy, and is the most defensible. **[[Christian Nationalism]]** treats it as proof of a "Judeo-Christian" foundation, which requires reading past the pagans and the Enlightenment that make up most of it. And the **[[Cultural Marxism]]** narrative treats every revision of the list as a Gramscian assault — the [[Long March Through the Institutions]] with a syllabus. The irony the page exists to record is that the canon's defenders on the right rarely read it: Locke and Mill are on the list, and so are the arguments against everything the movement wants. ## See Also - [[Western Civilization]] · [[Ancient Greece]] · [[Ancient Rome]] · [[Plato]] · [[Aristotle]] · [[John Locke]] - [[The Closing of the American Mind]] · [[Hillsdale College]] · [[Christian Nationalism]] · [[Cultural Marxism]] · [[Long March Through the Institutions]]