What Are the Modern Classics? The Baruch Poll of Great Philosophy in the Twentieth Century

The millennial frenzy that generated several highly publicized “Best of the Century” lists early in 1999 planted in my mind the idea of conducting a poll asking my fellow philosophers to name the best works of philosophy in the twentieth century. I approached the project with some trepidation. The polls that had bounced around in the media in early 1999 had something crazed about them. “Hiroshima Voted Top News Event Of The Twentieth Century,” for example: what could one possibly do with such information? Furthermore, even polls that might have some use—the book and movie and musical recording lists that might guide one’s choice of casual entertainment—had in some cases gotten silly results with silly methods. Thus, we have a “top 100 American movies” list without a single film by Buster Keaton, a “top 100 novels” list produced by Random House in which Random House books were listed first when the experts tied, and so forth. All “best of” polls are afflicted with nearly insuperable problems of method and commensurability. The possibility of producing something silly in designing a philosophy poll loomed large. Perhaps asking philosophers to name their favorite books would be like asking mathematicians to name their favorite integers. Nevertheless, there is nothing prima facie absurd in asking philosophers to discriminate between important books and unimportant books. Every teacher does this in designing a syllabus for a course. And even if there is no sense in claiming that a poll of great books tells us what the great books are, at least it will tell us what they are believed to be. This is something I thought it would be fun to know. The goal decided, the question was how to do it. The polls so far had appealed to panels of experts; I was determined not to go that route. There is of course the regress problem: you need an expert to pick the experts. But there is the more THE PHILOSOPHICAL FORUM Volume XXX, No. 4, December 1999