Initiating students into classics has long been considered central to the idea of a liberal education. These works are deemed “classics” because a tradition (or culture) confers upon them the status of greatness. Classics set standards and are taken to represent the most significant and refined reflections of that tradition. To recognize a work as a classic is also to acknowledge that it has taken part in our intellectual and cultural formation and continues to do so. In this sense, classics are part of our cultural inheritance and belong to what may be called “educated discourse.” They participate in the reflective self-understanding of a culture and influence how people engage with the world.
In the West, an identifiable Western tradition has often been invoked, and familiarity with its classics is seen as necessary for participating in an ongoing conversation that stretches across centuries. However, from the 1980s onward, this idea has been forcefully challenged. Critics have argued that these works have been canonized not solely for their intellectual or aesthetic merit, nor for any universality or timelessness, but because they reflected the interests of dominant groups—particularly white, male, European elites (as seen in debates on the canon). Since then, the question “why study the classics?” has been vigorously contested, with multiculturalist and feminist critiques exposing how such texts have sometimes served to legitimize colonial power or patriarchy, while marginalizing alternative voices.
Today, this debate has been partially resolved through an expansion rather than a rejection of the canon. Works emerging from marginalized groups — across cultures, races, and genders — have increasingly been incorporated into the canon. While the boundaries of the canon have widened to include previously neglected texts, including oral traditions, the idea of studying classics itself has not been abandoned. Arguments that classics have displaced the popular and the folk have been countered by the observation that classics become classics precisely because they already possess a life within a culture: they emerge from, and continue to be sustained by, popular and folk traditions before being canonized.
The continuing significance of classics, however, lies not merely in their canonical status, but in the fact that they shape the very vocabularies, conceptual distinctions, and forms of experience through which a culture understands itself. Engaging with classics therefore enables each generation to enter into inherited modes of thought and participate in an ongoing process of intellectual reflection and conversation. In this sense, classics, though belonging to the past, remain contemporary and continue to shape how we understand the world we inhabit.
Yet the contemporary defence of classics does not rest solely on their continuing relevance to the present. In the wake of canon debates, alternative justifications have emerged. For instance, Sheldon Pollock rejects the often-held, traditional view that classics are valuable because they embody timeless truths or universal human concerns. Instead, he argues that the significance of a classic lies precisely in its resistance to such universality. A work is “classical” not because it mirrors our present or confirms a shared human essence, but because it reveals the distinctiveness of a particular historical moment. Rather than allowing us to recognize ourselves in the past, classics confront us with forms of human thought and experience that may be radically different from our own. In doing so, they expand our understanding of what it means to be human by opening up possibilities that are otherwise inaccessible to us.
Classics give us the concepts, predicates and schemes of distinction through which we name, organize and reflect on our experience, while also opening us to forms of life that are unfamiliar or no longer available to us. Together, these make a strong case for their continued study.
Bibliography
Pollock, Sheldon. “Crisis in the Classics.” Social Research: An International Quarterly 78, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 21–48.