Our Tradition

People have always taught themselves. What they rarely did was teach themselves alone.

For six centuries, in many countries, serious readers have found the same answer: meet regularly, read with purpose and talk with people who will take your ideas seriously. Your Reading Journey draws on four of those traditions. Each gave us something the others lacked.

The Republic of Letters

A community without borders

In July 1417 the Venetian scholar Francesco Barbaro wrote to his friend Poggio Bracciolini, who had been searching German monasteries for lost classical texts, to praise what he had done for the respublica litteraria, the “republic of letters.” It is the first known use of the phrase.

The Republic of Letters had no capital, no charter and no members’ list. It was a network of scholars across Europe who wrote to one another, often in Latin, sent each other books and news of discoveries, and argued by post. By the time Pierre Bayle named his journal Nouvelles de la République des Lettres in 1684, the idea was common currency. Voltaire alone left more than 15,000 letters to some 1,400 correspondents.

Its members often never met. What bound them was a shared commitment to learning and the habit of writing to people who would answer.

What we take from it: a community of readers that crosses borders, and the belief that writing to one another is part of learning.

The Salons

Conversation as an art

Around 1610, in a room hung with blue brocade near the Louvre, the Marquise de Rambouillet began receiving guests: aristocrats and writers, talking as equals. Her chambre bleue became the model for the Paris salon.

A century later the salons were among the engines of the Enlightenment. Marie-Thérèse Geoffrin, herself a commoner, gave two dinners a week, on Mondays for artists and on Wednesdays for writers and philosophers, and helped pay for Diderot’s Encyclopédie. The form spread. In London in the 1750s, Elizabeth Montagu and Elizabeth Vesey began evenings of serious conversation that became known as the Bluestockings, after one guest who came in plain blue worsted stockings instead of formal dress. Unlike the Paris salons, they had no ties to the court.

The salons were led, almost always, by women. They gave women a central place in intellectual life at a time when universities and academies were closed to them, and they made conversation something to be practised and done well.

What we take from it: a host who brings people together, a mix of people from different walks of life, and the conviction that good conversation is a skill worth cultivating.

The Junto

Improvement by rule

In the autumn of 1727, Benjamin Franklin, then a 21-year-old printer in Philadelphia, gathered about ten friends into what he called “a club of mutual improvement.” They named it the Junto, from the Spanish junta, meaning a meeting. The members were not scholars: a copier of legal documents, a self-taught mathematician, a surveyor, a shoemaker, a joiner, a merchant’s clerk. They met on Friday evenings for nearly forty years.

Where the salon was graceful, the Junto was methodical. Franklin drew up rules:

• Each member, in turn, brought questions on morals, politics or natural philosophy. Questions were read a week in advance, so members came having read and thought about them.
• Every three months, each member wrote an essay and read it to the group.
• Discussion was to be conducted “in the sincere spirit of inquiry after truth, without fondness for dispute, or desire of victory.”

Every meeting opened with a set of standing queries, read aloud. The first asked whether anyone had met with anything “in the author you last read” worth sharing with the group. A new member answered four questions: did he respect the current members, did he love mankind “of what profession or religion soever,” would he harm anyone “for mere speculative opinions,” and did he love truth for truth’s sake?

Franklin called the Junto “the best school of philosophy, morality, and politics that then existed in the province.” It pooled its books, which led to the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1731, one of the first subscription libraries in America. And when more people wanted to join, Franklin argued against making the club larger. Instead, each member was invited to start a new club with the same rules.

What we take from it: self-improvement as the point, standing questions to prepare each meeting, the quarterly essay, principles every member agrees to, and growth by new groups rather than bigger ones.

The Study Circle

A course of reading

In 1878 John Heyl Vincent founded the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle in upstate New York: a four-year course of reading that adults followed at home, often meeting in local circles to discuss it. More than 8,000 people enrolled in the first year, and by 1900 more than 10,000 circles had formed across America. Graduates received a diploma.

In 1902 Oscar Olsson, a Swedish temperance campaigner and politician, started the first Swedish study circle, in the southern province of Skåne, so that working people could study together without the cost of a university. Each circle started from where its members were and was guided by what they needed. The idea took root: in 2024 Swedish study circles still counted more than 300,000 participants.

After the Second World War, Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler founded the Great Books Foundation (1947). By the end of 1949 an estimated 50,000 people were meeting in thousands of discussion groups, in libraries, homes and churches, to read the classics together.

What we take from it: a curriculum. A study circle is not a book club that drifts from one popular title to the next. It follows a course of reading, chosen and shaped by its members, over years.

The Same Idea Elsewhere

These four are not the only examples. In 1179 the philosopher Zhu Xi revived the White Deer Grotto Academy in southern China, and private academies like it became the home of a great revival of Confucian learning. Nineteenth-century Britain had its mutual improvement societies, where working men and women met to read, debate and teach one another. America had the Lyceum movement from 1826. Each found the same thing: people keep learning when they learn in company.

Still Going

These are not museum pieces.

• The Library Company of Philadelphia, which grew out of the Junto’s pooled books, has been open since 1731. Nearly three hundred years later it is a research library in the center of Philadelphia.
• Every summer since 1882, graduates of the Chautauqua reading course have gathered for Recognition Day. Each class chooses a name and unveils its own banner. Alumni parade, and the new graduates walk through a golden gate into the Hall of Philosophy.
• In Sweden, study circles still count more than 300,000 participants a year.
• The Great Books Foundation still supports discussion groups, more than seventy-five years after it began.

None of them was designed to last for centuries. They lasted because, year after year, people kept meeting.

A Long Line

1179

Zhu Xi revives the White Deer Grotto Academy in China

1417

Francesco Barbaro writes of the “republic of letters”

c. 1610

The Marquise de Rambouillet opens her chambre bleue in Paris

1684

Pierre Bayle launches Nouvelles de la République des Lettres

1727

Benjamin Franklin founds the Junto in Philadelphia

1731

The Junto’s books become the Library Company of Philadelphia

1750s

The Bluestockings begin meeting in London

1826

The Lyceum movement begins in America

1878

The Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle is founded

1882

Chautauqua’s first Recognition Day

1902

Oscar Olsson starts the first Swedish study circle

1947

The Great Books Foundation is founded

2026

The Commons opens and its first study circle forms

The next entry is yours.

Why Now?

It has never been easier to learn, or harder to keep learning.

The old model is finished. For most of the last century, education was a phase of life: you learned when you were young, then you worked. That model does not survive a knowledge economy. Careers now depend on knowledge and a broad range of skills, and both change faster than any degree can keep up with. What you learned in school or college will not carry you through the rest of your life. People live longer, too, with decades of active mind ahead of them after their careers peak. Learning has to continue, and it only continues when it is challenged.

AI raises the stakes. Knowledge that once sustained a career is now being done by machines. But when information becomes cheap, judgment becomes precious: the ability to understand, to weigh evidence, to spot a weak argument and to ask a good question. You can only check what a machine tells you if you know enough to doubt it. The greater risk is not being replaced but handing over our thinking until we lose the habit of doing it ourselves. Reading seriously and arguing with real people is how we keep that habit.

Access was never the problem. Lectures are free, books are cheap and the world’s libraries are a search away. Yet most people who set out to learn alone stop. In one large study of online courses from MIT and Harvard, only about 3 percent of participants finished the course they started. What is missing is not material but direction, discipline and company. This site began as one person’s attempt to educate himself alone. After six years it had grown difficult. Learning alone lacks the motivation, the excitement and the new ideas that only other readers bring.

More is at stake than careers.

• Friendship. In 2023 the US Surgeon General called loneliness an epidemic, reporting that about half of American adults experience it. Many of the clubs, societies and gathering places where adults once made friends have faded. A study circle is a friendship with a reason to meet.
• Attention. The share of Americans who read for pleasure on a given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. Reading a whole book, and talking about it seriously, has become a quietly countercultural act.
• Citizenship. Self-government has always depended on citizens who educate themselves. In a polarised age, disagreeing in good faith with people you respect is a civic skill, and it has to be practised.
• Breadth. Careers reward narrow specialisation. A broad, self-chosen course of reading is how you become someone who can connect one field to another.
• A life well used. Some things are worth knowing for their own sake. Franklin asked every new member whether he loved truth for truth’s sake. It is still the right question.

So we return to the oldest answer. Small groups, a regular rhythm, a course of reading and real people who know you, notice what you are reading and disagree with you to your face. This is the one thing a machine cannot do for you.

How It Works Here

The Commons is where our readers meet. Within it, members read in study circles: groups of a dozen people or fewer, so everyone knows everyone.

• A curriculum to start from. Every member begins with the same map: more than 250 subjects across the liberal arts and sciences, and more than 650 books that lead into them. Each member’s copy is theirs to shape, and each circle can adapt the curriculum to its own interests.
• A regular rhythm. Every circle meets on a schedule it chooses, in person, by video or in writing, because rhythm is what keeps reading going.
• Standing questions. Before each meeting, members are asked: Where are you in your curriculum, and what have you found worth sharing? What question are you bringing? Is there a book you would propose for the circle? How can the circle help you?
• The quarterly essay. Every member writes one piece a quarter and shares it with their circle.
• Four principles. Joining means agreeing to:
  1. Respect the people; argue with the ideas.
  2. Welcome everyone, whatever their background, work or beliefs.
  3. Never penalize anyone for their opinions.
  4. Seek the truth, not victory.
• Growth by new circles, not bigger ones. When a circle is full, a member can found another.

What We Changed

Every one of these traditions had its limits, and we have tried not to inherit them.

• Open to anyone invited. The Republic of Letters wrote in Latin and the Junto was a club of men. The salons depended on a hostess’s wealth and favor. Ours is open to anyone a member invites, whatever their background.
• Nothing is secret. The Junto kept its existence quiet, and its offshoot clubs were not told they were connected to it. Every circle here knows what it belongs to.
• No fines. Franklin fined members for flat contradiction. We hope for courtesy as earnestly as he did, but leave out the penalties.
• No one at the center. A salon belonged to its host, and the Junto to its founder. A circle belongs to its members.

Join the Tradition

Every member starts from the same map of human knowledge, chooses where to begin and finds others going the same way. Pick a subject, read with a circle, write about what you find and keep going.

Study circles are currently by invitation. Your Reading Journey is made by Integer School, which makes tools for learning by doing.