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Summary: Intellectural History of the West - A Brilliant Summary
Review: Jacques Barzun is a peerless scholar on the history of Western civilization. In the past I've read some of his books of essays and shorter works, but from Dawn to Decadence is a massive volume that summarizes cultural life in the West over the last half-millenium. Barzun is a witty, subtle writer of great intelligence who is at the same time very readable. He makes sound but often idiosyncratic judgments that illuminate the great characters of history. Because of his encyclopedic knowledge, Barzun has been compared to Gibbon, who wrote the magesterial Fall of the Roman Empire in the 1770s. This book will also be a classic that will be reprinted time and time again. I can only claim to have read sections of this impressive work, as I research various topics, but each page is full of intelligent insights.
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Summary: Barzun's Magnum Opus compares to Gibbon's treatise on Rome
Review: This was my introduction to this masterful thinker. I read a wide variety of non-fiction, including so-called "Intellectual" or "Social" History. Few works are comparable to Prof. Barzun's review of the ascent and decline of western culture. Gibbon's "Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire" comes first to mind. It was obviously influential in Barzun's personal history. Also, Daniel Boorstein's trilogy: "The Discoverers", "The Creators", and "The Seekers", individually or in toto, come to mind. In each of these Boorstein works, as with Barzun's "Dawn to Decadence", the fruits of one age are traced along often unlikely roots to a previous age. Sometimes, too, the vines of a given age bear disparate fruits.
The Beauty of this tome is not solely in the mastery of the subject matter. It is also not just the materful use of the language. Both of these are wonderful facets to this gem. What shines brightest is the flow of ideas and their impact on disparate areas of the culture; to see the pebble strike the pond and then to follow the ripples along their course. For example, the demonstration that our modern concepts of political democracy and personal freedoms can be traced directly to the Protestant Reformation. This alone was such an epiphany for me. I had never heard anyone trace this path in other works and, to my knowledge, no one else has freely done so since. This alone convinced me of Prof. Barzun's brilliance. I have since gathered and read almost everything that he has published. After all of these I am even more convinced of his unique genius.
I have recommended "From Dawn to Decadence" to few people whom I know or meet. Not because of anything lacking in the book. It is that this book will appeal to certain indivuals but will not be appreciated by the public at large. It is not for the casual reader; it is not an "easy read". It is "project reading". One must approach it with an open mind and, preferably, with the ability to schedule time to read. At 800 pages, none of which is mindless fluff, it takes time for even the most voracious reader.
If you favor "historical fiction" and rarely venture into the non-fiction aisles, then this book is not for you. If you love to learn and love to read, especially if you love to read for learning, then you should read this book. Consider it a "must read." It may change your world-view. I know that it changed mine.
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Summary: I wonder what will come next
Review: After a lifetime of study, travel, research and reading, Jacques Barzun sums up a history of the last 500 years of Western culture. It is, of course, a fascinating trip, from the awakening of Europe in the Renaissance to our wonderful and yet terrible times, with Internet, amazing advances in health and comfort sharing the world with loonies driving planes into buildings and stupid murderers blowing up schools filled with kids and teachers.
Along the way, Barzun discovers the main themes of Western culture during these past 500 years: emancipation, individualism, progress, material comfort, primitivism, abstraction, analysis and the unconditioned life. Imbedded is also the continual struggle, within the human soul, of the two opposing forces of security and freedom.
This book is cultural philosophy as it should be written: rigorous but at the same time accesible to the reader, with comprehensive indexes and notes at the end of the book, but without cumbersome and intruding footnotes or pedantry. It is a fascinating trip through the development of a way of being in the world. It has wonderful descriptions of what life was like at every stage of history, as the book concentrates not so much on what was happening in politics, war or the economy, but indirectly so, as it focuses on the common life of people and the trends in the arts and sciences.
Along the way, Barzun tells us briefly the stories of many persons, whether or not they are famous nowadays, who made significant contributions, for good and bad, to the current state of the world. He also tells us what books could give the reader a deeper understanding of the trend, situation or character he is analyzing at every moment, which is very useful. Barzun writes alwalys with a tongue in his cheek, with a subtle and acute sense of humor.
Finally, when he analyzes the present, Barzun wraps up his conclusion that the present culture is in its final moments. But beware, the book is not the disappointed lament of an old man in his final days. It is simply a devastating statement about how several forces, which blossomed in the XX Century but which come from trends set before, are destroying the core of Western culture. But he understands that the end of this culture will not necessarily mean the end of the world. Barzun trusts that the West will be able to reinvent itself in a new shape, pass through a period of transition and finally rediscover the many good traits developed in the West in these past 500 years. Not pessimistic nor openly optimistic, this great work of philosophy will surely stimulate in the reader an impulse to look deeper into the current trends of the world and how we got here. It is entertaining and utterly readable in spite of being that long, and the cast of characters is fabulous. Much recommended.
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Summary: A Franco-centric View of Western Civilization
Review: Jacque Barzun's "From Dawn to Decadence" is a rich and highlight-detailed accounting of the progress of western civilization from 1500 to the late 20th century. However, the work is characterized by a few personal quirks on the part of the author that might be of interest to anyone who would consider this work to be a "classic" of historical writing and free of such individualistic or stylistic characteristics.Being French, the author shares the arrogance of many Francophone intellectuals who ascribe too much intellectual and cultural influence to their Gallic heritage. From Barzun's Franco-centric perspective, there were few ideas worthy of the name that originated anywhere else in the civilized world, much less globally. Such a bias gives little credit to the intellectual history of the Middle East and the Orient, which pre-date the various French Republics by hundreds or even thousands of years. And American and British contributions to the world of ideas are mostly derivative, in Barzun's view. Like other well-known foreign-born writers who make English their lingua franca, Barzun tends to assume his command of English-its grammar, syntax, and vocabulary-are at least the equal of any native speaker of English, especially those who choose to call themselves intellectuals. Because of this, many of his sentences are at best convoluted and over-long, and at worst are unintelligible, lacking normal subject-verb agreement or perhaps reflecting a reflexive or subconscious attempt to "fit" this mongrelized English syntax and its rules into a more familiar and linguistically-pure French language construction. Nabokov's "Lolita" reflected a similar unjustified exhibitionism with regard to the use of a second language that the writer assumed he knew better than he did. Finally, Barzun's eccentric insistence on using the term "techne" as a replacement for the word "technology," that is well known and understood in common English usage, reflects an ignorance of writing for a "lay" public. Perhaps such free-form constructivist foibles are tolerated in academic journals and high-specialized monographs in which an academic is seeking to establish himself in a field, but in a work intended for the generalist, such novel creations serve only to confuse rather than enlighten. All of this said, Barzun's "Dawn to Decadence" is still a magnificent work and one that would serve a variety of factual and source reference purposes, as long as one keeps in mind the apparent Franco-centric biases of its author about such sources and his interpretations of them.
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