Rating: 
Summary: wide ranging and fun to read
Review: The urge to write - and more importantly, to sell - books about the 20th century was well in evidence before the century came to a close. And it has clearly shown no signs of abating even now. 'Conventional' histories have been outnumbered and outshone by those claiming to be 'unconventional' (which would, of course, make these very much the convention). But few have been as wide-ranging as Peter Watson's Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century.
At first sight, Modern Mind looks like one of those heavyweight volumes that sit on the reference shelf, waiting for graduate students to photocopy the odd page. But Watson used to be a journalist before he became an academic and it shows: the book is an extremely readable, even thrilling, romp through almost every major Western idea of the 20th century.
The book opens in the year 1900 with the publication of Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, Arthur Evans discovery of the Minoan civilisation in Crete, Hugo De Vries' introduction of modern genetics and Max Planck's discovery of the quantum. It follows these threads (and others) through the century in almost 900 pages, managing to mention 2,000 different people who contributed to the great intellectual discoveries of the century. As promised, it is not a conventional history of kings, politicians and generals, all of whom make only the most cursory appearance. Instead, Watson focuses on scientists, philosophers, writers, musicians and artists.
All the usual suspects are here: from Freud and Jung to Foucault and Derrida. Once you have waded through the book - a long but surprisingly delightful exercise - you will be able to hold your own on almost any aspect of modern culture. Naturally, this breadth of vision entails a rather drastic loss of depth but one cannot expect more detail when such a vast subject is being tackled.
Granted the author's choices cannot possibly satisfy every taste in any such undertaking, yet in the area of modern music the omissions are so glaring that one is moved to complain. The author devotes dozens of pages to Stravinsky and Schoenberg but his 'modern mind' does not include Jazz, Blues, the Beatles, hard rock or heavy metal. After this display of determined 'squareness' Watson compounds his sins by failing altogether to mention Indian music or, for that matter, any other music in the world. Similarly, while all the major scientific breakthroughs get a mention accompanied by brief but generally accurate explanations, the field of mathematics is somewhat neglected. Sir Karl Popper gets well-justified airplay in the philosophy of science but Paul Feyerabend is mentioned without any reference to his ideas. Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society gets a reasonable hearing but his equally devastating Medical Nemesis is completely overlooked.
Watson is well aware of the fact that the 'modern mind' is almost entirely western. Though the book manages to devote a few pages to Lu Xun, Yan Fu and Fu Sinian, all members of the early 20th-century Chinese enlightenment, they are there mainly to show how western ideas were introduced into China. The only other 'non-western' intellectuals who make an appearance are writers like Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul. Mahatma Gandhi is given only one throwaway line and Mohammed Iqbal, with his mishmash of Spengler, Nietzsche and Islam, is not even mentioned. Neither are any of the 'theorists' of militant Islamic revival.
In his defence, Watson concludes that he is only reflecting the facts as he found them: the modern world is an overwhelmingly western creation. No amount of lists of Arab contributions or African origins can obscure this fact. But the author fails to give a cogent reason for the dominance of western civilisation, even though he does mention Naipaul and Landes (the author of The Wealth and Poverty of Nations) as people who may have an inkling of why this is so.
This may well raise hackles in some quarters but it should not detract from the value of the book. Whatever our own 'meta-narrative', we cannot ignore the tremendously fertile and overwhelming contributions of 20th-century western civilisation. And Modern Mind is an excellent introduction to those contributions. Also, one may add that if this book seems Eurocentric, it is still an improvement over several recent titles that take the view that even western civilisation is too broad a term and the credit (or blame?) for the modern world should go to much smaller groups. A flavour of this can be had by simply perusing the following titles: How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It by Arthur Herman. How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe and The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels by Thomas Cahill.
Rating:
Summary: 4 stars for effort, 2for results - interesting BUT v sloppy
Review: This author has worked hard and diligently to produce this book, which is unique. Its breadth is breathtaking, and makes interesting reading. The catch is that the breadth he attempts is probably beyond one man's capability. The author simply is intelectually incompetent in too many areas - as is anyone given the attempted scope. For example he names the people he asserts to be the six greatest living philosophers in 1900, including Croce but omitting Frege. Even Croce would surely admit Frege was one of the six, if one must insist on such lists, just as you or I would admit that Netwon and Einstein are sharper knives in the drawer than we are. Is this a petty criticism? No, it is an example of a pervasive fault of this book, which is that it is too ambitious. But then again, the whole point of the book is its ambition, to cover EVERY significant idea of the 20 th c. It is fun to read, but probably not as reliable as one hopes. Well done to the author for writing it.
Rating:
Summary: It's big
Review: Watson has created a very, very formidable tomb. It is not by Watson's own admission exhautive of all ideas in this century. It's chief value may be a reference work that offers the reader an introduction to key concepts the world of science, the world of art, and elsewhere in historical context. I think this book is well-written, but not one that is likely to be read in one afternoon.
Rating:
Summary: A hundred years of ideas
Review: What Peter Watson attempts to create with "The Modern Mind" is a narrative tale of (mostly Western) ideas that have shaped the 20th century. With a project so ambitious, it is certain that many readers will feel some important people are left out, or that some ideas are not covered in adequate detail. But reading through his accomplishment, it is forgivable. "The Modern Mind" must be read as a personal work that is intricately tied to the mind of its author. It is one person's view of intellectual history, and it is what he managed to fit in the space of less than 800 pages.What is immediately clear from the beginning is that this story is molded by two thinkers: Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud. It is thus a tale of first, how science came to dominate our view of the world, and second, how psychology came to be so focal in our lives. The book is roughly chronological, but the chapters are topical so it is not simply structured as a list of intellectual events. There is form here, and one of the book's achievements is that there actually is a narrative going on, and it is interesting to see what was happening in literature or music, for instance, during the same time as certain scientific discoveries or during particular political events. There is definitely something to be said for looking back upon a century and taking in a distant, if thin, view of how ideas developed during that time. The content essentially boils down to a bunch of books and accounts taken from other books. The older the history, it seems the more established the thinkers and their impacts are. The more recent material has some idiosyncratic choices, though most are no doubt influential and important. I also felt that Watson was a little too optimistic of science, and as important as science was in the book, I did not feel confident of the author's grasp of scientific concepts or of mathematics. Are string theory and chaos theory really that important at the moment, or are they simply new and sensational? Still, what you end up with is a very large reading list and a narrative to tie them together. If you're interested in some famous thinkers of the past but don't know how their ideas fit into a larger historical context, this may be a good resource for you.
Rating:
Summary: A hundred years of ideas
Review: What Peter Watson attempts to create with "The Modern Mind" is a narrative tale of (mostly Western) ideas that have shaped the 20th century. With a project so ambitious, it is certain that many readers will feel some important people are left out, or that some ideas are not covered in adequate detail. But reading through his accomplishment, it is forgivable. "The Modern Mind" must be read as a personal work that is intricately tied to the mind of its author. It is one person's view of intellectual history, and it is what he managed to fit in the space of less than 800 pages. What is immediately clear from the beginning is that this story is molded by two thinkers: Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud. It is thus a tale of first, how science came to dominate our view of the world, and second, how psychology came to be so focal in our lives. The book is roughly chronological, but the chapters are topical so it is not simply structured as a list of intellectual events. There is form here, and one of the book's achievements is that there actually is a narrative going on, and it is interesting to see what was happening in literature or music, for instance, during the same time as certain scientific discoveries or during particular political events. There is definitely something to be said for looking back upon a century and taking in a distant, if thin, view of how ideas developed during that time. The content essentially boils down to a bunch of books and accounts taken from other books. The older the history, it seems the more established the thinkers and their impacts are. The more recent material has some idiosyncratic choices, though most are no doubt influential and important. I also felt that Watson was a little too optimistic of science, and as important as science was in the book, I did not feel confident of the author's grasp of scientific concepts or of mathematics. Are string theory and chaos theory really that important at the moment, or are they simply new and sensational? Still, what you end up with is a very large reading list and a narrative to tie them together. If you're interested in some famous thinkers of the past but don't know how their ideas fit into a larger historical context, this may be a good resource for you.
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