Jacques BarzunRezensionen

This book filled in much of what I think I missed from not studying liberal arts. It's a lot to take in, but very worthwhile.

A fairly comprehensive look at the cultural history of the modern era. However his predictions for the future do not take into account the problems of ecological change, resource depletion or environmental degradation.

This book is a long read on the cultural history of the west, requiring nearly as much time to think about what the author says as to read it. It is one of the most insightful and thought-provoking books I've ever read. I had post-it flags throughout marking passages whose ideas I wanted to discuss with my husband. It is not a book I could read with distractions or when tired, and so it took me a while to finish, what with all the kids and all the work making me almost always distracted, tired, or both. After finishing, I'm actually a little sad to part from Jacques Barzun and his sharp mind and sharp tongue. Despite my long to-read list and the length and density of this book and the challenge of finding the time and mental energy for it, I fully expect to return to it, to reread parts or the whole, when I want to spend some time sitting around with a great mind with no patience for muddled thinking and intellectual laziness.

To get the four stars you have to ignore the last 200 pages or so. His politics ,his cultural bias and his economics all stop the book cold and is kinda disappointing.

1/21/23

Good book on researching.

12/7/22

Comments on music collected by Jacques Barzun provide an endless source of fascination and amusement. The book is literally a potpourri of enticing entries that traverse the musical world from listeners and commentators to philosophers and musicians themselves.

Summary: A discussion of the decline of the intellect and its causes.

It is fashionable in higher educational circles these days to decry the decline of intellectual life. Jacques Barzun, a patrician educator, professor of history and Dean at Columbia was doing that in 1959. What was striking to me was the continuity between what he wrote and our situation over sixty years later.

Barzun would define intellect as the basics of communication from the alphabet to the conventions of the clear articulation and argumentation of idea, disciplinary ideas and habits and more. He explains his idea of intellect as follows:

“That part of the world I call the House of the Intellect embraces at least three groups of subjects: the persons who consciously and methodically employ the mind; the forms and habits governing the activities in which the mind is so employed; and the conditions under which these people and activities exist. “

He goes on to explain the “house” metaphor:

“I would speak of the realm of the mind–limited and untamed–but I say the House of the Intellect, because it is an establishment, requiring appurtenances and prescribing conventions.”

He begins by contending that there are three enemies facing the intellect. When artistic sensibilities intrude into intellectual life, aesthetic sense obscures the discursive character of intellectual articulation. When the language of science intrudes, its precision and specificity intrudes into the unity of knowledge. Philanthropy as he uses it is opens education to a wide audience, regardless of fitness (which comes off as elitist, one of my problems with this part of his argument).

He describes the pseudo-intellectualism of public discourse and our polite, cultured conventions of conversation that prevent serious discussions of ideas (although some polite conventions and manners might be needed in our own day). He describes education as without instruction, observing the use of television for instruction (if only he knew) and instruction without authority. He is one of the earliest to recognize the conversion of education into business and college leadership into bureaucracies. And he points out how intellectual pedantry has influenced every discipline, and far beyond–even President Eisenhower declaims, “Marshal Zhukov and I operated together very closely” rather than saying “worked.”

Barzun makes an argument for power and pretension intruding into the work of the intellect. What is concerning is that he also sweeps up the broadening of American education into his critique. I was one of those who benefited by that “broadening,” or as he would call it, “philanthropy.” I would not naturally have enjoyed access to these opportunities, growing up in a lower middle, working class neighborhood. In another era, I might have been excluded from “the house of the Intellect.”

Nevertheless, Barzun poses some important questions. Today, it is the hegemony of STEM fields over those disciplines that classically taught clarity of thought and expression. He guts the jargon-laden discourse of many academic disciplines. He questions the academic fads that often substitute for the instruction that cultivates the intellect. He exposes the conventions of public and personal conversation that thwart intellectual life (I’d love to see what he would do with social media).

Barzun is an educator from another era, and while I cannot endorse some of his ideas, he also holds up a mirror to contemporary educational practice, asking, “why are we doing this?” He was a kind of educational prophet. If you can find a used copy of this online, and care about education, I think you will find this a thought-provoking read.

3/23/22

I read this several years ago, while Barzun trod the earth. Most of it is worth five stars. But there is a serious flaw. Barzun had no clue how science works. His anti-science attitude was sadly misdirected. His declared beef was in fact against a caricature of science and scientists, a cartoon fancy held by some people who haven't any idea how, for example, a radio works beyond the knobs on the front. Barzun appeared to be one of them. Thus his proper argument lay with his own bias; a paradox that he failed to divine.

Or perhaps he painted himself into a corner by his pretentious choice of book title and preferred a willful ignorance about the enormous value created throughout the 20th century in many domains. That effect may explain the poor reaction of many goodreads reviewers to the last part of the book.

I don't recall Barzun giving any recognition to scientists or science, or noticing the influence of science upon events and ideas, or of events and ideas upon science. An excellent remedy is "The Western Intellectual Tradition, from Leonardo to Hegel" by Jacob Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish, a balanced and very readable survey of the same subject by eminent scholars, solid five stars.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/455391.The_Western_Intellectual_Tradition_fr...

During the May 68 uprising in France, a phrase that was written on a wall somewhere read: "Professors, you make us grow old." That moment in history is one of my favorites to read about, but the above quote never totally clicked with me. Now that I've read this book by Jacques Barzun, a stuffy liberal studies professor, I totally get it.

Seriously, this guy has such a wettie for western civ. Also, he thinks "decadence" is an insult, wtf? My favorite part was his comparing the (at the time) recent influx of privilege politics into the academy to the Inquisition. Or, even better, maybe it was the European witchhunts, I don't remember. Either way...totally bro, you're such a victim.

critical bibliography of crime fiction

Ex-lib. JCC

1959, but not the same edition.

An extremely thorough book full of intelligent ideas, most of which - I'm sad to say - were beyond the reach of my IQ. In fits and starts I had to claw my way through this read with only bursts of understanding in the way of a fantastic quote or enlightening passage to keep me moving on. I would still recommend it, Jacques Barzun is brilliant, however one must have great powers of concentration to be able to digest such an undertaking as this.

FIRST SENTENCE : “The Modern Era begins, characteristically, with a revolution. It is commonly called the Protestant Reformation, but the train of events starting early in the 16C and ending—if indeed it has ended—more than a century later has all the features of a revolution.”

REVIEW : Barzun, in his master opus, attempts to organize the Western cultural history of the last 500 years, chiefly around principles like Emancipation, Self-Determination, Primitivism. He has insights but expects a lot from the reader. The more you know, the more Barzun will help you organize your existing knowledge. He provides a narrative, not a detailed account. Writing style a bit peculiar, a zest of obsession for Operas.

QUOTES : “During the writing of this book I was frequently asked by friends and colleagues how long its preparation had taken. I could only answer: a lifetime.”
“The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.”

RATING : ★★★☆☆ Very Good
Read in January 2018, Nouméa.

SIMPLE AND DIRECT is anything but.

SIMPLE AND DIRECT is anything but.

Solo uno studioso come Jacques Barzoun poteva accumulare la messe di ocnoscenze e sopratutto giungere all'ampiezza di visioe necessarie per raccontare in un solo libro, con tale profondità di sintesi, l'ascesa e il declino , tra il 1500 e il 2000, della civiltà occidentale [...] mella limpida, meditata e mai scontata visione di Barzun, la nostra civiltà è segnata dal susseguirsi di quattro grandi rivoluzioni - religiosa, monarchica, liberale e sociale- e l'ultima epoca, dal 1920 a oggi, è quella della decadenza.

One of the few of a dying breed: a public intellectual. The author was a professor of history and yet his long career allowed him to range freely over a wide variety of topics. He is the intellectual's intellectual, a public thinker and writer who can be dipped into for pleasant reading and thought.

500 years of culture.

I have been reading The Folio Society two volume edition whish is the first illustrated edition of this work. Unfortunately the conversion from the one volume edition caused the identifiers provided by Dr. Barzun to not correctly transfer. Those are unique to show in a simple way the page of the first mention of a person/subject and also a later continuation. These aid greatly for a close reading. Every one of these is incorrect in Volume One of this unique edition. I notified The Folio society and after a few days they decided to do a complete reprint for everyone who purchased the book. Volume Two has the correctly converted reference page numbers. The Folio Society is completely reprinting Volume One with the proper conversions. That significantly delayed the reading of Volume One.
This is a cultural survey of the past 500 years of history as told from a long lifetime of study and, yes, appreciation. The work is to be savored. It is like a College Course that may never end. The carefully named persons and works demonstrate the breadth of the studies of Dr. Barzun. It is opinionated and has a conversational rather than confrontational tone. This is polite conversation.
Unfortunately, I see that he has incorrectly located Robert Owen's New Harmony in Illinois rather than Indiana. The Wabash River throws water between Illinois and Indiana at that location. I wonder how many other simple factual details are incorrect in the book.

Incredible recounting of the past 500 years of Western history. As I listened to this, I kept thinking to myself "The more things change..."

The 3 stars mostly relates to the quality of the audio recording. Worst I've ever had. Like having C3PO read it - but worse.

An interesting, and often illuminating, argument about how materialism, or rather, popular perceptions of it, might have helped bring about the worst episodes of the twentieth century. I'm going to have to disagree with HadriantheBlind's assessment. Barzun's focus, or, rather, target, here isn't Darwin's science per se, it's how his age jumped at the chance to make Darwinism into a general principle, usually with terrible results. The point is that Darwin himself -- who wasn't he most forceful personalities -- was almost immediately obscured by his interpreters. Barzun also pauses to consider other evolutionary theories that predated Darwin and to consider some of and exactly what separated Darwin from these, which is pretty instructive for anyone concerned with the history of ideas.

"Critique of a Heritiage" is, in a sense, broad-strokes intellectual history, an attempt to figure out how a few great ideas shaped a century's worth of history, and a reminder that even great ideas have their limits and misuses. Barzun, in effect, wants to identify the ideological, often ignored intellectual bulwark that supported materialism and, by doing so, traces the fanaticism and intellectual dogmatism that many people rightly identify with the twentieth century to a few works in the nineteenth. He can be hard on what he considers error -- the elder Huxley, Spencer, Marxists of various stripes, and Marx and Wagner themselves are treated very roughly, on both a personal and intellectual level. But "Critique of a Heritage," though it doesn't mention Freud too often, can be weirdly holistic and psychological, even hopeful. Maybe because this was written in the midst of the Second World War, Barzun seems to want to impress upon his readers these theories' inevitable overreach and their failure to account for every part of man's being. The phrase "the return of the repressed" seems to loom over this entire book. The last few chapters are an impassioned plea for intellectual moderation, the importance of ideas and human consciousness, and general empathy. Now that Marxism's no longer a really viable political force in much of the world and has even lost some cachet in academia, some readers might find it a bit dated. Still, it's nice to find those ideas expressed so succinctly and sincerely. The three individuals mentioned in the title have inspired a library worth of books, but this one is still worth reading. I'd recommend "Critique of a Heritage" for no other reason that it lets readers spend time with a truly educated and organized mind, and that's always a pleasure.