Life as We(sterners) know it

The title(s) alone, From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the present, 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, suggest an intimidating and massively complex analysis of western civilization, and Jacques Barzun, a 20th century father of cultural history, does not let his readers down. It may seem excessive to find a volume of 800+ pages, plus notes and indexing, from a man so attuned to excess and its dangers. Yet, this is a work that only an old person could write, one who has for many years observed the shifts of cultural expression, and who has studied in depth the cultural past that westerners share.

Barzun early on makes important distinctions in periodization, and if you've read my other reviews, you will remember that I try to focus on this element of a book. Periodization is important, because it helps us to emphasize commonalities and differences over time. It provides temporal bookends to prevent historians from loosing themselves in the never-ending story of human choices, and it helps us to make sense of a great jumble of dates and events that fill that bottomless vat of the past. Barzun's periodization starts in 1500, that time period usually marked as the beginning of the modern Era. He uses the phrase "era" to mean stretches of 500 years or more, time for a culture to work out its possibilities, he writes. Period or age, he suggests, denote shorter distinctive spans within an era (xxi). From here, he makes three spans of cultural perspective, each approximately 125 years, and the fourth for the rest. 1500-1660: dominated by what to believe in religion; 1661-1789: what to do about the status of the individual and the mode of government; 1790-1920: how to achieve social and economic equality; and a fourth span, the rest, how to deal with the consequences of the previous choices.

From Dawn to Decadence presents a chronological, sub thematic, organization. Within the spans of time Barzun lays out as periods, or ages, he creates subcategories. For example, in Part One, he begins (more or less) with Luther's 95 Theses, inarguably critical in the emergence of choice for the religious man. The Protestant Reformation, he argues, tore western life apart; where Europeans had previously been united (more or less) by a system of congruent belief, they were now visibly divided by divisions in the belief system, sufficiently so to kill for them. Barzun explores the complexity of this development, and its scientific, political, and social implications, in several cross sections. Cross sections are detailed analyses of a specific place, or specific events. For example, he takes us to Madrid in about 1540. What did the city look like? How did people live? What were their concerns? How was social life constructed? His essay on the invisible college is fantastic!

In part two, From the Bog and Sand of Versailles to the Tennis Court, Barzun lays out the shift in political culture: in this period(1660-1789), Europeans grappled with primary questions about how individuals express their own choices, and how they should be governed. In titling this part from the bog and sand of Versailles to the Tennis Court, Barzun reminds us that the magnificent Versailles was once a small village in a bog, and that on this bog rose the emblem of mighty France; and from the emblem of mighty France came an even mightier power, the concept of the people united, committed to one another, to create a constitution by which they would agree to be governed. This is also the period in which we see a vast shift in the acceptability of violence in western culture (see my review of Julius Ruff, Violence and Early Modern Europe, at http://www99.epinions.com/content_419529920132 ), and the victory of Etiquette over Brutality. In this part also (as he does in parts I-III) he uses what he calls a "cross section" to give us a narrower, more detailed view of some elements or location.

In section III, Barzun examines the third revolution in social and economic equality. In his one paragraph summary of the Napoleonic Wars (brilliant), he sets out the problems facing Europeans for the next century: containment of revolution and reconstruction of culture, the effort to impose constructive order on the forces unleashed previously (symbolized by "the Tennis Court"). Barzun offers here probably the most constructive and concise examination of European Romanticism I've read. Romanticism was a state of consciousness that revealed the divisions found in any age. Nearly impossible to define, Barzun labels it a Zeitgeist, not an ideology. The unifying element of "romanticism" is the altered conception of "Man" (meaning humans, not men). Romanticism maintains the "intellect" was not enough; one must also have heart and mind.

Imbedded in his title is the concept of a civilization now in the throes of decadence, which is where Barzun leads us in part IV. Decadence is not the idea that "our" culture may be ending, but rather that the possibilities of our culture are falling off. Part of the reason for this falling off was the massive bloodshed of two wars. If his description of the polarization of European society before WWI doesn't chill your soul, you've not been reading current newspapers. His chapter on the death of the Philistine is a tour de force of cultural commentary.

In the introduction to his paper back edition, Barzun tells us he would have wished to include sidelights (cross sections) about Byron's daughter, Lady Lovelace, a mathematician who helped to write the program for the original calculating machine, Peter Mark Roget, who classified words by the cluster of ideas they conveyed, and about Disraeli, known as Victoria's prime minister, but who also wrote political novels.

I've said earlier that this is a book only an old person could write. It is a synthesis of a lifetime of study, analysis, introspection, reading, thinking and discussion. Another reviewer commented that this is not traditional history. I would suppose by that is meant it isn't one battle after another, or one famous king after another. But it is history. Cultural history had its start in the early 19th century, with the Swiss historian Jakob Burkhardt's assertion that to study history, one must study the period in its entirety, not just the cultural artifacts of paintings, music, sculpture, etc., but also their economic, social and political underpinnings. Barzun was born in France (1907), and nurtured, for a time in the saloons of pre-War Paris. Today he lives in Texas.