It’s been a great 500 years, but it’s over for Western Civilization as we know it says Jacques Barzun, and he should know. He wanted to write a history of the West when he was fresh out of school, but his advisor asked him to wait until he was eighty. Barzun waited until he was 92 and perhaps the greatest living historian of the West, to produce “From Dawn to Decadence,” a cultural history of Western Civilization from 1500 to the present.
Barzun sees the last 500 years as a distinct civilisation with 4 ages: the age of religious strife; the age of individualism and nationalism; the age of rights; and the present age of Decadence. Barzun says the West has been “the mongrel civilization par excellence” and he picks out its unifying themes connecting, for example, ’60s flower children to Rousseau’s Noble Savages, Social Security to Florence Nightingale, and the American Revolutionary to Voltaire.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
Jacques Barzun, author and Professor at Columbia University.