Jacques Barzun: From Dawn to Decadence

By TOM BROOKING*

The Calvinist beliefs, well described and explained by Barzun, that underpin the New Zealand knocking syndrome immediately made me suspicious of a book that had received so much hype - the cover carries adjectives such as "stunning", "peerless", "classic" "ingenious" and so on from big-name reviewers.

My training as a sceptical historian also made me wonder why this book should have received such enthusiastic plaudits in the intensely conservative America of George W. Bush. Certainly Barzun's massive tome, which if nothing else represents fantastic value, is an antidote to the more radical new American high school history syllabus.

Devised in California by the likes of Gary Nash, the new history course tries to place women, Hispanics, indigenous peoples, Black Africans and Asians back into the nation's history, which tended to suffer from the curse of being the study of dead white men.

The author's old-fashioned, top-down, Eurocentric history represents something of a fightback of America's old East against the more liberal challenge of the West. Consequently, Barzun ignores most of the diverse cast of American and European history other than powerful or incredibly clever women. There are plenty of queens (Christina of Sweden is done best) as well as kings in these pages, but that is about the only concession to the so-called new history.

As someone who works in economic and social history and is now reinventing himself as an environmental historian, I miss the big, shifting tectonic plates which shape culture from underneath. Indeed, Barzun is dismissive of social history as warmed-over sociology.

Not surprisingly, the environment, which certainly has played a critical role in the development of European culture, is nowhere to be seen. There is also little evidence of the extraordinary influence that the New World encounter had upon Europe. Our own Anne Salmond's work, for example, reveals this as a serious absence.

Even more puzzling is the scant reference to the huge empires established over this period which Americans were among the first to reject. This whole field has been revitalised recently, particularly by examining the imperial impact in the colonies on the periphery rather than in metropolitan Europe. Yet there is little reference to the new imperial history and such magisterial works as the new five-volume Oxford History of the British Empire. Essentially, then, this is a history of elites in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States, with the occasional diversion into Russia, Scandinavia and Spain.

On the credit side, Dawn to Decadence is an excellent history of letters and a useful and comprehensive reference work on the history of philosophy, science, painting and music. Barzun's opinions are open to debate but this eminent American historian and critic, long a bastion of the Columbia University history department, also rehabilitates a vast cast of long-unfashionable artists, thinkers, and social critics.

The experimenter Sir Francis Bacon, the pioneer psychoanalyst William James, the playwright George Bernard Shaw, and the novelist Dorothy Sayers receive particularly full and glowing reassessments.

Barzun succeeds in catching the flavour of the Renaissance and Reformation in much the same way as the great Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt. One suspects this is his favourite period and that he thinks the long decline set in early.

He argues that the pre-First World War period holds the key to understanding the 20th century. Such an interpretation could certainly be made for our own, small and more recent history too, but seriously underplays the role of two world wars, the process of decolonisation, and the impact of huge advances in communications technology.

Barzun breaks up his relentless chronological march by diverting to the view from Madrid around 1540, Weimar around 1790 and so on. He then races through the 20th century and ends with a prologue on the new millennium.

This rather strange approach does allow him to write about the beginning of a new historical era and to reject Fukiyama's nonsense of the end of history. It also frees him to take some harsh swipes at the modern era. He singles out for special condemnation rampant individualism (rights without responsibilities), ludicrous choice and hopelessly high expectations, uncultured managerialism, cowardly defenders of the liberal order (silent academics) and muddled thinking (applying inappropriate business models to solve all problems).

He concludes that the greatest threat to the west is boredom. The only way out of this impasse, he suggests, is to find something in our past to rekindle the drive to emancipation, much as the rediscovery of the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome inspired the architects of the Renaissance to break free from the torpor of the Middle Ages.

Several times I checked his date of birth to confirm that he was born before my father and wrote this huge book at age 93. This fact alone is worth celebrating.

When asked how long it took him to write the opus, Barzun rightly claimed a lifetime. He also noted that Europeans became much more interested in the subject of history when people started to live beyond 70 years rather than dying under 40. Suddenly human experience could stretch over a century and across several generations rather than being limited to just two.

This is an intriguing observation, which affects us all at a personal level. My grandfather, for example, born in 1876, took me back to the gangland problem known as larrikinism in the Auckland of the 1880s and the world of his well-known customer, Sir George Grey. His good friend George Nicholson similarly provided a direct link to those iconic heroes - the 1905 All Blacks.

So here I am, a little over 50 but still in touch with the 19th century. In my worst moments I sometimes think that we would have to live to 200 to do history properly, not just to find time for research in addition to the relentless bureaucratic tasks demanded by managers, but to gain an adequate perspective on change.

Herein lies a vital clue to the strengths and weaknesses of Barzun's big and beautifully written book. He has become a prisoner of his own training and does not share the concerns and interests of younger practitioners. So he dismisses their concerns by simply ignoring them.

Each generation has to reinterpret its history in its own way but Barzun seems rather contemptuous of this necessity. His insistence on using the exclusive language device "man" will also infuriate many modern readers.

On the credit side this is grand, big-sweep history at its best - erudite, sophisticated, scholarly and opinionated.

I doubt that Barzun has much sense of what goes on in history classes of the 21st century because his dismissal of modern education is a travesty of what happens.

His suggestion that the key task of historians is to discern patterns is unobjectionable and his argument that nationalism destroyed the old medieval conception of Christendom is sensible.

His concluding observation that the contradictory forces of fragmentation and globalisation are reshaping the world in strange new ways is also a perceptive and challenging comment on the predicament in which we now find ourselves.

Despite its obvious shortcomings, the book is something of a tour de force and will serve as an excellent reference for anyone wanting to understand the rise and fall (an admittedly questionable approach) of western civilisation. It also bequeaths us the intriguing question: from which and whose past do we most want to draw inspiration?

Perennial/HarperCollins

$49.95

* Tom Brooking teaches history at the University of Otago.