From Dawn to Decadence [antikvár]

Author's Note It takes only a look at the numbers to see that the 20th century is coming to an end. A wider and deeper scrutiny is needed to see that in the West the culture of the last 500 years is ending at the same time. Believing this to be true, I have thought it the right moment to review in sequence the great achievements and the sorry failures of our half millennium. This undertaking has also given me a chance to describe at first hand for any interested posterity some aspects of present decadence that may have escaped notice, and to show how they relate to others generally acknowledged. But the lively and positive predominate: this book is for people who like to read about art and thought, manners, morals, and religion, and the social setting in which these activities have been and are taking place. I have assumed that such readers prefer discourse to be selective and critical rather than neutral and encyclopedic. And guessing further at their preference, I have tried to write as I might speak, with only a touch of pedantry here and there to show that I understand modern tastes. Because the plan of the work is new, and thus unlike that of excellent histories that might be named, special care has been given to the ordering of the parts. Linking is particularly important in cultural history, because culture is a web of many strands; none is spun by itself, nor is any cut off at a fixed date Uke wars and regimes. Events that are commonly said to mark novelty in thought or change of direction in culture are but emphatic signposts, not boundary walls. I punctuate the course of my narrative with events of that kind, but the divisions do not hang upon them. Rather, the chapter divisions suggested themselves after rethinking the given past to find in it the clearest patterns. They are framed by the four great revolutions—the religious, monarchical, liberal, and social roughly a hundred years apart—whose aims and passions still govern our minds and behavior. * * *