A scholar, but also an everyman
Wrote of the decline of the West, and baseball
Jacques Barzun, the distinguished historian, essayist, cultural gadfly and educator who helped establish the modern discipline of cultural history and came to see the West as sliding toward decadence, died Thursday night in San Antonio, Tex., where he lived. He was 104.
Barzun was a man of boundless curiosity, monumental productivity and manifold interests, encompassing both Berlioz and baseball. It was a life of the mind first cultivated more than a century ago in a childhood home outside Paris that became an avant-garde salon.
Barzun stood beside Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell and Lionel Trilling as among the mid-20th century’s most wide-ranging scholars, all of whom tried to reconcile the achievements of European culture and philosophy with the demands and tastes of American intellectual and cultural life.
He wrote dozens of books across many decades, demonstrating that old age did not necessarily mean intellectual decline. He published his most ambitious and encyclopedic book at the age of 92 (and credited his productivity in part to chronic insomnia). That work, From Dawn to Decadence, is an 877-page survey of 500 years of western culture in which he argued western civilization itself had entered a period of decline.
Barzun was both of the academy and the public square, a man
Barzun was a man of letters and — he was proud to say — of the people.
of letters and — he was proud to say — of the people.
As an educator, Barzun was an important critic of U.S. universities, arguing in 1968 that their curriculums had become an undisciplined “bazaar” of miscellaneous studies.
But he was also a popularizer, believing that the achievements of the arts and scholarship should not be divorced from the wider American culture. Writing for a general audience, he said, was “a responsibility of scholars.”
To that end, he served as history consultant to Life magazine and as a critic for Harper’s. In 1951, he joined Trilling and W.H. Auden in founding the Readers’ Subscription Book Club, which sought to make serious scholarship and literature widely available.
His fascinations extended to mystery fiction and baseball, an American institution he considered with a scholar’s eye.
In From Dawn to Decadence, he argued one of the great virtues of the West was that, over the course of its development, it was resiliently constructed out of dozens of national cultures.
He traced periods of rise and fall in the western saga, and contended that another fall was near — one that could cause “the liquidation of 500 years of civilization.” This time the decline would be caused not by scientism and absolutism, he maintained, but by an internal crisis in the civilization itself, which he believed had come to celebrate nihilism and rebellion.
And yet, in the cycles of history, he believed another renewal would come.
“It is only in the shadows,” he wrote, “when some fresh wave, truly original, truly creative, breaks upon the shore, that there will be a rediscovery of the West.”