Barzun’s Warnings Still Relevant 80 Years Later | Eastern North Carolina Now

M.D. Aeschliman writes for National Review Online about the continuing significance of one historian’s decades-old work.

ENCNow
Publisher's Note: This post appears here courtesy of the John Locke Foundation. The author of this post is Mitch Kokai.

    M.D. Aeschliman writes for National Review Online about the continuing significance of one historian's decades-old work.

  • Eighty years ago, in that ominous year 1941, the Franco-American historian Jacques Barzun (1903-2012) published a work of cultural history that has retained power and relevance when most such books, however worthy, live a life of temporary influence and then are occasionally consulted on the shelves of university libraries. Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage has had a longer and deeper subsequent influence, being republished in only slightly revised editions but with new prefaces in 1958 and 1981 and frequently reprinted in paperback. It is a great, antiseptic book, almost as necessary now as it was at the high tide of German National Socialist "racial science" and Soviet Communist "scientific socialism" in 1941. ...
  • ... Barzun's case against both Darwin and Marx is that both are writers of evasive, convoluted, confused prose that obscures not only truth itself but their own scientistic, mechanistic premises about the meaninglessness of mind, free will, and purpose in human affairs. He himself had started out his own academic career by writing a strongly anti-racialist book in 1937, Race: A Study in Modern Superstition, at a time when Darwinian "racial science" was riding high not only in Germany but throughout the West, leading to eugenic laws in several American states even before the Nazi national policy of eliminating "lives unworthy of life." ...
  • ... Barzun's short anatomy of Marx and Marxism, quietly devastating, is permanently worth reading for its clear understanding and lucid explanation of the self-contradictory and damaging character of Marxism and all forms of reductionism. He insists on the perennial need for an at least minimally accurate description of human personality, the reality of the human mind, and the scope of human free will. (Reductionism, he wrote in 1964, "is congenial to the modern temper, and what it reduces is the individual.")

Go Back


Leave a Guest Comment

Your Name or Alias
Your Email Address ( your email address will not be published )
Enter Your Comment ( text only please )




Supreme Court To Rule on Major Issues as Term Winds Down John Locke Foundation Guest Editorial, Editorials, Op-Ed & Politics Durham Probe Cost Roughly $1.5 Million During First Six Months as Special Counsel


HbAD0

Latest Op-Ed & Politics

"Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a foolish man, full of foolish and vapid ideas," former Governor Chris Christie complained.
Bureaucrats believe they set policy for spending taxpayer dollars usurping the directions of elected officials.
would allow civil lawsuit against judge if released criminal causes harm
"This highly provocative move was designed to interfere with our counter narco-terror operations."

HbAD1

Charlie Kirk, 31 years of age, who was renowned as one of the most important and influential college speakers /Leaders in many decades; founder of Turning Point USA, has been shot dead at Utah Valley University.
The Trump administration took actions against Harvard related to the anti-Israel protests that roiled its campus.
In remembrance of the day that will forever seer the concept of 'evil' in our minds, let's look back at that fateful morning, exactly 11 years ago today to that series of horrific events which unfolded before our unbelieving eyes......

HbAD2

faced 25 years in prison for "misgendering" a leftie tranny politician
illegal alien "asylum seeker" migrants are a crime wave on both sides of the Atlantic
It was a clear beautiful, royal blue sky day on Wall Street. The S & P futures were up markedly, awaiting a positive open, as I turn to get my first cup of coffee. I return to CNBC to get the morning business news, when I notice that the S & P futures are falling, and they're falling fast.
conservative youth leader was victim of political assassination
Harvard University is once again sending its students on delegations to China

HbAD3

 
Back to Top