Barzun, Jacques

cultural historian, former professor and dean at Columbia University, author of From Dawn to Decadence

The interviewer is the C-SPAN host, who is not named in the captions; most of the interview consists of questions from callers and emails, read or put by the host. The captions are automatic, so names and details are sometimes approximate.

In Depth with Jacques Barzun (2001)

Andrea Cirla · Mar 23, 2024

• Jacques Barzun
• cultural history
• decadence
• education
• liberal arts
• Columbia University
• Lionel Trilling
• From Dawn to Decadence
• writing
• William James

Core ideas

Jacques Barzun, then 93, looks back on a writing life that began with a seven-page history of France at the age of eight. Born near Paris, he came to the United States in 1920 to attend Columbia, and says World War I, which killed people he knew, convinced him that it had destroyed Western culture as it had developed since the sixteenth century. That conviction shaped his later work, culminating in From Dawn to Decadence (500 years of Western cultural life), which he defines as cultural history: a field that can include anything people have made (art, philosophy, government, theology, sports, even the practice of weeping), with politics used only as a framework.

His central thesis is that the West is in an age of decadence, which he describes as a recurring historical phase and not as a cause for gloom or optimism: institutions fall apart or do what they were never meant to do (the failing public schools), government is deadlocked between balanced coalitions, nations fragment into ethnic and religious groups, the arts have exhausted the ideas of the Renaissance and fall back on desperate novelty, and a "failure of will" leaves people wishing for change but unable to act. He stresses the importance of authority, "the only alternative to force", and says the way out is unpredictable (the discovery of America ended an earlier crisis; the Napoleonic wars and the first world war broke old traditions) and that new ideas may already exist, obscured because they are few.

Much of the interview concerns education. He defends the Columbia core curriculum and the "great books" course he taught for decades with Lionel Trilling (they also trained doctoral students to write), criticizes the PhD "octopus", argues that the American high school of the 1920s-30s gave a good humanistic education, rejects the "elitist" label, and opposes "studies" programs (multicultural and others) because they segregate material and replace general principles. He sees the 1968 student revolt as a missed chance to demand better teaching, says he did not enjoy teaching because it demands entering another person's mind, and notes a "floating hostility" in modern life caused by bureaucracy and constant communication.

He also answers callers on a wide range of other topics: his writing routine (fountain pen, five drafts, work from nine to 12:30, a typist who reads his handwriting), his love of crime fiction and baseball, his admiration for William and Henry James, Burckhardt, Gibbon, Lincoln and Henry Adams, and his book on Berlioz; his dislike of deconstruction ("adolescent rebellion"), his regrets about the abrupt end of European colonialism, his explanation of Hitler's appeal through centuries of German humiliation, and his wariness about the European Union. He also recommends books for self-education (William James's Psychology, Whitehead's Science and the Modern World, Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, Dorothy L. Sayers) and ends by praising San Antonio as a cultural center.

Excerpts