Word: barzun
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...study of history has its equivalent of Dupin the relaxed thinker puffing on his meerschaum, scoffing at the scurrying police as they collect their clues. Worried because "the nineteenth-century pre-eminence of history in the sphere of intellect no longer obtains," intellectual and musical historian Jacques Barzun (University Professor at Columbia, author of Darwin, Marx. Wagner) has undertaken to incite resistance to modern modes of history. In Clio and the Doctors: Psycho History Quanto-History, and History (University of Chicago Press) he cites the depths of the problem he and some other older historians see: The historical sense...
However manic the score-keepers of society have become though, there is no reason we should suppose, as Barzun does, that proliferation of information necessarily leads to the sterilization of history. Barzun seeks the victory of historical artist over historical statistician, without considering the possibility that someone might be both. Yet Stephen Thernstrom's heavily statistical studies are as sensitive to the unquantifiable as any previous works on social mobility. Richard Sennett's book on nineteenth-century family life in Chicago (Families Against the City) is as audacious and speculative, though not as wide-ranging, as anything Barzun has written...
...central conflict within every man-the conflict between a desire for vengeance and a wish to honor life. It is no answer to say, as some do, that man can sanctify life by killing those who kill. Nor is there any real answer in the elegant argument of Jacques Barzun, who claims that prison existence so debases and brutalizes life that the death penalty is more humane. Even if that were true, the choice of death ought to be made by the prisoner, not by the state...
...youthquake" is likely to roll on even if the Viet Nam War ends tomorrow. In Jacques Barzun's phrase, the young are battling "the whole of modern life"?what they regard as meaningless work, abuse of the environment, the dwindling opportunities for adolescent self-definition at a time when puberty arrives earlier than ever. In recent testimony before Congress, France's Journalist-Politician Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber argued that the revolt of the young is aimed at the "excesses of economic competition" and cannot be "eradicated by the elders in a fit of blind rage." Businessmen themselves, he said...
...Government? Of the police? Of Congress? No, for God's sake, we're afraid of the individual, of the beast masquerading as man." Some less volcanic thinkers?among them many liberals and academics?have also expressed dismay. All institutions are fallible, says Columbia University's Jacques Barzun, and unending criticism can bring down the entire structure of society...