Word: barzun
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...pagan success has a common cause. What it is can be found out by reading Darwin, Marx, Wagner, a 420-page study of dominant ideas and intellectual climate of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries by Columbia University's Assistant Professor of History Jacques Martin Barzun...
...shared in some degree throughout Western civilization-the fatalistic idea that evolution and progress are the result of the survival of the fittest in a struggle to the death for life. World War II is the political and military stage of an intellectual revolution whose mild beginnings Author Barzun dates from...
...Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species, Karl Marx published his Critique of Political Economy, Richard Wagner finished Tristan und Isolde. These three were the intellectual forebears of Lenin, Hitler, Mussolini. They were the intellectual forebears of nearly everybody else in the Western world too. And, says Author Barzun, "it would be hard to find in the whole history of Western civilization a corresponding trio to share the honors of a single epoch with such perfect parallelism...
...understand how these three men have dominated our thinking, says Author Barzun, try to imagine our speech without terms like survival of the fittest, struggle for existence, natural selection, exploitation of labor, dialectic materialism, scientific socialism, social significance, Nordic culture, music drama, leitmotiv, the twilight of the gods...
...world, saturated with -I will not say, the precise ideas of the three materialists-but surely with their deeper spirit, their faith in matter, their love of system, their abstract scientism, and their one-sided interpretation of Nature." How directly their theoretical ideas have found current practical expression, Author Barzun highlights by bracketing two quotations...