From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life

This cultural history surveys the West from about 1500 to the close of the twentieth century, treating theology, science, politics, manners, and the arts as one continuous argument. Barzun begins with the Reformation and the Renaissance courts, then follows the scientific revolution, the rise of nation-states, and the Enlightenment's claims for reason. Later chapters take in the French Revolution, the nineteenth-century cults of progress, nation, and art, and the wars and mass cultures of the modern period. He organizes the narrative around recurring themes - emancipation, analysis, primitivism, and the specialization of knowledge - rather than a year-by-year chronicle. The book is a single essay on how Western institutions and tastes were made and then, in his account, thinned out.

Bound in metallic buckram blocked with a pattern in black and orange. Printed slipcase wrap with portrait paintings by Holly Frean.