Rating: 
Summary: A Franco-centric View of Western Civilization
Review: Jacque Barzun's "From Dawn to Decadence" is a rich and highlight-detailed accounting of the progress of western civilization from 1500 to the late 20th century. However, the work is characterized by a few personal quirks on the part of the author that might be of interest to anyone who would consider this work to be a "classic" of historical writing and free of such individualistic or stylistic characteristics.Being French, the author shares the arrogance of many Francophone intellectuals who ascribe too much intellectual and cultural influence to their Gallic heritage. From Barzun's Franco-centric perspective, there were few ideas worthy of the name that originated anywhere else in the civilized world, much less globally. Such a bias gives little credit to the intellectual history of the Middle East and the Orient, which pre-date the various French Republics by hundreds or even thousands of years. And American and British contributions to the world of ideas are mostly derivative, in Barzun's view. Like other well-known foreign-born writers who make English their lingua franca, Barzun tends to assume his command of English-its grammar, syntax, and vocabulary-are at least the equal of any native speaker of English, especially those who choose to call themselves intellectuals. Because of this, many of his sentences are at best convoluted and over-long, and at worst are unintelligible, lacking normal subject-verb agreement or perhaps reflecting a reflexive or subconscious attempt to "fit" this mongrelized English syntax and its rules into a more familiar and linguistically-pure French language construction. Nabokov's "Lolita" reflected a similar unjustified exhibitionism with regard to the use of a second language that the writer assumed he knew better than he did. Finally, Barzun's eccentric insistence on using the term "techne" as a replacement for the word "technology," that is well known and understood in common English usage, reflects an ignorance of writing for a "lay" public. Perhaps such free-form constructivist foibles are tolerated in academic journals and high-specialized monographs in which an academic is seeking to establish himself in a field, but in a work intended for the generalist, such novel creations serve only to confuse rather than enlighten. All of this said, Barzun's "Dawn to Decadence" is still a magnificent work and one that would serve a variety of factual and source reference purposes, as long as one keeps in mind the apparent Franco-centric biases of its author about such sources and his interpretations of them.
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