Jacques Barzun
Jacques Barzun was a prominent American cultural historian and social critic, renowned for his extensive literary career and profound insights into history and education. Born in France in 1907, Barzun moved to the United States as a teenager and attended Columbia University, where he later became a faculty member. His scholarship often focused on the historical development of ideas, particularly concerning race, which he critiqued in his early works amid the rise of Nazi ideology in Europe.
Throughout his career, Barzun engaged with influential intellectuals and was known for his defense of democracy against totalitarian regimes in works like *Of Human Freedom*. His best-selling book, *Darwin, Marx, Wagner*, examined the impact of key figures on modern society and culture. As an educator, he advocated for liberal arts education and was critical of progressive educational trends.
In his later years, Barzun achieved significant acclaim with *From Dawn to Decadence*, a sweeping overview of Western cultural history. He continued to write and engage with cultural life until his passing in 2012 at the age of 104. Barzun is remembered as a keen observer of cultural trends and a significant figure in American intellectual life.
Jacques Barzun
Historian
- Born: November 30, 1907
- Birthplace: Créteil, France
- Died: October 25, 2012
French-born American historian and educator
Biography
Jacques Martin Barzun has been an influential American cultural historian and social critic with an exceptionally long literary career. The French-born Barzun’s father, Henri-Martin Barzun, was a civil servant in the French ministry of labor. The elder Barzun was also a writer, and many prominent authors and artists visited the family home. In 1917, the French government sent Henri-Martin Barzun on a mission to the United States. The young Jacques moved there in 1920. Still a teenager, Jacques Barzun enrolled in Columbia University in New York in 1923. He would continue to be associated with Columbia for the rest of his life.
He took his bachelor’s degree from Columbia in 1927 and then began teaching and graduate study at the same institution. He received a Ph.D. degree in 1932. His dissertation was published as his first book, The French Race: Theories of Its Origins and Their Social and Political Implications Prior to the Revolution. In this book, Barzun examines how the idea of race had developed historically in French thought and how this idea had shaped political and social behavior. This theme of the historical emergence of the idea of race, an idea that Barzun saw as misleading and dangerous, became the basis of his second book, Race: A Study in Modern Superstition. These two books were timely in their topic because the Nazi Party had risen to power in Germany during these years, advocating racial doctrines derived from the historical influences described by Barzun.
While teaching at Columbia, Barzun came into contact with prominent New York intellectuals. The literary critic Lionel Trilling became his friend and collaborator when the two taught a “great books” class in 1934. Barzun and his first wife, Marianna, frequently socialized with Trilling and his wife, Diana Trilling, also a renowned literary critic.
Barzun’s third book, Of Human Freedom, also treated the historical currents of his day. Written on the eve of World War II, the book offered a defense of democracy in the face of the absolutist doctrines of Nazism and Fascism. The political ideas in this book were inspired by the late nineteenth century American psychologist and philosopher William James, who formulated a version of the philosophy of pragmatism and saw American democracy as a flawed but practical way of meeting the challenges of political life.
Darwin, Marx, Wagner was Barzun’s first best-seller. It was a critical examination of the three nineteenth century figures who had shaped much of the modern era’s approaches to biology, politics and society, and music. Barzun’s interest in education led him to publish a number of works on teaching, including The Teacher in America, The House of Intellect, and The American University. In these books, he was critical of progressive education and supported the ideal of education in liberal arts in favor of vocational education.
Although he always considered himself primarily a teacher, Barzun’s interest in shaping intellectual life went beyond his own classroom and even beyond his own books. Together with his Columbia colleague Lionel Trilling and the poet W. H. Auden, Barzun formed the Reader’s Subscription Book Club in 1951. The three men of letters made selections of recent historical and literary works and made these available to club members at discount prices. Each month, one of the three would write an essay on the club’s main selection to be printed in the monthly newsletter.
Barzun served Columbia as dean of graduate faculties from 1955 to 1958 and dean of faculties and provost from 1958 to 1967. He was named Seth Low Professor of History in 1960. In 1975, he finally retired from Columbia’s active faculty and became an emeritus professor. In his retirement, though, he took up a second career as literary consultant to the publishing house Charles Scribner’s Sons.
The prolific Barzun managed one of his most impressive achievements when, at the age of ninety-two, he published From Dawn to Decadence, an massive overview of five centuries of Western cultural history that he had begun writing when he was eighty-four. In this book, he regarded the modern period of history in the West as having begun in the sixteenth century. He divided this era into four stages. The first stage lasted from the Protestant reformation sparked by Martin Luther to the scientific revolution of Sir Isaac Newton at the end of the seventeenth century. The second stage began with the rise of the nation state during the time of French king Louis XIV and ended with the French Revolution and the Enlightenment. The third stretched from the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment to the appearance of Cubism in art and thought in the decade before World War I. The fourth and last stage lasted through the World Wars through the opening of the twenty-first century. Barzun argued that by the time at which he was writing, the modern culture of the West had spent itself and had become empty, self-defeating, and decadent. Even critics who disagreed that historical periods could be characterized as having a beginning and an end thought that Barzun had written a masterpiece, and Barzun was compared to the great historian Edward Gibbon.
After From Dawn to Decadence, he published What Is a School? and Trim the College! (2002), The Modern Researcher (2003, with Henry F. Graff), and Four More Sidelights on Opera at Glimmerglass: 2001–2004 (2004).
While working on From Dawn to Decadence, Barzun finally left New York and moved to San Antonio, Texas, with his second wife, Marguerite, who was a San Antonio native. Barzun became an active part of the cultural life of his new city, giving lectures and interviews. Through most of his life, he was in the public eye less than other New York intellectuals, such as his friend and colleague Lionel Trilling. Nevertheless, Barzun maintained a consistent reputation as an elegant and insightful historian, an independent and clear-headed observer of higher education, and an incisive critic of modern culture.
Barzun died at his home in San Antonio on October 25, 2012, at the age of 104.
Bibliography
Heilbrun, Carolyn. When Men Were the Only Teachers We Had: My Teachers Barzun, Fadiman, and Trilling. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2002. Print.
Krystal, Arthur. Except When I Write: Reflections of a Recovering Critic. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. Print.
Rothstein, Edward. "Jacques Barzun at 104; Cultural Critic Saw the Sun Setting on the West." New York Times. New York Times, 25 Oct. 2012. Web. 21 Apr. 2016.
Russello, Gerald J. "The Achievement of Jacques Barzun." First Things. First Things, 26 Oct. 2012. Web. 21 Apr. 2016.
Trilling, Diana. The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993. Print.
Trilling, Lionel. “A Personal Memoir.” In From Parnassus: Essays in Honor of Jacques Barzun. Ed. Dara B. Weiner and William R. Keylor. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. Print.