Jacques Barzun

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Jacques Martin Barzun (born November 30, 1907, Grenoble France) is a leading American historian of ideas and culture. He has also eloquently defended tradition in the practice of higher education and scholarship.

Life

Barzun spent his childhood in Paris and Grenoble. The Paris house of his parents was frequented by many 'modernist' artists of belle epoque France, e.g., the poet Apollinaire, the Cubist painters Gleizes and Marcel Duchamp, the composer Edgard Varèse, and the writers Richard Aldington and Stefan Zweig.

While on a diplomatic mission to the USA during the First World War, Barzun's father so liked what he saw there that he decided that his son should have an American university education, a conclusion startlingly out of character for a French person of that time. Thus Jacques was sent to the USA at the tender age of 13, first to attend a preparatory school, then Columbia University where he obtained a broad liberal education. His upbringing in an artistic family inclined him to the study of cultural history, then a new branch of history.

At Columbia University, he was first in the class of 1927, obtained the Ph.D. in 1932, and was a prize-winning member of the Philolexian Society. Barzun taught history at Columbia from 1928 to 1955, becoming the Seth Low Professor of History and one of the founders of the discipline of cultural history. He also famously co-taught Columbia's Great Books course with his Columbia colleague and literary critic Lionel Trilling. From 1955 to 1968, he served as Dean of the Graduate School, Dean of Faculties, and Provost. Concurrently, he was an Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College at the University of Cambridge. From 1968 until his 1975 retirement, he was University Professor at Columbia. In 1993, Barzun moved to San Antonio, Texas, where he continues to write.

The American Philosophical Society honors Barzun with its Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History, awarded annually since 1993 to the author of a recent distinguished work of cultural history. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2003. He has also received the Gold Medal for Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, of which he was twice president.

Writings

For seven decades, Barzun has written and edited over 30 books of critical and historical studies on a wide variety of subjects, including:

1937. Race: a Study in Modern Superstition;
1941. Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage;
1943. Romanticism and the Modern Ego;
1945. The Teacher in America;
1951. Pleasures of Music;
1956. Music in American Life;
1956. The Energies of Art;
1961. The Delights of Detection;
1959. The House of Intellect;
1961. Classic, Romantic, and Modern;
1964. Science: The Glorious Entertainment;
1968. The American University: How It Runs, Where It Is Going;
1969. Berlioz and the Romantic Century (3d ed.);
1971. On Writing, Editing, and Publishing;
1974. Clio and the Doctors;
1974. The Use and Abuse of Art;
1975. Simple and Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers;
1982. Critical Questions;
1983. A Stroll with William James;
1986. A Word or Two Before You Go: Brief Essays on Language;
1989. The Culture We Deserve: A Critique of Disenlightenment;
1991. Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning;
2000. From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present;
2003. The Modern Researcher (with Henry F. Graff), 6th ed.

Some of Barzun's books - particularly Teacher in America and The House of Intellect - were bestsellers that influenced debate about culture and education far beyond the realm of academic history. Barzun's work in cultural history spans an unusual range of subjects, from science to science fiction and detective fiction, from Robert Burton through William James to modern psychiatry, and classical music; he is one of the all-time authorities on Berlioz.

Barzun has taken an unusual interest in the tools and mechanics of writing and research. He edited the 1966 edition of Follett's Modern American Usage, and is the author of books on style (Simple and Direct, 1975), on the craft of editing and publishing (On Writing, Editing, and Publishing, 1971), and on research methods in history and humanities (The Modern Researcher, 4 eds.)

He has continued to write on education and cultural history since his retirement from Columbia. At 84 years of age, he began writing his swan song, to which he devoted the better part of the 1990s: the result was a book exceeding 800 pages, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present, a New York Times bestseller, lauded by historians, literary critics, and popular reviewers alike as a sweeping and powerful, albeit idiosyncratic, survey of modern Western history. From Dawn to Decadence introduces several novel typographic devices that help keep its many strands of thought under control. Almost every page features a sidebar containing a pithy quotation from some author or historical figure; most are surprising, little known, and quite humorous. All in all, evidence of a vast erudition, astonishingly undiminished by advanced age.

External links

[Site] devoted to writings about Barzun, including interviews.

On From Dawn to Decadence:

A more detailed [synopsis] along with a short bio of the author.
Kimball, Roger, "[Closing time? Jacques Barzun on Western culture]," New Criterion, 18 June 2000. A positive take.

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