Barzun's Summa. - Review - book review

National Review, May 22, 2000 by Jeffrey Hart

We must also consider that the United States has had the resiliency to put together an alliance that won World War II and the Cold War, really World War III, and defeated totalitarianism. It now stands supreme in wealth and power. The decadence must be partial and perhaps temporary. No doubt the Great War was the catastrophe Barzun describes.

But there seems to have been a recovery, and it is possible that the decadence he now decries is more immediately a product of the '60s, and began in the universities. Indeed, Jacques Barzun's book in itself is grounds for hope. No period is entirely decadent in which such a book could appear.