The Idea of Decline in Western History

Arthur Herman

May 2010 · Simon and Schuster

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The renowned historian’s “learned study of the concept of decline since the Enlightenment” (Kirkus Reviews).

Through a series of biographical portraits spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Arthur Herman traces the roots of declinism and aims to show how major thinkers of the past and present, including Nietzsche, DuBois, Sartre, and Foucault, have contributed to its development as a coherent ideology of cultural pessimism. He then demonstrates how this intellectual posture has spread from elite enclaves to the general culture.

From Nazism to the Sixties counterculture, from Britain’s Fabian socialists to America’s multiculturalists, and from Dracula and Freud to Robert Bly and Madonna, historian Arthur Herman sets out to explain how the conviction of civilization’s inevitable end has become a fixed part of the modern Western imagination. Shedding light on this increasingly pervasive notion, Herman is quick to point out that—to paraphrase Mark Twain—reports of Western civilization’s demise are greatly exaggerated.

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Arthur Herman is the bestselling author of Freedom’s Forge, How the Scots Invented the Modern World, The Idea of Decline in Western History, To Rule the Waves, and Gandhi & Churchill, which was a 2009 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Dr. Herman taught the Western Heritage Program at the Smithsonian’s Campus on the Mall, and he has been a professor of history at Georgetown University, The Catholic University of America, George Mason University, and The University of the South at Sewanee.