Jacques Barzun, who at once celebrated and castigated Western civilization in his many works, has passed away at 104. Though long a New Yorker, Barzun had been living in San Antonio, where he died on Thursday night.
Barzun is best known for 2000’s “From Dawn to Decadence,” in which he argued that Western culture had fallen from the heights of the Renaissance, having shattered in the dank gulches of the 20th century. An intellectual of distinctly European vintage, he was a prolific writer and public figure with appeal beyond the groves of academe. A cover story on Barzun in a 1956 issue of Time said he was part of “a growing host of men of ideas who not only have the respect of the nation, but who return the compliment.”
Born in Paris in 1907, where his father ran a prominent literary salon attended by the likes of Ezra Pound, Barzun arrived in the United States at the age of 12 to attend prep school. He went on to Columbia, where he would graduate at the top of his class in 1927. Five years later, he also obtained a doctorate from Columbia – and would go on to serve the Ivy League university in either a professorial or administrative capacity until 1975.
It was from his perch at Columbia that Barzun made his mark on American culture. As the creator, in the 1930’s, of the “Colloquium on Important Books,” a seminar he taught with Lionel Trilling, he sought to instill young Americans with the greatest works and ideas of Europe. At the same time, the ideas he so thoroughly loved turned him into a cultural conservative resistant to change: the protests that shook Columbia in 1968 were anathema to him, and he more recently criticized Columbia for its exclusion (since ended) of the ROTC military training program.
Barzun’s main concern, though, was always thought, and he was generally hesitant to dabble in politics.
His “Teacher in America” (1945) aimed to reinvigorate American education with a sweeping appreciation of the liberal arts, arguing that specialization corroded the pursuit of knowledge. “Colleges and universities have become bureaucracies like business and government,” he wrote in a 1983 introduction to that work.
Barzun and Trilling, along with the poet W.H. Auden, also founded the Readers’ Subscription Book Club in 1951, hoping to expand the “great books” course from Morningside Heights into greater American society.
It is hard to imagine an intellectual today as wide-ranging in his interests as Barzun, who wrote about the Romantic poets, the composer Hector Berlioz, French history and baseball – which he said “fitly expresses the powers of the nation’s mind and body.”
Barzun is mainly credited as the founder of cultural history, a discipline that combines the study of ideas with that of events like war and exploration. As he once told the Associated Press, “When I became interested in history, it seemed that social and cultural elements were perfectly real things that existed as forces. Diplomacy and forces of arms were treated as the substances of history, and there was this other realm missing.”
Writing of “From Dawn to Decadence” (which was published when Barzun was 92) in the New York Times, a critic noted of Barzun and his approach to history, “Despite his view that things in general are going downhill, Barzun is undiminished in his scholarship, research and polymathic interests. Like Diderot, one of his subjects, and unlike too many professors of literature, Barzun can keep up to date and comment intelligibly on almost anything human minds may light upon.”
The book was nominated for many prizes and George W. Bush awarded Barzun the Presidential Medal of Freedom, though it is unclear if Bush ever read the 900-page tome.
It was perhaps odd that Barzun would move from Manhattan to a much smaller Texas city, but as he wrote in the New York Times in 1982 about that expansive state, “After being boxed in by man and his constructions in Europe and the East, the release into space is exhilarating. The horizon is a huge remote circle, and no hills intervene.”
Barzun moved to San Antonio in 1996, where he lived until his death.
In an appreciation of Barzun published in 2006, Columbia historian Thomas Vinciguerra wrote, “Barzun is not content to simply curse the darkness. He is a tireless supporter of the liberal arts and of the notion that the pursuit of truth may literally set one free.”
(Photo: Associated Press)
