Series:

Routledge Revivals

2 total works

Cover of Revival: A History of Modern Culture: Volume II (1934)
The understanding of history can be advanced only by the combination or alternation, of analysis and synthesis. Detailed research and generalizing survey are not antiethical but complementary. For a long time, however, the specialist has reigned supreme in our schools. The need is now, surely, for a return to synoptic writing. The present work was undertaken to supply the need of a synthesis. It is a map of a large region, not a geological chart of a square mile or the plan of a single city. Its value, if any, lies in its view of the interrelations of large tracts of social and intellectual life, not in the intensive investigation of narrow fields.

Cover of Revival: A History of Modern Culture: Volume I (1930)

The best excuse for writing the history of anything is the intrinsic interest of the subject. Most men of past generations have thought, and many men still think, of politics as the warp and woof of social life. History for a long time therefore treated chiefly politics. Then came the economists to arouse the interest of scholars and of the public in the production and distribution of wealth. Economic history rightly absorbs much attention, for it illumines, with its new searchlight, many a dark corner of the past, and explains many features of present-day society.

But to many men today the most interesting thing about society is its culture; just as the most interesting thing about an individual is his thought. Indeed, it has begun to be suspected that even politics and economics, each sometimes worshipped as a First Cause, are but secondary effects of something still deeper, namely, of the progress of man's intellectual life. The present volume aims to exhibit, as a unified whole, the state and progress of modern culture.