At the End of an Age [Hardcover]

John Lukacs (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2002

A reflection on the nature of historical and scientific knowledge. Of broad philosophical, religious and historical scope, it is the product of a historian's lifetime of thought on the subject of his discipline and the human condition. While running counter to most of the accepted ideas and doctrines of our time, it seeks to offer a compelling framework for understanding history, science and man's capacity for self-knowledge. In the work, John Lukacs describes how we in the Western world have now been living through the ending of an entire historical age that began in Western Europe about 500 years ago. Unlike people during the ending of the Middle Ages or the Roman Empire, we can know where we are. But how and what is it that we know? In John Lukacs's view, there is no science apart from scientists, and all of "science", including our view of the universe, is a human creation, imagined and defined by fallible human beings in a historical continuum. This radical and reactionary assertion - in its way a "summa" of the author's thinking, expressed here and there in many of his previous 20-or-so books - leads to his fundamental assertion that, contrary to all existing cosmological doctrines and theories, it is this earth which is the very centre of the universe - the only universe we know and can know.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"We have arrived at the stage of history when we must begin thinking about thinking itself. This is something as different from philosophy as it is from psycho-analysis," writes celebrated historian John Lukacs (Five Days in London, May 1940) in At the End of an Age, an extended essay on the problems of history. Continuing the argument he began in earlier books, Lukacs elaborates on his notion that we're at the end of the modern age that began with the Renaissance, and that this period calls for a reconsideration of the idea of objectivity in history and science, two disciplines that create rather than describe the world that they seek to understand.

From Library Journal

The author of over 20 books (Five Days in London: May 1940, etc.), Lukacs argues that our entire civilized "Modern Age" of science, reason, democracy, and capitalism is coming to an end. His own thoughts are especially influenced by the ideas of Pierre Duhem, Heisenberg, and Tocqueville. The author stresses the necessity of taking a historical perspective seriously, yet he ignores the obvious ramifications of organic evolution, which places human existence totally within a naturalistic (not idealistic) framework. Moreover, Lukacs is critical of giving priority to scientific knowledge and philosophical materialism. He even maintains that both this planet and our species are unique in the whole universe. Many readers will not accept his position that mind precedes and is the key to understanding matter. Furthermore, they will not readily dismiss the enormous contributions made by Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Einstein to a sound comprehension of and proper appreciation for mental activity, evolved humankind, and dynamic nature. Unfortunately, Lukacs neither speculates on what the emerging next age might be like nor discusses what could replace science and reason in the human quest for truths. Although insightful (particularly in its treatment of Adolf Hitler in terms of historical unpredictability), this esoteric book is suitable for larger academic library collections only. H. James Birx, Canisius Coll., Buffalo, NY
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (April 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300092962
• ISBN-13: 978-0300092967
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #936,874 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Scholarly, yet well written and meaningful., May 26, 2002

By 

OAKSHAMAN "oakshaman" (Algoma, WI United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: At the End of an Age (Hardcover)

This is that most rare of scholarly books, namely, one that is well written and meaningful. Briefly, Mr. Lukacs holds that much of what came into being in western society, and is largely taken for granted even though it didn't exist in the Middle Ages, is disappearing or collapsing. This list includes the state (and it's ability to provide law and order to the common citizen), money (of any REAL value), industry, cities, books and literacy, and the right to privacy. None of this is too shocking, since, as he points out, even the common working man in a bar can readily recognise the analogy between American, or western, civilization and Roman civilization.

I find it interesting how more and more first rate minds, like Jacques Barzun (Dawn to Decadence) and Morris Berman (The Twilight of American Culture) are coming to quite simular historical summations. It seems that one no longer has to be a science fiction writer, pestimistic paranoid, or religious fanatic to see that we are nearing the end of of anything worth terming civilization.

Lukacs holds that the future struggle will be between those who hold that men are mere machines and those who hold that we are creatures (in a spiritual sense.) Put me down as a creature, please.

28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Thinking about our Place in History, June 10, 2002

By 

Wiltrud Goldschmidt (Pennsylvania, United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: At the End of an Age (Hardcover)

A lifetime of writing, teaching, reading and thinking about History has been distilled in these pages. "At the hour of sunset" John Lukacs contemplates the passing of the "Modern Age" which began about 500 years ago with the Renaissance and proceeded through the Age of Enlightenment, producing the modern state. The 20th century, in Lukacs' view, has seen a rapid dissolution and malfunctioning of the ideals and institutions of the Modern Age, and the idea of "Progress" has been severely compromised. He shows how concepts like "liberalism" and "conservatism" have become perverted and meaningless. ("All the -isms are -wasms", says a wag).

In the work of celebrated thinkers like Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Einstein, Lukacs sees the common thread of determinism, which constrains human potential and responsibility. The pursuit of truth - in scientific as well as in historical thinking - has become ever more ambiguous; the limits of objectivity have been recognized. Ranke's famous dictum that the historian describes "what really happened" is an unfulfillable desideratum. "The purpose of the historian is not the establishment of perfect truth but the pursuit of truth through a reduction of ignorance, including untruths".

The Heisenberg Principle of Uncertainty or Indeterminacy (which Einstein refused to accept) states that the very act of observing or measuring may alter a physical object. A similar effect obtains in other areas, especially in mass democratic societies (Lukacs mentions phenomena involving popularity and publicity as examples). The "human inseparability of the knower from the known means the inevitable participation of the knower in the known".

Human thought is central to the interpretation of the universe. Hence, we must acknowledge that our thinking of the world is unavoidably anthropomorphic, just as our exploration of the universe is inevitably geocentric. "Thinking about thinking" becomes increasingly important. And for Lucacs, a contemplation of history cannot exclude a contemplation of God. At a time when men are capable of destroying much of the world, including themselves, it behooves them to rethink the essential meaning of their place in history.

This book (the author calls it an "extended essay") is an erudite and impassioned appeal to our historical consciousness. It may make some people very uncomfortable; others undoubtedly will derive from it only what fits into their own preconceptions. But there it is - waiting to be read.

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If Lukacs is right the implications are mind boggling, January 16, 2004

By 

DAVID-LEONARD WILLIS (Thessaloniki Greece) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: At the End of an Age (Paperback)

Fleeing from a not yet wholly Sovietized Hungary to the US, Lukacs was convinced 20 years ago that the entire Modern Age was crumbling fast. By 2002 he was able to write that during the past 10 years his conviction had hardened into an unquestioning belief that not only an entire age and the civilization to which he belonged, were passing but that we are living through - if not already beyond - its very end. Even ordinary people when confronted with the moral rottenness with which we are surrounded conjure up thoughts of the last days of the Roman Empire and have a gut feeling that we are seeing the end of the European Age which began about 500 years ago. As late as 1914 the entire continent of Africa was governed by Europe but after two disastrous world wars and 80 years later there is not one European-ruled African state and European colonists have left their Asian homelands. To the observant, the European Age was clearly over by 1945 when super power status was with the US and with Russia. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall we are living through one of the greatest changes in the entire history of mankind - a period when history is being made by majorities whereas it has been made by minorities in the past and when the aristocratic era has been replaced by democracy. Most of the great minds and artists of the last 500 years had bourgeois origins; the Bourgeois Age was the age of the state, money, industry, cities, privacy, family, schooling, representation and science all of which are declining except for the last two. Evidence of decay is mixed with elements of lasting progress such as health, longevity, material comforts, cheap travel, democracy, working conditions and state welfare, but these should not blind us to the reality of decline.

The period from 1914 to 1989 was a transitional period and we are now in a new era. The last time something like this happened was 500-600 years ago but then it involved a small minority of people creating the Renaissance, which is not happening now. At the end of the Modern Age, for the first time in 200 years, more and more people in more and more fields of life, have begun to question the idea of progress. A great division among the American people has begun between unthinking believers in technology and economic determination and those who question and publicly oppose more concrete, more automobiles and more noisy machinery ruling their lives. We must engage in a radical rethinking of progress, history, science, limitations of our knowledge and of our place in the universe and this is what this book is all about.

Having set the scene, the author devotes several chapters to justifying his argument and it is not until chapter 5: At the Center of the Universe that he says: "And now I arrive at the most dramatic proposition of this book. Contrary to all accepted ideas we must now, at the end of an Age, recognize that we, and our earth, are at the center of our universe. We did not create the universe. But the universe is our invention; and, as are all human and mental inventions, time-bound, relative, and potentially fallible." He goes on to say that such a hypothesis is neither arrogant nor stupid but hopes that for some people there may be a faint echo of truth. There exists evidence of our central situation in the universe and this means that we must proceed not from a proud but a chastened view of ourselves, of our situation, and of our thinking.

Nearing the end of the book Lukacs refers to God. "Throughout this little book I have insisted on the importance of thinking - more exactly: on the present and increasing importance of thinking about thinking. But now I must go further than that - to say something not about thinking but about beliefs." "And now - especially, but perhaps not exclusively for Christians - I must argue for the recognition of our central situation not only in space but also in time. In sum, that the coming of Christ to this earth may have been? no that it was, the central event of the universe; that the greatest, the most consequential event in the entire universe has occurred here, on this earth. The Son of God has not visited this earth during a tour of stars or planets, making a Command Performance for us, arriving from some other place and - perhaps - going off to some other place."

If Lukacs is right in what he has written, the implications are mind boggling. All thinking people should read this book and take to heart the author's point about the importance of thinking about thinking. This book may well prove to be the watershed in our lives.