Customer Reviews

The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848-1914 (Yale Intellectual History of the West Se)

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This book is a part of the Yale Intellectual History of the West series, edited by J. W. Burrow, William Bouwsma, and Frank M. Turner. I bought this book in search of a contemporary synthesis for the period in question: 1848-1914. I wanted to learn more about the influence of such individuals as Darwin, Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx.

What I discovered, contrary to the alluring blurbs on the back of the book, was nearly impenetrable. I could not identify an argument from page to page, let alone a thesis for entire chapters. The author occasionally makes interesting pairings of individuals to discuss (Bakunin and Wagner, for instance) or statements about this or that, but the overall effect is frustratingly fragmentary and at times superficial. The latter is particularly in evidence in the author's coverage of Darwin and evolution. Having just read Gertrude Himmelfarb's Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (a masterwork of intellectual history), I wanted to place those particular ideas in a wider context. But Burrow gives them short shrift, devoting only a few pages to them.

I could forgive this shortcoming if it were limited to Darwin, but other heavyweights of the period receive the same abbreviated treatment. Although the author imparts a great deal of knowledge about lesser figures of the period, he seems unwilling to devote more attention to certain key individuals. I did not detect that this choice was dictated by some post-modern egalitarianism or equivalency, but I could not detect any coherence in the narrative, either.

It could be that I am not the intended reader for this book. The reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement concluded that the book was "for people who know about Taine and Renan, have heard of Virchow and Helmholtz, but have no idea that Johann Muller's laboratory in Berlin was 'an intellectual power-house of the mid-century.'" That description excludes me (a zero score), but if this book turns off an avid reader of the TLS (and an admirer of intellectual historians such as Crane Brinton and Arthur Lovejoy), it may only be appropriate for academic historians.

Those who are undeterred or unintimidated will still undoubtedly benefit from the book's decent index.

It is impossible to write a fully satisfactory intellectual history of a period, though there a number of ways to try. One can be encyclopedic. Lay it all out. Who were the major thinkers of the time period? What were they influential for? Why do we remember them today? What were the major ideas and schools? How did they change?

Or one could go to the opposite extreme. Develop a theme and relate everything to that theme. One could, say, take the title of this book seriously. "In the period prior to 1848, most influential thinkers had confidence in something they called "reason." By which ____ meant ____ and ____ meant _____. But this confidence was lost because ______ and replaced by ______, which is shown in __________.

And one constantly faces the question, "How much do I report the past on its own terms and how much do I make judgments: this idea was right; this one was wonderfully, fruitfully right; that idea was wrong; that other was dangerously wrong; and that one there was horribly, terribly, dangerously wrong."

Burrow doesn't go for a pure type. He assumes you already know a lot and he admits that a good deal of the selection is idiosyncratic. There are few obvious themes that the reader can follow through the book to make it hang together. Some ideas are criticized; some are just presented--seemingly without rhyme or reason.

And speaking of rhyme, or rather rhythm: There are too many sentences like, "Though intellectually inconclusive and resting on a mistaken analogy, the use of Social Darwinist rhetorics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not, so far as one can judge, negligible in its consequences, in the sense that for those who used them or took them seriously they tended always, as one might say, to raise the stakes: to create a sense of permanent crisis and to make vast issues of progress or retrogression, of national, cultural or racial triumph, survival or extinction appear to depend on policy alternatives." (p. 95)

I think it is possible to pull apart that sentence and determine what the author means, but it would be nicer IF THE AUTHOR HAD DONE IT HIMSELF.

The author's not inconsiderable wit is often ruined by a tin ear. "It is hard not to feel that someone with the nervous system of Kaiser Wilhelm II should ideally never be allowed near a phrase like `the struggle for existence'." (95 again) Why is that "ideally" there?

Reading the book was like driving a long forested road. It curved to one side and then another, gently rose and fell several times a mile, on and on for 253 pages. At the end I'd seen lots of trees, but I didn't have a feel for how (or whether) they fit together. I didn't know if the road had a shape, and whether I'd wound up ten miles from where I started or a hundred.

I give the book 4 stars for information, 2 for organization and style.