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21 Review of Jacob Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish, The Western Intellectual Tradition (London: Hutchinson, 1960)
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Published:July 2023
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Abstract
This “lively, competent, serviceable introduction” to the history of political and scientific ideas exhibits significant “blemishes.” First, it labors under mistaken impressions. The reader “may need to be warned that Socrates did not write dialogues, that the Middle Ages did not believe that “men cannot develop, and have nothing in them which is personal and creative,”… that there was virtually no serfdom in western Europe in the eighteenth century, [and] that George III was not “determined to impose an absolute rule on America as on England.” Second, the book’s omissions are grave. “This is an intellectual history from which we learn nothing of the importance of the Jesuits, Hooker, Grotius, Spinoza, the Bollandists, Richard Simon, Leibniz, Vico, Swift, Lessing, Herder, Coleridge, and which neglects the Counter-Reformation, the transition from natural law as a norma agendi to natural right as a facultas agendi, the quarrel of the ancients and moderns, and the origins of the idea of progress.” Third, the book is “conventional” in its ideas, with praises for merit distributed to thinkers who represent the march forward to currently favored social themes. “The Western intellectual tradition has produced another kind of history-writing, which does not judge the past by its contribution to the present, awarding marks to forward-looking minds, and which can extend the same sympathy to Pascal and Burke as to Bayle and Rousseau, because it regards every generation as equidistant from eternity.”
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