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A Century Coming Full Circle
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21924 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1993 |
2,310 Words |
| Author
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Paul Gottfried
Paul Gottfried is a senior editor of the Modern Thought
section of The World & I and author of The Search for
Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right. |
THE END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
AND THE END OF THE MODERN AGE
John Lukacs
New York: Tickner and Fields, 1993
291 pp., $21.95
PREPARING FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Paul Kennedy
New York: Random House, 1993
428 pp., $25.00
John Lukacs' newest book has brought him the kind of media fame that could either be cumulative or sudden. Having already authored seventeen books, mostly on contemporary history, and having produced essays for such journals as the New Yorker, Foreign Affairs, Atlantic, and harpers, it is not surprising that his published reflections on the state of the world at the end of the twentieth century are receiving widespread attention. More noteworthy, however, is the scope of the attention: two generally complimentary reviews in the New York Times, an excerpt from his book in Harpers, and lavish commendations from historians and scholars across the country.
Although Lukacs admits that there is little in his newest work that he has not said and published before, his thoughts and phrases have by now caught on. Through much of adult life (he is now sixty-eight) Lukacs has taught at a small Catholic, girls' college in suburban Philadelphia. Despite his multilingual education and his knowledge of diplomatic and cultural history, this Hungarian-born scholar, with a doctorate from Columbia, spent much of his career enduring insults from academic historians who questioned the professionalism of his scholarship.
Lukacs has always cultivated an impressionistic style; and though capable of producing densely documented research, his position is that history is a body of knowledge constantly being reshaped by our changing historical consciousness. His prose is heavily punctuated by parenthetic afterthoughts. He often begins to explain some idea occasioned by his material, but breaks off his provocative digression by saying "we shall let this pass." Though deliberate and absorbing, his style has infuriated American academic historians in the past. But now such critics seem to have gone into hiding. Foreign Affairs, Kirkus Reviews, and other journals honored in academia have proclaimed Lukacs a great "literary stylist" and a "master of narrative history."
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