BOOKS
485
Democratic hindsight should not prompt the thought that Metter–
nich 's policy of suppression was doomed from the start and that the
monarchists were plain evildoers. To the question who wants
another twenty-five years of war and revolution? the reasonabl e
answer was nobody la hyperbolel. The universal need was stability
and peace, and there seemed no other recourse but Legitimacy; that
is, the appeal to long-established forms and rulers.
It
was the com–
mon-sense position.
Question: Did Legitimacy have
to
take the Metternichian form? And, on
the other end of the political spectrum: In responding
to
the French Rev–
olution, its passions and its terrors, Barzun, consistent with his double
view of past events, does not partake in the currently fashionable repu–
diation of it. He understands the reasons for its militancy and its endur–
ing effects. Though he sympathizes with the romanticist reaction against
the Enlightenment (its pragmatic feeling for concreteness and partiCL1-
larity) as a correction
to
the universalizing bias of the Enlightenment, he
provides a scrupulous and generous account of Enlightenment ideas and
aspirations. His presentations of Voltaire, Diderot, and other Encyclo–
pedists are among the pleasures of the book. Here Barzun follows
Burkhardt in his
Judgments on History.
"Our moral criticism of past
ages can easily be mistaken. It transfers present-day desiderata
to
the
past. It views personalities according
to
set principles and makes too lit–
tle allowance for the urgencies of the moment," as does much of the
postmodern practice of "historical" writing and literary criticism.
What
to
make of Barzun's thesis in the final section of the volume that
we live in a time of decadence? Even his most sympathetic reviewers find
it the most problematic part. First, we need to be clear about what
Barzun means by decadence. It defines a time like our own when the
absurd is no longer considered eccentric by the leading thinkers, artists,
and writers in society, but has in fact become the norm; its defining phi–
losophy is Existentia li sm . Although Barzun has little
to
say about post–
modernism (Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan are conspicuously
absent from his discussion), it seems reasonable
to
infer that he views
it as a belated version of existentialist bafflement at the incoherence of
the world. (The difference between Existentia li sm and postmodern phi–
losophy is that existentia lists try
to
transcend the absurd whereas post–
modernists cheerfully embrace it.) "The blow that hurled tbe modern
world on its course of self-destruction [a phrase for decadence] was the
Great War of
1914-18."
World War I receives more attention than
World War II (Barzun is persuasively graph ic in describing its horrors
