Del amanecer a la decadencia

The historian Jacques Barzun, internationally recognized for his more than thirty works on history and cultural criticism, offers us in a unique narration the sum of his discoveries and conclusions on Western culture since the year 1500. He describes the forging of Western man from from the Renaissance and the Reformation to the present, under a double light: that of those times and that of our interests at the dawn of the 21st century. The triumphs and defeats that occurred in those five hundred years make up an inspired saga that modifies the vision of this period as a time of oppression by white European men. Women and their exploits are outstanding, and freedom (even sexual) is not an invention of the last few decades. And when Barzun values ??the present as a decline and not as a culmination, he does not do so as an apocalyptic prophet at all. On the contrary, he shows that decadence is the inevitable closure of great epochs, a necessary condition for the creation of novelty, which will emerge soon, perhaps tomorrow.