Civilization

On 21 September 2001, George W. Bush told Congress 'This is civilization's fight.' A month later he said 'I'm not moving on because we're in a fight for civilization itself.' European leaders described the 11 September attacks as 'a declaration of war against the entire civilized world' by a force 'dedicated to the destruction of civilization'. But what do we mean by civilization? We have a vague belief in a Western tradition of openness and freedom that has produced a good life for its citizens and a culture of enormous depth and creative power. But the history of our civilization is also filled with unspeakable brutality. For every Leonardo there is a Torquemada, for every Beethoven symphony a concentration camp, for every Chrysler Building a My Lai massacre. How can we come to the defence of a civilization whose benefits seem so questionable?In this ambitious and important book Roger Osborne shows that we can only understand and take comfort in our civilization by re-examining and confronting our past. The barbarity in Western history can no longer be explained away as base human brutality breaking through the restraining bonds of civilization. Instead we need to see that civilization is itself a hazardous enterprise, creating enormous challenges to humans as moral social beings - challenges that we sometimes fail. "Civilization" tells the story of the Western world from its origins to the present. Sweeping in its scope and comprehensive in its coverage, "Civilization" covers everything from the siege of Troy to the Gettysburg address, from Charlemagne to the European Union and from Aristotle to John Rawls. Filled with the voices of the past - including Herodotus, Pericles, Cicero, St Paul, Plotinus, St Augustine, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Cervantes, Locke, Voltaire, Jefferson, Gibbon, Darwin, Marx, Weber, Roosevelt and Arendt, to name just a few - the book ends with an assessment of the present state of Western civilization in the light of its past - and an indication of how it might go about the urgent task of renewing itself. At such a dangerous time in the world's history this remarkable and compelling book is required reading.

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Roger Osborne's previous books include The Floating Egg: Episodes in the Making of Geology, The Deprat Affair: Ambition, Revenge and Deceit in French Indo-China and The Dreamer of the Calle San Salvador: Visions of Sedition and Sacrilege in Sixteenth-Century Spain. He lives in Scarborough.

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