Dynamics of World History - ISBN: 1882926781


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		"To be amused by what you read--that is the great spring of happy quotations." - C. E. Montague, 'A Writer's Notes on His Trade'

	Dynamics of World History
	by Christopher Dawson, John J. Mulloy (Editor)

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Product Details

Format: Hardcover, 500 pages

Publisher: ISI Books

ISBN: 1882926781

Release Date: Jan 12, 1980

In Brief
In scope and in vision Dawson's conception of history ranks with the work of men like Spengler, Northrop, and Toynbee. The New York Times said that "for breadth of knowledge and lucidity of style [Dawson] had few rivals." This classic Dawson work is a conspectus of his thought on universal history in all its depth and range. Containing thirty-one essays selected from his writings it gives a clear and fascinating picture of his achievement in helping to widen our perspective of world history and in identifying the central determinative importance of religion for the formation of culture.

From The Publisher
In scope and in vision Christopher Dawson's historiography ranks with the work of men like Spengler, Northrop, and Toynbee. Immensely learned and erudite, the scholarship of the British Catholic Dawson eventually earned him a professorship at Harvard University and widespread acknowledgment as one of the world's great historians. This book, assembled by John Mulloy with Dawson's cooperation, comprises Dawson's essential essays, providing the reader with an illuminating introduction to the sweep of his thought.

Several major themes run through Dawson's work, including the interdependence of history and sociology; the need to go beyond nationalist history toward a history of the entire process of cultural development; the need to study not abstract Man but particular men in their local relations, including their relations with the land; a trenchant critique of urban industrialism, rootless cosmopolitanism, and bourgeois culture; and a firm conviction of the radically destructive character of cultural imperialism. But perhaps the most unique aspect of Dawson's historiography was its unequivocal insistence on the determinative importance of religion in shaping and sustaining civilizations.

Religion, Dawson firmly believed, is the great creative force in any culture, and the loss of a society's historic religion therefore portends a process of social dissolution. For this reason Dawson concluded that Western society must find a way to revitalize its spiritual life if it is to avoid irreversible decay. Progress, the real religion of modernity, is insufficient to sustain cultural health. And an ahistorical, secularized Christianity is an oxymoron, a pseudo-religion only nominally related to the historical religion of the West.

Dawson held that the hope of the present age lay in the reconciliation of the religious tradition of Christianity with the intellectual tradition of humanism and the new knowledge about man and nature provided by modern science. Dynamics of World History shows that though such a task may be difficult, it is not impossible.

About the Author

Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) is widely regarded as one of the most important historians of the twentieth century. Dermot Quinn is Associate Professor of History at Seton Hall University.

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The Word On The Street
Christopher Dawson is one of the most important historians and cultural analysts of the twentieth century. The republication of this work is a major contribution to intellectual life.
— Professor of History, St. Louis University —James Hitchcock

Dynamics of World History is extraordinarily valuable, because it is much more than a Christopher Dawson compendium, or than an introduction to Dawson. It is a very carefully collected and edited quilt of Dawson's most important writings: a multicolored quilt, rather than a collection of disparate essays. It covers and comprises what it ought to cover and comprise; and the richness and the quality of Dawson's historical thinking will catch the eye of its readers at first sight.
— author, Five Days in London, May 1940. —John Lukacs

This third edition of The Dynamics of World History is a valuable and welcome resource for the renewed study of Christopher Dawson. With material drawn from his essays published over several decades, this volume is arranged to create a symmetric exploration of three distinguishable subjects: a consideration of history's relationship to all aspects of sociological study, a continuous narrative of world history itself, and a survey of ancient and modern philosophies of history. Consistently solid in information, eloquent in composition, and convincing in argument, this is a volume not prudently ignored by any serious student of sociology, history, philosophy, theology, or literature. —Patrick Henry Reardon

"The man who is fond of books is usually a man of lofty thought, and of elevated opinions."

Introduction by Dermot Quinn	vii
Preface to the 1978 edition, by John J. Mulloy	xxxi
Introduction to the 1958 edition, by John J. Mulloy	xli

part one: Toward a Sociology of History
section i: The Sociological Foundations of History

1. The Sources of Culture Change	3
2. Sociology as a Science	13
3. Sociology and the Theory of Progress	35
4. Civilization and Morals	47
5. Progress and Decay in Ancient and Modern Civilization	57
6. Art and Society	71
7. Vitality or Standardization in Culture	79
8. Cultural Polarity and Religious Schism	85
9. Prevision in Religion	95
10. T. S. Eliot on the Meaning of Culture	109

section ii: The Movement of World History

1. Religion and the Life of Civilization	119
2. The Warrior Peoples and the Decline of the Archaic Civilization	137
3. The Origins of Classical Civilization	157
4. The Patriarchal Family in History	165
5. Stages in Mankind's Religious Experience	175

section iii: Urbanism and the Organic Nature of Culture

1. The Evolution of the Modern City	199
2. Catholicism and the Bourgeois Mind	211
3. The World Crisis and the English Tradition	225
4. Bolshevism and the Bourgeoisie	237

part two: Conceptions of World History
section i: Christianity and the Meaning of History

1. The Christian View of History	245
2. History and the Christian Revelation	263
3. Christianity and Contradiction in History	275
4. The Kingdom of God and History	283

section ii: The Vision of the Historian

1. The Problem of Metahistory	303
2. St. Augustine and the City of God	311
3. Edward Gibbon and the Fall of Rome	341
4. Karl Marx and the Dialectic of History	369
5. H. G. Wells and the Outline of History	381
6. Oswald Spengler and the Life of Civilizations	389
7. Arnold Toynbee and the Study of History	405
8. Europe in Eclipse	419

Afterword by John J. Mulloy: Continuity and Development
in Christopher Dawson's Thought	427
Sources	483
Notes	487
Index	503

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