Cultural Dementia
Beschreibung:
David Andress is Professor of Modern History at the University of Portsmouth, and one of Britain's finest interpreters of the 18th and 19th centuries. His books include The French Revolution and the People (2004), The Terror (2005) and 1789 (2008). For Head of Zeus he has written a sharp polemic, Cultural Dementia: How the West Has Lost Its History and Risks Losing Everything Else - a book that analyses the rise of the National Front in France, Trump in the USA and the right-wing nationalists at the core of the Brexit project.
In this blistering book, David Andress shows how the West has abandoned its history and lost its memory.
The former great powers of the historic 'West' have abandoned themselves to senile daydreams of recovered youth. They have stirred up old hatreds given disturbing voice to destructive rage, and risked the collapse of their capacity for decisive, effective and just government.
At the core of this is an abandonment of political attention to history, understood as a clear empirical grounding in how we reached our present condition. In Britain, France and the USA, historical stories are deployed in public debate as little more than dangerous fantasies.
In this blistering book, David Andress shows how the West has abandoned its history and lost its memory.
A blistering assessment of the West's abandonment of history as it succumbs to an attack of social and cultural dementia, by leading historian David Andress.