BARZUN, Jacques Martin

(b. 30 November 1907 in Créteil, France), cultural historian, educator, and college administrator best known for his wide-ranging scholarship and his consistent defense of the liberal arts and the humanist tradition.

The son of Henri Martin Barzun and Anna-Rose Barzun, Barzun was initiated into the life of the mind at a very early age. His father, a noted literary scholar, was a member of the Abbaye group, which included such renowned French men of letters as Jules Romains and Georges Duhamel. In the years before World War I, Barzun attended the Lycée Janson de Sailly in Paris. The shortage of teachers caused by the war compelled administrators to adopt the Lancaster system, in which the older students instructed the younger. Barzun thus received his first experience as a teacher at the age of nine.

Barzun's father came to the United States on a diplomatic mission in 1917, and Barzun followed two years later. In 1923, when he had not yet passed his sixteenth birthday, Barzun enrolled in Columbia University. Initially preparing for a career in law and the foreign service, Barzun eventually became captivated by the study of history, earning a B.A. in 1927, an M.A. in 1928, and a Ph.D. in 1932. He joined the faculty at Columbia in 1929, before completing his degree, and served as an instructor in history until 1937. Promoted to assistant professor in 1938, Barzun became an associate professor in 1942 and a full professor in 1945. In 1960 he was appointed Seth Low Professor of History, a chair he occupied until 1967, when he became University Professor of History, a position he held until his retirement in 1975. Between 1955 and 1958 Barzun was dean of graduate faculties at Columbia, and was subsequently dean of faculties and provost until 1967, then professor emeritus until 1975. Barzun became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1933, and married Marianna Lowell in August 1936; they had three children. Barzun's first wife died in 1979, and in June 1980 Barzun married Marguerite Davenport.

Although Barzun's rate of publication during the 1960s did not match his output during the 1940s and 1950s, he nonetheless produced several important and controversial books. In 1961 he reissued Classic, Romantic, and Modern, which had originally appeared in 1943 under the title Romanticism and the Modern Ego. A defense of the romantic sensibility, Classic, Romantic, and Modern also exemplifies Barzun's attempt to recover the ideas he still considered of value to contemporary society. The romantics, Barzun argued, were neither sentimental nor insipid. Rather, in answer to the numbing rationalism and scientism of the Enlightenment and the unsettled aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, they sought to fashion a new world through the robust application of intellect and imagination to a host of social, political, intellectual, and aesthetic problems. This thesis paralleled Barzun's conclusion in Science: The Glorious Entertainment (1964) that not all aspects of human experience could be illuminated by the scientific method.

According to Barzun, romanticism "expresses and exalts [man's] energetic, creative, expansive tendencies by recognizing that, although he is but a feeble creature lost in the universe, he has unpredictable powers that develop under stress of desire and risk." The destruction of romanticism in the twentieth century, as Barzun lamented in the epilogue to the revised edition of Classic, Romantic, and Modern, ensured "the elimination not alone of romanticist art and its sequels, but of all high art of the last five centuries." Anti-intellectual, sensational, and technical, modern art, Barzun contended, embraced an aesthetic of annihilation.

The publication of The American University: How It Runs, Where It Is Going (1968) earned Barzun both devoted partisans and embittered antagonists. Reiterating a defense of the liberal arts tradition that he had first articulated in The Teacher in America (1945), Barzun reaffirmed that the purpose of the university is to sustain "the unity of knowledge, the desire and power to teach, and the authority and skill to pass judgment on what claims to be knowledge.…" The operation of the university, however, is not, and can not be, democratic. Occupying different stations, teachers and students are not equals and it is dishonest and dangerous to pretend that they are. "Only rarely," Barzun wrote, does a teacher learn from a student, "a fact he does not know or a thought that is original and true.… [T]o make believe that their knowledge and his are equal is an abdication and a lie."

Barzun reserved special ire for radical students who sought the drama of "revolutionary experience" by replacing the true university with a "stimulation palace." Displaying an "indifference to clothes and cleanliness, a distrust and neglect of reasoning, [and] a freedom in sexuality," young militants demanded immediate "relevance" in their education or else pursued a "new religion" designed to resolve all "the perplexities of life." Some went further, envisioning the university as an experimental utopian society organized explicitly to advance black power, free love, or popular revolution. None of these objectives, Barzun attested, is compatible with the real aims of a university.

Most undergraduates, Barzun suggested, want not freedom but order in their lives. To enable them to escape "fever and frenzy," the university has to become a place of "respite and meditation." Radical critics such as Martin Duberman assailed Barzun's image of the university as well as his apparent disdain for students. Duberman and others insisted that Barzun focused so exclusively on grooming, hygiene, and manners that he had lost sight of the merits that the younger generation possessed: their sense of justice, their determination that the United States live up to its finest ideals, and their quest for meaning. To many who were part of the academic leftist movement of the 1960s, Barzun's criticisms of student attitudes and conduct seemed so inconsequential and idiosyncratic that they hardly merited a response. Yet, Duberman wrote, "Mandarins like Barzun … are so certain of the rightness of their own patterns of thought and action and so eager to denounce all deviations by the young from those patterns that they blind themselves (and others) to the serious questions this new generation has raised.…"

In addition to the titles previously mentioned, Barzun's essential works are Race: A Study in Modern Superstition (1937); Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage (1941); Berlioz and the Romantic Century (1950); God's Country and Mine: A Declaration of Love Spiced with a Few Harsh Words (1954); The House of Intellect (1959); The Use and Abuse of Art (1974); Clio and the Doctors: Psycho-History, Quanto-History and History (1974); A Stroll with William James (1983); A Word or Two Before You Go.… (1986). Since the 1960s, Barzun has continued his extraordinary career, translating, editing, or writing more than twenty books. The most recent, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present, was published in 2000 when Barzun was ninety-three years old. It became a surprise best-seller, thereby confirming his reputation as one of the most eminent men of letters in the modern world.

There is no biography of Barzun. Critical assessments of Barzun's scholarship during the 1960s include Victor Lange, "Romanticism and the Modern Ego," New Republic (18 Dec. 1961); Frank Kermode, "Europe by Candlelight," New Statesman (31 Aug. 1962); Martin Duberman, "On Misunderstanding Student Rebels," The Uncompleted Past (1969); Paul Wilkinson, "Redefinition and Defence: Jacques Barzun on the American University," Contemporary Review (Jan. 1970).

Mark G. Malvasi