The wisdom and relevance of his salvo against Darwin, Marx, and Wagner endures, 80 years later.
Eighty years ago, in that ominous year 1941, the Franco-American historian Jacques Barzun (1903–2012) published a work of cultural history that has retained power and relevance when most such books, however worthy, live a life of temporary influence and then are occasionally consulted on the shelves of university libraries. Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage has had a longer and deeper subsequent influence, being republished in only slightly revised editions but with new prefaces in 1958 and 1981 and frequently reprinted in paperback. It is a great, antiseptic book, almost as necessary now as it was at the high tide of German National Socialist “racial science” and Soviet Communist “scientific socialism” in 1941, and just as these two ferocious states and ideologies commenced their terrible war on the European Eastern Front, caused by the unexpected betrayal by Hitler of the Nazi–Soviet “nonaggression pact” that had been in effect since August 1939 and that had allowed these two totalitarian predators to conquer, divide up, and devour the small, free states of Eastern Europe.
Barzun’s book was very timely as the political and even allegedly scientific prestige of Nazism and Communism was at its…
