Books: Doom, gloom, hope

There's a good reason intellectuals are always so depressed | George Grant

Ideas have consequences. Bad ideas have bad consequences. If ever there were any doubts, these provocative new books would quickly dispel them.

Arthur Herman is a professor at George Mason University and the coordinator of the Western Civilization program at the Smithsonian Institution. Disturbed by the pervading sense of pessimism in American academia, he began to explore the roots of our current cultural self-immolation. The Idea of Decline in Western History is the result of that study.

Surveying the pessimistic assault on the virtues of Christendom evident in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, W.E.B. DuBois, Oswald Spengler, Herbert Marcuse, Michael Foucault, Paul Erlich, and Noam Chomsky, the book ranges across the entire landscape of modern thought.