From Freud to Babbitt, from Animal Farm to Sartre to the Great Society, from the Theory of Relativity to counterculture to Kosovo, The Modern Mind is encyclopedic, covering the major writers, artists, scientists, and philosophers who produced the ideas by which we live. Peter Watson has produced a fluent and engaging narrative of the intellectual tradition of the twentieth century, and the men and women who created it.
Customer Reviews
Like a huge table of delicious hors d’oeuvres:
It took weeks of on-and-off reading to finally finish this 770-page “intellectual history of the 20th Century”. An amazing feat–summarizing every significant idea of the era. Inevitably superficial, often so much so that it leaves the reader as puzzled as enlightened. But it’s the kind of book that sets your mind churning with almost every page and, like a good quotation book, stirs you to want to read the original works. It sharpens your regret over all those college courses you passed up. It also makes you intellectually modest. “The more you know, the more you realize how much you don’t know”.
The Modern Mind:
This purports to be an intellectual history of the 20th century. It’s that and more. Science, literature, art, and technology are discussed as well.
Bloody good read. This is especially suggested to those grandparents attempting to teach grandkids about their own growing up
Pretty Much as Advertised:
Dense, erudite and challenging, but never boring: An 800-page panoramic view of the intellectual history of the 20th Century. It follows both the paradigms and the paradigm shifts in the arts, humanities and most of all in the sciences — paradigms and shifts that have taken place over the 20th Century mostly in the Western world.
All of the big ideas and the people that introduced them are present, accounted for, and are neatly and economically summarized, in context. The core elements of most of the key intellectual ideas and theories across a vast expanse of the intellectual landscape — from Freud to Nietzsche, and Darwin to Einstein — that have driven us from Modernism to Post-modernism are given with the historical connective tissue left in.
Importantly, the author makes a distinction between “cultural” and “intellectual” history and advances; between “big ideas” and “big people” and “big events” that normally drive history and uses these distinctions as a tool for ignoring the latter two; thus paring down his selections to a manageable size. As a result, the book has a unity that is simply uncanny in its utter coherence and precision.
What an exhilarating ride. Intellectual history doesn’t get much better than this. Read and enjoy. Amen
Five Stars
The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century:
This book is for those who think they are intellectauls, aspire to being intellectuals or have proof that they are intellectuals including being told so by one or more of their mentor/gurus. I made a present of a copy to a doctor of education and a University of Chicago graduate. I like it so much that I bought another book by author, Peter Watson called Ideas, etc. and it is also a winner.
Excellent though flawed intellectual history of the 20th century:
Peter Watson, holding a number of research degrees, offers a comprehensive intellectual history of the 20th century in this book. Not being an easy read, it takes some time to get through.
The main strengths of this book are placing the intellectual development of the 20th century in its economic and social context. This is quite an achievement, considering the remarkable scientific and technological advances and the fragmentation of human knowledge into many small and specialised areas in very arcane topics.
Watson tends to cover science the best, and provides excellent accounts of the development and progress of 20th century science, including the theories of relativity, quantum mechanics, scientific cosmology, evolutionary biology and the discovery of the gene. However, the book falls down in some parts where it covers philosophy. Watson dismisses Husserl’s Phenomenology as ‘abstract’ and of little importance, when in fact Phenomenology was probably the most important philosophical school in the 20th century along with analytical philosophy, founded by Russell and Wittgeinstein, and attracted so many leading European minds to philosophy in a time when science was at its zenith of glory.
Overall though, Watson’s work is a very important attempt to see where we are in what we know, and where we are going.
