Recent Developments in European Thought

“If mankind is now to go down” amid war and ruin, Francis Sydney Marvin writes, “the sunset sky at least is glorious.” What makes this battered age worth hoping for?

First given as a series of lectures, Marvin’s survey ranges across Western thought from the Franco-Prussian War to the close of the Great War. He sets political upheaval and the struggle for workers’ rights beside the astonishing expansion of science, from Darwin’s influence to new discoveries about matter. Progress, he suggests, is no simple march forward: the same generation that witnessed terrible conflict also built knowledge through cooperation and a living connection to the past. Against those who see only collapse, Marvin asks readers to look deeper than the wreckage. Can the age’s harvest of ideas help reveal what its crises mean—and where its path leads?

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