Most Important Concepts

Action Points

Chapter Recap

Introduction:

• History makes no leaps, what happened today germinated generations ago.
• Culture emphasizes the individual rather than society, original creation rather than preservation and duplication, prototypes rather than mass production, an aesthetic look on life rather than an ethical one.
• Civilization represents a crystallization of the preceding parent culture, basically uncreative, culturally sterile, but efficient in its mass organization, practical and ethical.
  • Civilization aims at the gradual standardization of increasingly large masses of men within a rigidly mechanical framework - masses of ”common men” who think alike, feel alike, thrive on conformism, are willing to bow to vast bureaucratic structures, and in whom the social instinct predominates over the creative individual.

Part 1 - Europe: The new Greece

1 - Seedtime: Renaissance and reformation

2 - Foundation of the new Rome

3 - The age of enlightenment

4 - The age of revolution

5 - The fateful decisions

Part 2 - America: The new Rome

6 - Hellenistic and Victorian ages

7 - The turning point

8 - The rule of law

9 - Growth and expansion

10 - The rise of democracy

11 - Jackson and the new presidency