2021 Jacques Barzun Prize

The recipient selected for the 2021 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History is Paul Betts in recognition of his book Ruin and Renewal: Civilizing Europe After World War II (Basic Books, 2020).  Dr. Betts is a Professor of Modern History at St. Anthony’s College, University of Oxford.

Is the concept of civilization a grand illusion or an indispensable part of historical and political thinking?   Professor Betts’ remarkable book offers interesting answers to this question and also explores what it means to ask it.   He looks at the modern workings of ‘this old, troublesome, and much-maligned principle’, and suggests that a preoccupation with the fate of civilization is …  less the product of peace and prosperity than the result of rupture, vulnerability, and the drive for reform’.  After World War II, Professor Betts says, ‘the contest for civilization inspired a mixed crowd of advocates on both sides of the Iron Curtain’, and the title of his last chapter’ – ‘New Iron Curtains’ – offers us a sobering reminder of where we are.   ‘A new specter is haunting Europe’, but it is not Communism, and it is haunting other places too.  It is whatever mixture of racism, reaction and privilege Donald Trump meant to evoke when in 2017 he said we needed to defend the ‘civilized world’.  Or for that matter, what Winston Churchill meant when in 1947 he said ‘the real demarcation between Europe and Asia…  is… a system of beliefs and ideas which we call Western Civilization’.

Fortunately, civilization has other meanings, and Professor Betts tracks a large number of them through different, consecutive contexts: relief work and reconstruction after the war; encounters between religion and international politics; science, culture and domestic life as features of modern civility; the end of an old empire-dominated world; the rise and supposed fall of multiculturalism; the recurrence of colonial wars as ‘referenda on the myth of European civilization’.   Certain key events and figures emerge: the Nuremberg Trials, the Geneva  Convention, the Algerian War, the cultural work of UNESCO; Cardinal Mindszenty, Leopold Senghor, Pope John Paul II, Mikhael Gorbachev  -  Professor Betts says the meeting of the last two persons in 1989 was ‘perhaps the most dramatic episode that indicated the changing shape of European politics’.  And through it all ‘the bruised concept of civilization’ survives, even if its meanings often contradict each other.   The notions that a campaign could be waged ‘to civilize war itself’’, while civilization is also ‘a favorite rhetorical weapon’, do not sit comfortably together.    But Ruin and Renewal is not a comfortable book; it is a constant provocation to thought.

The Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History is awarded annually to the author whose book exhibits distinguished work in American or European cultural history.  Established by a former student of Jacques Barzun, the prize honors this historian and cultural critic who was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1984.   

The selection committee consisted of Michael Wood (chair), Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Princeton University; David Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley; and Robert B. Pippin, Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor, Committee on Social Thought, Department of Philosophy, University of Chicago.