the modern mind an intellectual history of the 20th century

Leavis to Jacques Derrida), art (Picasso to Warhol), economics (Milton Friedman to John Kenneth Galbraith), science (Linus Pauling to E.O. At a frenetic pace, he gallops through the modern intellectual landscape, pausing long enough to graze the founts of philosophy (from Wittgenstein to Richard Rorty to Alasdair MacIntyre), literature (Kafka, Woolf, Mann, Rushdie), literary criticism (F.R. British journalist Watson's (War on the Mind The Caravaggio Conspiracy etc.) panoramic survey traces various 20th-century ideas and their power to bend and shape society and individuals. Just as the 20th century dawned with an unparalleled optimism regarding the moral, social and scientific progress of humanity, it ended with an unshakeable confidence in the promises of technology and the power of free-market economics to deliver a better life for all humankind. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. Unlike more conventional histories, in which the focus is on political events and personalities, The Modern Mind is an illuminating blueprint of twentieth-century thought and culture and the men and women who created it.

Watson emphasizes that 'the century may be understood as a period during which the scientific method colonized all modes of thought and changed the way thinking is done.' He sees the first half of the century as a period of discovery and the last half as a period of analysis, synthesis, and understanding, and he explores the role of the United States in setting the century's agenda in many areas.

The book is divided into four parts - Freud to Wittgenstein Spengler to Animal Farm Sartre to the Sea of Tranquillity the counterculture to Kosovo - and there are forty-two chapters. Beginning with four seminal ideas that were introduced in 1900 - the unconscious, the gene, the quantum, and Picasso's first paintings in Paris-Peter Watson has produced a fluent and engaging narrative of the intellectual tradition of the past century. From Freud to Babbitt, from Relativity to Susan Sontag, from Proust to Henri Bergson to Saul Bellow, the books range is encyclopedic, covering the major writers, artists, scientists, and philosophers who produced the ideas by which we live. This major narrative history of the people and ideas that shaped the modern world is a brilliantly reasoned examination of the thought and individuals that made twentieth-century culture.

The modern mind an intellectual history of the 20th century