The best history of ideas you’ve never heard of
The Western Intellectual Tradition by Jacob Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish
It’s a funny thing about the Western intellectual tradition that its accounts of itself, its histories of ‘ideas’, are often dry and turgid affairs.
When I think of some of the tomes I’ve encountered, images come to mind of their authors, of crusty old men in beautiful Oxbridge colleges which they have barely left in forty years; men for whom a life of study means sitting in an ivory tower and doing one’s best to avoid contact with the real world outside.
I actually rather like the image and the man imagined. There is something to be said for such a life.
But no doubt this cosy, detached set-up has its costs, not least in the products that come out of it, if they are meant to find a place with the general reader. My experiences of various attempts to collate the best thought of mankind or of ‘the West’ testify to that - so what a nice surprise it was to find a book I had never heard of that offers a lively contrast to the image.
The Western Intellectual Tradition was co-authored in 1960 by Jacob Bronowski (1908-1974), best-known for his 1973 BBC series The Ascent of Man, and Bruce Mazlish (1923-2016), who Bronowski teamed up with while a Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). I found it in a charity shop a few months ago, opened it at a random page, liked what I read and then happily handed over the £2 price quoted.
The presence of two authors from different traditions seems to hit a sweet spot of energy and creativity.