Product Description

A reflection on the nature of historical and scientific knowledge. Of broad philosophical, religious and historical scope, it is the product of a historian's lifetime of thought on the subject of his discipline and the human condition. While running counter to most of the accepted ideas and doctrines of our time, it seeks to offer a compelling framework for understanding history, science and man's capacity for self-knowledge. In the work, John Lukacs describes how we in the Western world have now been living through the ending of an entire historical age that began in Western Europe about 500 years ago. Unlike people during the ending of the Middle Ages or the Roman Empire, we can know where we are. But how and what is it that we know? In John Lukacs's view, there is no science apart from scientists, and all of "science", including our view of the universe, is a human creation, imagined and defined by fallible human beings in a historical continuum. This radical and reactionary assertion - in its way a "summa" of the author's thinking, expressed here and there in many of his previous 20-or-so books - leads to his fundamental assertion that, contrary to all existing cosmological doctrines and theories, it is this earth which is the very centre of the universe - the only universe we know and can know.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #637683 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

Review
"He brings to all his writings a Central European wit, charm, and realism." Michael Korda, Harper's Magazine

About the Author
John Lukacs is the widely known author of more than twenty book on history, including Five Days in London (0 300 08466 8, pb. [pound]7.99*) and A Thread of Years (0 300 08075 1, pb. [pound]12.95*), both published by Yale University Press.

Customer Reviews

This book may be the watershed in our lives
Fleeing from a not yet wholly Sovietized Hungary to the US, Lukacs was convinced 20 years ago that the entire Modern Age was crumbling fast. By 2002 he was able to write that during the past 10 years his conviction had hardened into an unquestioning belief that not only an entire age and the civilization to which he belonged, were passing but that we are living through - if not already beyond - its very end. Even ordinary people when confronted with the moral rottenness with which we are surrounded conjure up thoughts of the last days of the Roman Empire and have a gut feeling that we are seeing the end of the European Age which began about 500 years ago. As late as 1914 the entire continent of Africa was governed by Europe but after two disastrous world wars and 80 years later there is not one European-ruled African state and European colonists have left their Asian homelands. To the observant, the European Age was clearly over by 1945 when super power status was with the US and with Russia. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall we are living through one of the greatest changes in the entire history of mankind - a period when history is being made by majorities whereas it has been made by minorities in the past and when the aristocratic era has been replaced by democracy. Most of the great minds and artists of the last 500 years had bourgeois origins; the Bourgeois Age was the age of the state, money, industry, cities, privacy, family, schooling, representation and science all of which are declining except for the last two. Evidence of decay is mixed with elements of lasting progress such as health, longevity, material comforts, cheap travel, democracy, working conditions and state welfare, but these should not blind us to the reality of decline.

The period from 1914 to 1989 was a transitional period and we are now in a new era. The last time something like this happened was 500-600 years ago but then it involved a small minority of people creating the Renaissance, which is not happening now. At the end of the Modern Age, for the first time in 200 years, more and more people in more and more fields of life, have begun to question the idea of progress. A great division among the American people has begun between unthinking believers in technology and economic determination and those who question and publicly oppose more concrete, more automobiles and more noisy machinery ruling their lives. We must engage in a radical rethinking of progress, history, science, limitations of our knowledge and of our place in the universe and this is what this book is all about.

Having set the scene, the author devotes several chapters to justifying his argument and it is not until chapter 5: At the Center of the Universe that he says: "And now I arrive at the most dramatic proposition of this book. Contrary to all accepted ideas we must now, at the end of an Age, recognize that we, and our earth, are at the center of our universe. We did not create the universe. But the universe is our invention; and, as are all human and mental inventions, time-bound, relative, and potentially fallible." He goes on to say that such a hypothesis is neither arrogant nor stupid but hopes that for some people there may be a faint echo of truth. There exists evidence of our central situation in the universe and this means that we must proceed not from a proud but a chastened view of ourselves, of our situation, and of our thinking.

Nearing the end of the book Lukacs refers to God. "Throughout this little book I have insisted on the importance of thinking - more exactly: on the present and increasing importance of thinking about thinking. But now I must go further than that - to say something not about thinking but about beliefs." "And now - especially, but perhaps not exclusively for Christians - I must argue for the recognition of our central situation not only in space but also in time. In sum, that the coming of Christ to this earth may have been? no that it was, the central event of the universe; that the greatest, the most consequential event in the entire universe has occurred here, on this earth. The Son of God has not visited this earth during a tour of stars or planets, making a Command Performance for us, arriving from some other place and - perhaps - going off to some other place."

If Lukacs is right in what he has written, the implications are mind boggling. All thinking people should read this book and take to heart the author's point about the importance of thinking about thinking. This book may well prove to be the watershed in our lives.