Letters of Jacob Burckhardt

Burckhardt was the most renowned of the historians of the nineteenth century to predict, with astonishing accuracy, the totalitarian direction that history could take -- and which history in fact did take in the twentieth century. It was in his letters, rather than in his lectures or longer works, that Burckhardt most directly addressed the currents of intellectual thought and social and political order -- or disorder -- of Europe in the nineteenth century. It was in his letters, for instance, that he warned that these currents portended the rise of a new kind of demagogue unique to the modern era. Such demagogues would, Burckhardt feared, respond to the complexities and confusions of modern life by becoming 'terrible simplifiers', marshalling masses of people into totalitarian regimes for simple solutions to complex challenges that would wreak havoc upon numerous countries and millions of lives. Not only are the letters addressed to some of the most important thinkers of the time (Nietzsche, Burckhardt's younger colleague at the University of Basel, among them), but also they address the most pressing issues and the most important personages of the era.

"There is much wisdom and insight in Jacob Burckhardt's words. He studied history carefully and attempted to learn from the past." --Allan C. Brownfeld, America's Future

"He writes as an extremely thoughtful and good human being, one who had absorbed during his lifetime an incredible number of facts, shaping them by reflection into meanings which make them sueful to the reader." --Manas

Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) has been called 'the most civilised historian of the nineteenth century', and he was certainly one of the greatest historians of art and culture of his time. A Professor at the University of Basel, Burckhardt was especially knowledgeable about the Renaissance.

As a rule, an author's correspondence possesses only a secondary interest, but Jacob Burckhardt's letters are of primary interest to students of history because of the nature of the man and of his major writings. Judgments on History and Historians, for example, consists not of Burckhardt's own lectures, but of notes on his lectures by one of his greatest students. It is because Burckhardt was a remarkably private man who believed that contemplation was the key to insight into the nature of man and history, and because his approach to the study of history was reflective rather than systematic or dogmatic, that his letters possess a singular significance. For it is in his letters that Burckhardt provides additional and even personal observations on his learned explorations of antiquity, the Renaissance, and modern Europe, and it is in his letters that Burckhardt muses on the consequences that he believed--and feared--awaited a Europe that had given itself almost wholly to a rationalistic and materialistic understanding of history and destiny. Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) has been called "the most civilized historian of the nineteenth century," and he was certainly one of the greatest historians of art and culture of his time. A professor at the University of Basel, Burckhardt was especially knowledgeable about the Renaissance, and his best-known work is The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy.

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