When it was published in 1968, a year noted for historic student protests on campuses across the country, The American University spoke in Jacques Barzun's characteristically wise and lucid voice about what colleges and universities were really meant to do--and how they actually worked. Drawing on a lifetime of extraordinary accomplishment as a teacher, administrator, and scholar, Barzun here describes the immense demands placed on the university by its competing constituencies--students, faculty, administrators, alumni, trustees, and the political world around it all. "American higher education is fortunate to have had a scholar and intellectual of Jacques Barzun's stature give so many years of service to the daily bread-and-butter details of running a great university and then share his reflections with us in a literate, humane, and engaging book."--Charles Donovan, America

Highly regarded here and abroad for some thirty works of cultural history and criticism, master historian Jacques Barzun has now set down in one continuous narrative the sum of his discoveries and conclusions about the whole of Western culture since 1500. In this account, Barzun describes what Western Man wrought from the Renaisance and Reformation down to the present in the double light of its own time and our pressing concerns. He introduces characters and incidents with his unusual literary style and grace, bringing to the fore those that have "Puritans as Democrats," "The Monarch's Revolution," "The Artist Prophet and Jester" -- show the recurrent role of great themes throughout the eras. The triumphs and defeats of five hundred years form an inspiring saga that modifies the current impression of one long tale of oppression by white European males. Women and their deeds are prominent, and freedom (even in sexual matters) is not an invention of the last decades. And when Barzun rates the present not as a culmination but a decline, he is in no way a prophet of doom. Instead, he shows decadence as the creative novelty that will burst forth -- tomorrow or the next day. Only after a lifetime of separate studies covering a broad territory could a writer create with such ease the synthesis displayed in this magnificent volume.

Twelve essays exploring aspects of literacy and art criticism, retrospective sociology and the effects of relativism on moral behavior.

"When an extremely intellectual, extremely experienced, extremely wise man shares his thoughts with others, the result seizes the imagination at once. Such is the effect of these essays, a series given as lectures at the National Gallery in 1973. Mr. Barzun examines art as religion, as destroyer, as redeemer, and in relation to what he calls "its temper, science", but never forgets the basic essential. As he says, "the last word on art should indeed be: mystery. But that need not stop any of us from dealing with it as if we understood more than we can". And how good it is to have one's mind stretched to that understanding of "more."--Virginia Quarterly Review

The House of Intellect embraces: persons who consciously and methodically employ the mind, the forms and habits governing the activities in which the mind is so employed, and the conditions under which these people and activities exist.