Cultural Dementia: How the West has Lost its History, and Risks Losing Everything Else

(Hardback)

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In this blistering book, David Andress shows how the West has abandoned its history and lost its memory. The former great powers of the historic 'West' have abandoned themselves to senile daydreams of recovered youth. They have stirred up old hatreds given disturbing voice to destructive rage, and risked the collapse of their capacity for decisive, effective and just government. At the core of this is an abandonment of political attention to history, understood as a clear empirical grounding in how we reached our present condition. In Britain, France and the USA, historical stories are deployed in public debate as little more than dangerous fantasies.

Reviews

To understand our current political situation [...] this book is to be recommended as a handy primer - particularly on France's postwar political travails * Spectator *
A stimulating look at the way in which history shapes events * History Revealed *
[Andress] repudiates a collective failure to come to terms with the collapse of a historical bubble, when racist empire underwrote domestic achievement and granted international prestige * Guardian *

Author Bio

David Andress is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Portsmouth. He is the author of The Terror: Civil War in the French Revolution, 1789: The Revolutions that Shook the World and Beating Napoleon.