Book Review: The Age of Genius

The Age of Genius: The Seventeenth Century and the Birth of the Modern Mind
A. C. Grayling
History, philosophy, science

The first hint that The Age of Genius might have problems comes on page xiv, in the Author's Note. 

The section on the Thirty Years' War might be of less interest to some readers than the rest of the book . . . [they] may skim that section and pass on to the rest. It might be enough for them to have the bare report as here given . . .

It is never a good sign when, before your book even starts, you have to tell your readers that they can skip over the first third of it.

Needless to say, I skipped nothing. I can't say that I'm much the wiser thereby, though. Military history is a demanding discipline, and A. C. Grayling doesn't show much mastery of it. He has moments of clarity, but overall he never makes sense of the Thirty Years War (which would be hard to do for anyone).

Nor, more critically, does he really tie it into the rest of the book. His warning is all too true: the first 100 pages of The Age of Genius are not only disjoint in themselves, but they fail to tie into the argument of the book. That argument--that the 17th century represents a watershed moment in human intellectual history--is a defensible one; but Grayling doesn't really make it. Too much of the book consists of a series of examples, like the "Before" and "After" shots in a magazine ad, where what's needed is some illustration of how Before became After. 

Furthermore, the examples themselves are sometimes dubious. For example:

In 1606 Macbeth was stages for the first time. Shakespeare was able to rely on the beliefs of his audience . . . to portray the killing of a king as subversive of nature's order, to the extent that horses ate each other and owls fell upon falcons in mid-air and killed them. In 1649, a single generation later, a king was publicly killed, executed in Whitehall in London before a great crowd . . . The idea of the sacred nature of kingship as premised in Macbeth had been rejected . . . 

Leaving aside the fact that killing off the occasional king was hardly uncommon in previous centuries, Shakespeare's audience was not stupid. We can accept for the sake of entertainment the proposition that vampires walk among us, or that the Nazis won World War II. I have no doubt that seventeenth-century people were just as capable of accepting certain things in fiction, as fiction. By Grayling's logic, Goethe's Faust--written in the heart of the Enlightenment--shows that 19th-century Europeans generally believed in the literal truth of the deal-with-the-devil narrative, which (if it were true) would falsify The Age of Genius's main thesis.

Actually, to call it a thesis is to give too much credit. The book is full of inconsequential side quests. What does it matter whether Descartes was a Rosicrucian or a Jesuit spying on the Rosicrucians? Why spend so much ink contrasting Hobbes and Locke when both of them clearly belong on the "modern" side of the philosophical divide? Grayling proposes at one point to set up a contrast between the world-view of an educated man in 1600 and one in 1700, and then fails to do so (or, if he does it, it's awfully well-hidden). In any case, the fact that a change occurred is hardly in doubt; the attempt to box it into one arbitrary calendrical period doesn't seem to add much value.

The book ends well. The last chapter is a robust defense of reason, the Enlightenment, liberal thought, and education. It's a pity that the rest of The Age of Genius doesn't really lead there.