SOURCE: “PW Talks with Jacques Barzun,” in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 247, No. 4, April 3, 2000, p. 69.

In the following interview, Barzun discusses his notion of “culture” and “decadence” and the general thesis of From Dawn to Decadence.

[Golo:] Your book From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life is so wide-ranging, it covers everything from the literary to the culinary. How do you define “Culture”?

[Barzun:] Cultural history cannot be defined, because it really has no limits. “Culture” can be seen as high culture, the arts—generally. But anthropologists have changed all that. … When they went to see primitive peoples, they covered absolutely everything those peoples were doing—from how they cooked to how they worshiped.

In the book, you say that the Bible used to be the common culture of the West, but no longer is. Do we have a common culture today?

It used to be that colleges...