SOURCE: “Culture in the Eighties,” in Salmagundi, No. 87, Spring, 1990, pp. 360-68.

In the following positive review of The Culture We Deserve, Sisk examines the philosophical and aesthetic perspective that informs Barzun's critique of intellectual laxity, relativism, and reductionism in contemporary art and thought.

I began my long acquaintance with the work of Jacques Barzun in the fall of 1945 at West Palm Beach, an idyllic change from a previous assignment in the jungles of British Guiana. In the public library I found Romanticism and the Modern Ego and Darwin, Marx, Wagner. They were exactly what I needed after a four year sabbatical in the Air Force, especially since I expected to return to the classroom and teach Romanticism. In both books I found reasons to update some of my opinions about the Romantics, my reading of Paul Elmer More, Irving Babbitt and T.S. Eliot not having prepared me...