This is a gloomy book, written 'at the hour of sunset of a life that occurs together with the going out of the lights of an entire great age and with the swift coming of the incalculable darkness of a new one'. The departing era is 'the Modern Age', which 'began about 500 years ago', with the Renaissance and Reformation. It has been a 'European age', whose disintegration can be recognised wherever European influence has extended, but especially in the United States. The age has been bourgeois, democratic, scientific, literate, literal- minded, and supportive of the family and privacy. John Lukacs distinguishes himself from Spengler and other prophets of Western decline. Not all is dark. We live longer and more comfortably than we used to; we have (it seems) a growing sense of history; even amid the bleakest changes there are always continuities; and there is no virtue in nostalgia, for no age was golden. Nonetheless his book is, he acknowledges, a jeremiad. So was his The Passing of the Modern Age (1970), much of which he now echoes.

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