Episode 1 - Decoding Culture Foundation

Cycles of Decline

After introducing Barzun’s “Meditations on the Literature of Spying,” Professor John Stroup turns to the topic of ancient and modern theories of historical cycles, which undergird all accounts of social and cultural decline. Listeners are invited to ask their own internal questions as to where America has landed in the current year—and whether there is any escape from universal surveillance of the general population by the so-called deep state as the alleged custodian of our democracy.

The concluding film discussion considers voyeurism as a connecting thread between espionage and cultural decadence in Carol Reed’s Our Man in Havana (1959) and in the James Bond movie From Russia with Love (1963).

Citations

Jacques Barzun, “Meditations on the Literature of Spying,” The American Scholar 34, no. 2 (Spring 1965), 167–78, https://theamericanscholar.org/meditations-on-the-literature-of-spying/.

Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect (New York: Harper, 1959), https://archive.org/details/houseofintellect0000jacq/page/n5/mode/2up.

Jacques Barzun on cover of Time, June 11, 1956: https://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19560611,00.html.

Jacques Barzun, “Spies and Le Carre,” Letter to the Editor, Commentary, October 1983, https://www.commentary.org/articles/reader-letters/spies-and-le-carre/.

Douglas Johnson, “Jacques Barzun Obituary,” Guardian, October 29, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/oct/29/jacques-barzun.

James Fennimore Cooper, The Spy (New York: Wiley & Halsted, 1821), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/9845/9845-h/9845-h.htm.

“Social Cycle Theory,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory#Polybius.

Alexander Bertland, “Giambattista Vico (1668–1744),” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://iep.utm.edu/vico.

Jules-Marie Chaix-Ruy, “Giambattista Vico: Italian Philosophy,” https://www.britannica.com/biography/Giambattista-Vico.info

Giambattista Vico, The New Science, translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1948 [1725]), https://archive.org/details/newscienceofgiam030174mbp.

“The New Science,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Science.

Richard Rovere, “The Invasion of Privacy (1): Technology and the Claims of Community.” The American Scholar 27, no. 4 (Autumn 1958), 413-421, https://theamericanscholar.org/the-invasion-of-privacy/.

Richard Rovere, “Parnassus, U.S.A.” The Spectator 6 July 1956 Page 5-6 http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/6th-july-1956/5/parnassus-usa.

Joseph Wood Krutch, “If You Don’t Mind My Saying So,” The American Scholar 37, no. 3 (Summer 1968), 394–99, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41208922.

C.P. Snow, “Coriolanus of the Intellectuals,” review of The House of Intellect by Jacques Barzun, Encounter, November 1959, 66–68, https://www.unz.com/PDF/PERIODICAL/Encounter-1959nov/68-70/.

Harold Rosenberg, “The Battle of the Brains,” review of The House of Intellect by Jacques Barzun, The Saturday Review, June 27, 1959, http://www.unz.org/Pub/SaturdayRev-1959jun27.

Perry Miller, “On the Intellectual Debacle of our Age,” New York Herald Tribune, Books 35, no. 2 (1959).

Walter Laqueur 1983.“Le Carré’s Fantasies,” Commentary, June 1983, 62ff., https://www.commentary.org/articles/walter-laqueur/le-carres-fantasies/

Citations

Suggested Reading on James Bond