Books in Brief

Modern Times: From the Twenties to the Nineties (Revised Edition), by Paul Johnson (HarperCollins, 870 pp., $35)

The original Modern Times brought us to the end of “The Collectivist Seventies.” Here Mr. Johnson has tacked on a cheerier final chapter, “The Recovery of Freedom.” The recovery was marked above all by “outstanding popular leaders” representing ordinary men and women, and the corresponding “failure of intellectual leadership.” The events and heroes are all familiar: Thatcher, Reagan, Wojtyla, Yeltsin, Walesa. It attests to Mr. Johnson’s historical sense that, writing last June, he could anticipate the possibility of a Soviet coup and its likely failure. “Soviet Russia was suffering from an absence of clear lines of authority. . . . Russia [however] had no tradition of generals seizing power; the only occasion when such had been attempted, the famous Decembrist movement of 1825, had ended in complete fiasco.” Will the “Recovery of Freedom” continue? “It was not yet clear whether the underlying evils which had made possible [the century’s] catastrophic failures and tragedies—the rise of moral relativism . . . [and] not least the arrogant belief that men and women could solve all the mysteries of the universe by their own unaided intellects—were in the process of being eradicated.” That use of the past tense takes getting used to, as if one were reading about the upheavals and woes of Troy or Carthage. But for just that reason it makes a useful and humbling exercise.

Featured Tags

Modern Times: From the Twenties to the Nineties (Revised Edition), by Paul Johnson (HarperCollins, 870 pp., $35)

The original Modern Times brought us to the end of “The Collectivist Seventies.” Here Mr. Johnson has tacked on a cheerier final chapter, “The Recovery of Freedom.” The recovery was marked above all by “outstanding popular leaders” representing ordinary men and women, and the corresponding “failure of intellectual leadership.” The events and heroes are all familiar: Thatcher, Reagan, Wojtyla, Yeltsin, Walesa. It attests to Mr. Johnson’s historical sense that, writing last June, he could anticipate the possibility of a Soviet coup and its likely failure. “Soviet Russia was suffering from an absence of clear lines of authority. . . . Russia [however] had no tradition of generals seizing power; the only occasion when such had been attempted, the famous Decembrist movement of 1825, had ended in complete fiasco.” Will the “Recovery of Freedom” continue? “It was not yet clear whether the underlying evils which had made possible [the century’s] catastrophic failures and tragedies—the rise of moral relativism . . . [and] not least the arrogant belief that men and women could solve all the mysteries of the universe by their own unaided intellects—were in the process of being eradicated.” That use of the past tense takes getting used to, as if one were reading about the upheavals and woes of Troy or Carthage. But for just that reason it makes a useful and humbling exercise.