The Idea Of Europe

Resumen del libro

In this remarkable short book, the foremost intellectual of our age brings a lifetime of erudition to bear on a subject that he has grappled with for decades, and whose future is profoundly uncertain.
"The Idea of Europe "finds George Steiner reckoning with Europe from a number of different angles. "Europe," he writes, "is the place where Goethe's garden almost borders on Buchenwald, where the house of Corneille abuts on the market-place in which Joan of Arc was hideously done to death." It is, in other words, a continent rich with contradiction, whose many tensions--cultural, social, political, economic, and religious--have for centuries conspired to pull it apart, even as it has become more and more unified.
But what lies ahead for a continent whose borders are growing and economic might is strengthening, even as its cultural identity recedes? A continent where, in Steiner's words, "young Englishmen choose to rank David Beckham high above Shakespeare and Darwin in their list of national treasures"? This is the trajectory that Steiner explores so brilliantly in "The Idea of Europe."

Biografía del autor

GEORGE STEINER (París, 1929 - Cambridge, 2020), es una de las voces intelectuales más importantes de nuestra época y uno de los más reconocidos representantes del gran espíritu de la cultura europea. Premio Príncipe de Asturias 2001 de Comunicación y Humanidades, filósofo del lenguaje, crítico literario, ensayista, políglota y defensor de la educación estética y la cultura clásica, ejerció la docencia en varias universidades de Europa y Estados Unidos, entre ellas Princeton, Stanford, Chicago, Oxford y Ginebra. Hijo de judíos vieneses, es autor, entre numerosas obras, de Nostalgia del absoluto, Fragmentos, Errata, Presencias reales o El silencio de los libros, todas ellas publicadas en castellano por Siruela.