The Recovery of the West: An Essay in Symbolic History

The Recovery of the West is the first full-scale study of Western civilization employing the methods of symbolic history. These methods permit (1) an account of the human endowment taking up thought, feeling, and behavior from fruitful new perspectives, (2) a correspondingly new account of the course of Western history seen from the point of view of the degrees of retention, surrender, and deformation of fundamental elements of the human endowment over time, and (3) a therapeutic program based on the present condition of that endowment.