The Persistence Of The Old Regime: Europe To The Great War
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Usual aging. Very firm binding and clean pages.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, Europe stood on the precipice of catastrophic war — yet its ruling classes clung tenaciously to the aristocratic, agrarian, and monarchical structures of a pre-industrial age. Arno J. Mayer's The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War presents a landmark revisionist argument: that the ancien régime — with its landed nobilities, imperial courts, and reactionary cultural institutions — remained the dominant force in European life right up to 1914, stubbornly resisting the bourgeois and industrial forces that historians had long assumed had already triumphed. Mayer chronicles the death-grip of the old order across politics, economics, and culture, arguing that the First World War was not merely a product of nationalist rivalry or imperial competition, but the violent self-destruction of a civilization unwilling to relinquish its feudal foundations. Written with the precision of a rigorous scholar and the sweep of a grand historian, this work challenges fundamental assumptions about modernity and the trajectory of Western civilisation. A genuinely provocative thesis, it leaves the reader questioning just how modern Europe truly was — and whether the old world ever really died at all.
Author: Arno J. Mayer
Format: Hardback
Published: 1981, Croom Helm, London
Genre: European history
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Usual aging. Very firm binding and clean pages.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, Europe stood on the precipice of catastrophic war — yet its ruling classes clung tenaciously to the aristocratic, agrarian, and monarchical structures of a pre-industrial age. Arno J. Mayer's The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War presents a landmark revisionist argument: that the ancien régime — with its landed nobilities, imperial courts, and reactionary cultural institutions — remained the dominant force in European life right up to 1914, stubbornly resisting the bourgeois and industrial forces that historians had long assumed had already triumphed. Mayer chronicles the death-grip of the old order across politics, economics, and culture, arguing that the First World War was not merely a product of nationalist rivalry or imperial competition, but the violent self-destruction of a civilization unwilling to relinquish its feudal foundations. Written with the precision of a rigorous scholar and the sweep of a grand historian, this work challenges fundamental assumptions about modernity and the trajectory of Western civilisation. A genuinely provocative thesis, it leaves the reader questioning just how modern Europe truly was — and whether the old world ever really died at all.