THE FOLIO SOCIETY

WITTGENSTEIN TO THE WORLD WIDE WEB

The 20th Century

In the second two volumes of this acclaimed history, Peter Watson shows how the 20th century, a time of unprecedented conflict and social change, was also ‘dominated intellectually by a coming to terms with science’. From the coffee houses of Vienna, where psychoanalysis was born, to the scientific laboratories of Cambridge and London, and from the jazz clubs of Harlem to Silicon Valley, Watson takes us on a wonderfully entertaining and enlightening journey through the most influential ideas of the century.

1900 was an annus mirabilis of human achievement. Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, Arthur Evans began excavating Knossos and Hugo de Vries gave a paper on ‘The Law of Segregation of Hybrids’ – an early step towards the understanding of genes. Max Planck developed the idea of the quantum, and Picasso arrived in Paris to reinvent art. Einstein, meanwhile, was pondering his theory of relativity – perhaps the most revolutionary idea of a revolutionary century. The dominant historical theme was of course war, which in Watson’s words, ‘concentrates the mind wonderfully’ in terms of technological and other advances. The carnage of the First World War led to the first blood transfusions and a new acceptance of psychology to help treat shell-shocked soldiers. Similar innovations were seen in physics: from 1919, when Ernest Rutherford split the atom, to 1932, when James Chadwick discovered the neutron, barely a year went by without a major breakthrough. Also in reaction to the war, a new Modernist movement in literature and art was born, and the discontents of Western civilisation were explored in fact and fiction – from George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier to Lewis Mumford’s The Culture of Cities and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

The Second World War was equally a catalyst for technological advances, in atomic energy, radar, and rocket and jet propulsion. These advances would have a direct influence on the war’s outcome: most dramatically, the atom bomb. After years of war, the world was hungry for change. In Britain, the Welfare State promoted a more equal society, while oppressed groups found their voices in the civil rights and feminist movements. All of these changes can be traced to a setting-aside of old traditions and a new engagement with science as the best way of understanding the world. In the second half of the century, science accelerated ever faster, with space travel, the moon landing, the Big Bang theory, genomes and an obscure computer system known as the catanet or ARPANET, which became a new means of worldwide communication. Underlying these innovations, argues Watson, was the theory of evolution – ‘the story of us all’ – that gave the sense of one human race which, despite the horrors of the century, would continue to develop and advance.

A major intellectual achievement in a new illustrated edition

The Folio Society is proud to introduce members to one of the most exciting achievements of the past decade. In this brilliant and widely acclaimed work by historian and archaeologist Peter Watson, thousands of years of human intellectual development are encapsulated in a gripping narrative. Peter Watson’s gift is to make complex ideas, from Neo-platonism to string theory, easy to understand and absorbing to read about. Never before has the history of ideas been explained so clearly or made so fascinating.

PETER WATSON is an author, historian, archaeologist and journalist. He is the author of 18 books including The Death of Hitler and Nureyev, and of many articles for numerous publications. Since 1998 he has been Research Associate at the McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge.