Publisher's Synopsis
This revolutionary book updates the ideas of two of the great thinkers about history, St Augustine, first century Bishop of Hippo in North Africa, and eighteenth century Italian historian Giovanni Battista Vico. It brings fresh insights into the long life story of our Western civilization by exploring Vico's view that patterns of change of peoples in history can be understood by comparing the experiences of people in nations in different times, arranged in the context of St Augustine's view that history is the education of the human race advancing in stages like our personal life-stages
There are many reasons to understand the process that produced Western civilization and will determine our future. We want to know how our world came to be, what it may become, and the lessons the past holds for our lives. A timely and particularly illuminating reason is the clash of civilizations in the 21st century, which calls for a new exploration of the history of Western civilization and its future in a world that faces it's modernity with perverse hostility.
To understand the dynamics of that process, and the meaning of aging and maturity in nations and people, Growing up in History applies a contemporary perspective to those ideas of St Augustine and Vico, borrowing from G. W.F. Hegel, Abraham Maslow, and chaos theory, an approach that has special relevance to understanding the growth of nations and people as they move through times of order and times to our chaotic 21st century. The lessons of that journey can tell us how people in the mature democratic nations of our global world can find true freedom and happiness.
