peter watson ideas a history from fire to freud

My real problems with the book started with Watson’s writing on things of which I have a fair amount of knowledge, such as Greek philosophy and English literature. Perhaps I am exaggerating, but that is the impression I got. This would be more acceptable if he admitted to this, but instead he portrays his reading of the history of ideas as the ‘correct’, unquestionable version. He seems sometimes to decide on historical figures merely out of personal taste. Where Watson does seem to trip up, to me at least, is in his somewhat arbitrary selection of historical figures. Watson also presents both the Occidental and Oriental sides of the historical narrative, and in so doing calls into question whether we can really separate the world into such easily pre-digested chunks.In a book that spans so much of history, generalisations are to be expected. Watson questions the importance attributed to the period – in fact, he questions whether the period can even be considered as a homogenous block of history. An example would be the reassessment of the role the Renaissance played in Western history. Watson brings to the table broad reading of the latest controversies in historiography, and he gives a good overview of many contested points of canonical history. A lot of the things he has to say about, for example, the Middle Ages, are if not original (the book is endlessly footnoted – not necessarily a bad sign) then at least fresh. As Watson moves into territory with which I am more familiar, he asks interesting questions and posits interesting answers. Despite that, I found these chapters well-written and fairly interesting. The early chapters I found a little tedious, perhaps because I am no anthropologist or archaeologist and consequently have little interest in pre-historical humanity. Watson introduces a lot of information with which I am not really familiar, and he does this engagingly. He gathers a lot of interesting facts together, which is fair enough, but then he generalises ad infinitum – leading to a reduction ad absurdum, to be frank.Let me start with a few positive aspects of the book. But what disappointed me in the end was not so much the content of the book, objectionable as some of it is to me, as the style in which Watson writes.

Maybe both these responses are twined around each other, as Watson obviously wrote the book to elicit a strong response. On the other hand, I found myself vociferously disagreeing with a lot of Watson’s surmises. On the one hand, I was deeply stimulated and intrigued by most of the information and in the book.

Peter watson ideas a history from fire to freud