JACQUES BARZUN’S THEORY OF ASPECT
In his work From Dawn to Decadence. 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, the historian Jacques Barzun proffers the thesis that during the last 500 years, four main upheavals shook the West: the sixteenth-century religious, the seventeenth-century monarchical, the eighteenth-century liberal individualistic French, and the twentieth-century Russian social and collectivist revolution.
In the same book Barzun introduces his ideas of a theory of aspect, which is a recurring subtext.[676] He proposes that no person, object or event is ever viewed in his/her totality.[677] All present a variety of faces, and observers only take in one or a few of these faces or aspects and consider this to be the whole or at least the essence. Barzun accepts this partiality as a fact of life, namely the rule of spontaneous choice. In this rule, he finds the explanation for the surprising differences in value placed on the same thinker and for the different pasts depicted by different historians.[678] These ideas may fruitfully be applied to the fons et origo of Roman law, the codification of the Twelve Tables, as the interest in and studies of this code were resuscitated by the humanists and thus coincide with the time frame of Barzun’s work.The various interpretations of the events during the first half of the fifth century BCE show a number of recurring themes, such as secularisation of the law as the priests were forced into revelation of the law, the democratisation of the oligarchic rule of the aristocracy, equal rights, land reform and debt reform. It is not difficult to link these issues to points in the programmes of the four above-mentioned revolutions, which supports the hypothesis that the aspects that shine out of a particular historical event and grab the attention of researchers are to a large extent reflections of their own Zeitgeist.
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