Jerzy Jedlicki's work presents us with writings from such dissimilar areas as the history of economics and the history of ideas.
"This is a book about how much critics who moved on the margins or entirely outside Western culture have inundated it throughout its history with contents which they considered to be their own discovery. This content was principally related to the conviction that progress has its down sides, and that the advantages which it brings do not necessarily balance out the disadvantages." (Jerzy Szacki "Nowe książki")
"I have been occupied for some time with the question of why so many educated and rational people so despise the lifestyles which are, after all, the work of their contemporaries. What are the origins of the historical pessimism of a whole legion of writers and philosophers over the last three centuries, who consider modern civilisation to be degenerate and wretched, and happily watch it steering towards its own destruction? It was these questions that led me to write this book, in which I mainly examine English thought in the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century." (Jerzy Jedlicki)
Jerzy Jedlicki (b. 1930) historian and essayist, his area of expertise is the history of the intelligentsia. He teaches at the Institute for History at the Polish Academy of Sciences. His book Suburbs of Europe: Nineteenth-Century Polish Approaches to Western Civilization (1999) was published in English.
- Jerzy Jedlicki
Degenerate World. Fears and Verdicts by Critics of Modernity / Świat zwyrodniały. Lęki i wyroki krytyków nowoczesności
Wydawnictwo Sic!, Warszawa 2000
© Jerzy Jedlicki
125 x 195, 305 pages, hardcover
ISBN 83-86056-68-1