World Historians and Their Goals: Twentieth-Century Answers to Modernism

Costello analyzes paradigms of world history, focusing on seven twentieth-century historians, from H. G. Wells to William H. McNeill. He interprets central models of the history of civilizations as responses to modernism and as efforts to rescue meaningful patterns of history as a whole.

Costello locates his study in the post-Nietzschean context, in which the "death of God" and modernism's threat to progressive ideology stimulated a perception of the crisis of Western civilization. He anal...