The Idea of Europe: An Essay

In this remarkable short book, the foremost intellectual of our age brings a lifetime of erudition to bear on a subject that he has grappled with for decades, and whose future is profoundly uncertain.

The Idea of Europe finds George Steiner reckoning with Europe from a number of different angles. €œEurope,€ he writes, €œis the place where Goethe€s garden almost borders on Buchenwald, where the house of Corneille abuts on the market-place in which Joan of Arc was hideously done to death.€ It is, in other words, a continent rich with contradiction, whose many tensions€•cultural, social, political, economic, and religious€•have for centuries conspired to pull it apart, even as it has become more and more unified. 

But what lies ahead for a continent whose borders are growing and economic might is strengthening, even as its cultural identity recedes? A continent where, in Steiner€s words, €œyoung Englishmen choose to rank David Beckham high above Shakespeare and Darwin in their list of national treasures€? This is the trajectory that Steiner explores so brilliantly in The Idea of Europe.