RESTORING 20TH CENTURY EUROPE WITH THE IDEALS OF ANCIENT GREECE

JAEGER, WERNER.

Paideia. Die Formung des griechischen Menschen. 3 Bde.

Berlin & Leipzig, Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1934, 1944 & 1947.

Lex 8vo. 3 original blue full cloth w. gilt lettering to spines and to front board of volume one.Spines a bit sunned, hinges of volume one weak, hinges of volumes two and three restored w. new endpapers A nice and clean copy. (8), 513, (3); (8), 418; (8), 462 pp.

The first edition (of all three volumes) of Jaeger's seminal "three-volume history of the Greek mind" (his own words), which came to hugely influence the study of Greek culture and civilization as well as modern philosophy and political thought. Few other modern works within the field of classics and philology have had an impact comparable to this classic of the twentieth century.

The German-born classicist Werner Wilhelm Jaeger (1888-1961) was educated at the Universities of Marburg and Berlin, and from the latter he received a Ph.D. for his dissertation on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, a work which landed him the professorship and Nietzsche's chair at the University of Basel, -without having written his Habilitationsschrift! In 1921, Jaeger settled in Berlin, which he had to leave in 1936 because of Hitler, and he immigrated to America, where he stayed for the rest of his life. Here he became professor, first at the University of Chicago, and in 1939 at Harvard University.

Jaeger had written and published the first volume of his main work "Paideia, The Idols of Greek Culture" a couple of years before he left Germany, and in America he finished the last two volumes of this massive philosophical and political work on education, culture and the ideals that formed Greek civilization in ancient Greece. Under the name of "Paideia", the cultural nature of education is traced from Homer to Demosthenes in the hope of giving back the values of the ancient Greeks to 20th century Europe, which according to Jaeger was dominated by decadence and cultural decline.

After the appearance of Jeager's work, the concept of "Paideia" became hugely influential among critics of educational systems, and the work in general has moulded the way that modern man understood the culture of the ancient Greeks as well as his own. The work has had a deep impact on several fields, ranging from philosophy and politics to sociology, classics etc.

It is rare to find all three volumes together in first editions.

Order-nr.: 36415