The importance of honor is present in the earliest records of civilization. Today, while it may still be an essential concept in Islamic cultures, in the West, honor has been disparaged and dismissed as obsolete. In this lively and authoritative book, Honor: A History, James Bowman traces the curious and fascinating history of this ideal, from the Middle Ages through the Enlightenment and to the killing fields of World War I and the despair of Vietnam. Bowman reminds us that the fate of honor and the fate of morality and even manners are deeply interrelated.
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The first complete survey of this subject, tracing the evolution of honor as an ideal from the Greeks onward. The subject is in the cultural air at the present, as antagonists argue over whether the “honorable” course is to persevere in Iraq or withdraw and as the honor of U.S. forces is tarnished by the prison abuses scandal. The importance of honor is present in the earliest records of civilization. Today, while it may still be an essential concept in Islamic cultures, in the West, honor has been disparaged and dismissed as obsolete. In this lively and authoritative book, James Bowman traces the curious and fascinating history of this ideal, from the Middle Ages through the Enlightenment and to the killing fields of World War I and the despair of Vietnam. Bowman reminds us that the fate of honor and the fate of morality and even manners are deeply interrelated. His book is an indispensable document in a time of growing concern about the erosion of values.
About James Bowman
James Bowman is a Resident Scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Mr. Bowman is well known for his writing on honor, including his book, Honor: A History and “Whatever Happened to Honor,” originally delivered as one of the prestigious Bradley Lectures at the American Enterprise Institute in 2002, and republished (under the title “The Lost Sense of Honor”) in The Public Interest.
Among the other publications to which he has contributed are Harper’s, The Public Interest, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily and Sunday Telegraph of London, The Weekly Standard and National Review.
He has worked as a freelance journalist, serving as American editor of the Times Literary Supplement of London from 1991 to 2002, as movie critic of The American Spectator since 1990 and as media critic of The New Criterion since 1993. He has also been a weekly movie reviewer for The New York Sun since the newspaper’s re-foundation in 2002.
Mr. Bowman received B.A. degrees from Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania and the University of Cambridge in England, where he also did graduate study and received an M.A. in 1979.
