HEROIC HISTORIAN

The Great War also initiated a massive expansion of state power and apparatus and marked the beginning of the subordination of individuals to societies that pushed efficiency as the highest value. Dawson seized on the sociologists' idea of "culture as the common way of life of a people." Normally this dynamic is supplied by a religion." [...]when Dawson writes, "A society which has lost its religion becomes sooner or later a society which has lost its culture," he is making, Stuart observes, less a pious statement than an anthropological one. Yet the impression it imparts is not far from heroic: the impression of a man whose dedication to an "apostolate of study" led him ultimately to stand athwart the hectic course of history, politics, and social change, yelling