Ideas about softness and weakness, hardship and strength, have been central to reactionary politics since the beginning of ...

viii + 220 pp. $59.95 hc. Brian Stableford. Glorious Perversity: The Decline and Fall of Literary Decadence. Borgo, 1998. 152 pp. $20 pbk. Liz Constable, Dennis Denisoff, and Matthew Potolsky, eds.

Probably not. But here’s a possibility, from the recently deceased polymath Jacques Barzun’s magisterial book “From Dawn To Decadence: 1500 To The Present: 500 Years Of Western Cultural Life”.