AUGUST 28, 2010 For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age
of Dreyfus By Frederick Brown (Knopf, 304 pp., $28.95) The
phrase “culture wars” has a peculiarly contemporary and American
sound. Its very hyperbole captures something about our over-
excited political culture. It summons up images of Sarah Palin
denouncing liberal elites to the Tea Party convention, or of
hippies facing off against riot police. It triggers associations
with a series of “hot button” American issues: gay marriage,
abortion, gun control, prayer in schools. Yet “culture wars” are
in fact endemic to Western modernity. They may be defined as
conflicts that divide a country less along regional,
confessional, racial, economic, or even ideological lines than
according to more inchoate but easily grasped disagreements over
basic values, assumptions, and beliefs. The long-standing
Russian disputes between Westernizers and Slavophiles qualify as
a culture war. Germany came close to inventing the phrase with
its Kulturkampf (“culture struggl