History, Guilt and Habit

We are well supplied with interesting writers, but Owen Barfield is not content to be merely interesting. His ambition is to set us free. from the prison we have made for ourselves by our ways of knowing, our limited and false habits of thought, our 'common sense.' -Saul Bellow Few books [besides History, Guilt and Habit] . would provide a better basis for a serious discussion of modern mentality, or a better closing for a course in great books or the history of ideas. Readable at all levels. -Choice There is scarcely a single term that comprehends the range of Owen Barfield's interests and learning, though 'philosopher' would probably do as well as any, but all of his interests have been grounded in is study of history, which is to say something more than that he is a student of history. He is rather a knower of history and a thinker about it. -from the "Foreword" by G. B. Tennyson Owen Barfield, who died in 1997 shortly after entering his hundredth year, was one of the seminal minds of the twentieth century, of whom C. S. Lewis wrote "he towers above us all." His books have won respect from many writers other than Lewis, among them T. S. Eliot, J. R. R. Tolkein, and Saul Bellows, and John Lukacs. He was born in North London in 1898 and received his B.A. with first-class honors from Wadham College, Oxford, in 1921. He also earned B.C.L., M.A., and B.Litt. degrees from Oxford and was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He served as a solicitor for twenty-eight years until his retirement from legal practice in 1959. Barfield was a visiting professor at Brandeis and Drew Universities, Hamilton College, the University of Missouri at Columbia, UCLA, SUNY-Stony Brook, and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. His books include seven others published by The Barfield Press: Romanticism Comes of Age, Worlds Apart: A Dialogue of the 1960s, Unancestral Voice, Speaker's Meaning, What Coleridge Thought, The Rediscovery of Meaning, and History, Guilt and Habit.