Discover the Best Books Written by Arthur Herman

Arthur L. Herman (born 1956) is an American popular historian. He currently serves as a senior fellow at Hudson Institute. Herman's father, Arthur L. Herman, a scholar of Sanskrit, was a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. Herman received his B.A. from the University of Minnesota and his M.A. and Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University. He spent a semester abroad at The University of Edinburgh in Scotland. His 1984 dissertation research dealt with the political thought of early-17th-century French Huguenots.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Herman taught at Sewanee: The University of the South, George Mason University, Georgetown, and The Catholic University of America. He was the founder and coordinator of the Western Heritage Program in the Smithsonian's Campus on the Mall lecture series. His 2001 book on the Scottish Enlightenment, How the Scots Invented the Modern World, was a New York Times bestseller.

In 2008, he added to his body of work Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age, a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. In 1987, Herman married Beth Marla Warshofsky. He lives in Washington, D.C. Herman generally employs the Great Man perspective in his work, which is a 19th-century historical methodology attributing human events and their outcomes to the singular efforts of great men that have been refined and qualified by such modern thinkers as Sidney Hook.

He did not join the ranks of the so-called declinists after examining the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Henry Adams, Brooks Adams, Oswald Spengler, and Arnold Toynbee, who expressed pessimism about the fate of the West and remains cautiously optimistic about the future of the Western civilization.

He argues that after passing through the critical era of rapid geopolitical changes in the 20th century driven by an "ideological fervor to transform humanity and create a more perfect world order", the world finally entered the 21st century into an era of relative stability "defined by the balance-of-power geopolitics."

Herman advocates embracing "U.S. history in its entirety, including the American Civil War, rather than sanitizing it after the fact: "America is a country where the process of conflict and reconciliation, combined with the passage of time, brings out and embeds the qualities that make the United States one people and one community."