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John U. Nef, The Conquest of the Material World

Although John U. Nef never reduced European history to the pursuit of ever more “heat energy,” there were moments in his many works when it seemed so. For Nef, coal was the mainspring of European and especially British ascendancy, the impulse behind the mechanization that he feared had taken command of human destiny. Moreover, the heat energy released by atomic weapons seared his imagination; the scholar who had centered the industrial revolution on a vast shift in humanity’s ability to mobilize the earth’s storehouse of energy now trembled before this destructive power. Thus the peculiar tension that haunted Nef ’s collected essays, The Conquest of the Material World, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1964. A celebration of Europe’s increasing proficiency in mining and metallurgy, it was also the search for a moral compass that would prevent our selfdestruction in a burst of mushroom clouds. Nef was born in 1899, hailed from Chicago’s professional elite, married into even greater wealth, and counted himself among the generation that “grew to maturity during and just after the first World War.”1 Freed from financial constraints, he relished open touring cars during his European ventures, and his descriptions of the pleasures of Cap d’Antibes conjure up F. Scott Fitzgerald. Above all, he was a collector: Nef lined the walls of his apartment with original works by modern masters, filled his memoirs with a lineup of creative luminaries from T. S. Eliot to R. H. Tawney, Robert Hutchins to Jacques Maritain, and Marc Chagall to Artur Schnabel, and C L A S S I C S R E V I S I T E D