1. Cyclical Theories. In his Republic, Book VIII
Plato taught that even the ideal state is subject to
decay; and, in decaying, would pass through the stages:
timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, tyranny. Prima facie,
this is an early cyclical determinist theory, although
many Platonic scholars interpret it as no more than
an ethical parable. Of the innumerable later cyclical
theories, three are still discussed by historians: those
of Giambattista Vico, of Oswald Spengler, and of A. J.
Toynbee.
In his Principles of a New Science... concerning
the Common Nature of the Nations (1st ed. 1725, 3rd
ed. 1744), Vico maintained that in the development
of their customs, laws, governments, languages, and
modes of thought, all nations except the divinely
chosen Israel pass through a course (corso) of three
stages: first divine or religious, then heroic, then
human. Although it is the highest, the human stage
is not stable. Having reached it, nations become disso-
lute, and return to barbarism; whereupon there is a
recourse (ricorso) of the same three stages. Even the
true Christian religion has been established by divine
providence “according to the natural course of human
institutions themselves,” in the return of “truly divine
times” that followed the disintegration of the Roman
Empire (New Science, par. 1047).
Spengler took the intelligible units of historical de-
velopment to be, not nations as Vico had thought, but
cultures, which he defined as groups of individuals
sharing a common conception of the world in which
they live, and especially of its space. In The Decline
of the West (Vol. I, 1918; Vol. II, 1922; rev. ed., 1923),
he described such cultures as growing in the aimless
wilderness of the human past like flowers in a field,
each independently of every other. Nine of them he
identified, while allowing that there may have been
more; but he closely studied only two: the “Apollo-
nian” culture of ancient Greece and Rome, and the
“Faustian” culture of the medieval and modern West.
Each culture has a life of about a thousand years, in
which it passes through four stages, comparable to the
four seasons; an agricultural and heroic spring; an
aristocratic summer in which towns emerge; an autumn
in which cities grow, absolute monarchies subdue aris-
tocracies, and philosophy and science flourish; then
finally, a winter of plutocracy and political tyranny,
made possible by advanced technology and public
administration. Having fulfilled the possibilities of its
fourth stage, a culture develops no more. It is dead,
even though, like late imperial China, its corpse may
long continue in existence.
Toynbee's theory of historical development in the
first ten volumes of A Study of History (12 vols.,
1934-61) is not without qualification determinist: like
his view about the presuppositions of scientific history,
it is inconsistent. However, it has a determinist side,
which is as follows.
The intelligible units of historical study are neither
nations nor cultures, but societies, and especially those
that are civilized, which, by contrast with primitive
ones, are not only relatively long-lived and spatially
extensive, but also relatively few. They are not neces-
sarily independent, as Spengler thought cultures are,
but one may be the offspring of another. Toynbee
distinguished twenty-one known civilizations, which he
allotted to three generations; primary, secondary, and
tertiary. Of the eight surviving in the present century,
five are tertiary (Western, main Orthodox Christian,
Russian Orthodox Christian, Iranic, Arabic), and three
are secondary (Hindu, main Far Eastern, Japanese Far
Eastern). Each of the five tertiary civilizations is affili-
ated to one of two extinct secondary civilizations, the
Hellenic and the Syriac, both of which are affiliated
to the same primary civilization, the Minoan. Each of
the three surviving secondary civilizations is affiliated
to one of the two extinct primary ones: the Sinic and
the Indic. In addition, there are four extinct primary
civilizations: two of them perished without issue; and
the other two each had two secondary offspring, all
four of which perished without issue. Finally, Toynbee
counted ten other civilizations that were not only
barren but necessarily so, being either abortive, or
arrested, or fossils.
According to Toynbee, a civilization comes into
being when a society responds successfully to a chal-
lenge thrown down by its physical or human environ-
ment; and it grows as long as it continues successfully
to respond to the new challenges to which every suc-
cessful response must lead. In a growing civilization,
successful responses originate in a creative minority,
which is imitated by an uncreative majority. When a
civilization responds inadequately to a challenge, it
breaks down, and a process of disintegration begins.
The unsuccessful response alienates the majority from
the minority it formerly imitated; but that minority,
although no longer creative, establishes itself as domi-
nant. The majority is thus degraded to a proletariat,
either internal or external. Disintegration proceeds in
a succession of routs (times of troubles) and rallies,
usually three of each, terminated by a decisive rout.
The last rally of all civilizations now extinct was to
form a “universal state”; and all surviving civilizations
except the Iranic-Arabic and the Western have already
formed such a state.
When seeking inductively based laws of historical
development, Toynbee treated civilizations as deter-
ministic systems, each of which necessarily passes
through the stages described above. It follows that
Western civilization, like all others, will break down
and disintegrate; the important question is whether it
has broken down already, and, if so, how far it has
disintegrated. In the first six volumes of A Study of
History, Toynbee decided that whether it has already
broken down is an open question; but in the last four
he explicitly repudiated the conception of civilizations
as deterministic systems, and implicitly abandoned his
search for the laws of their development. At one point,
he suggested that only the disintegration of a civili-
zation might be determined, not its growth and break-
down. Even more important, his principal interest
came to be teleological: What is the point, sub specie
aeterni, of the system of civilizations itself? In his first
six volumes the function of the higher religions is to
bring certain tertiary civilizations to birth from their
secondary parents; in his last six, civilizations exist in
order to foster the higher religions.
Historically, Toynbee's is the most impressive of the
cyclical theories; philosophically, it is not. His con-
fessed inability to answer the question whether West-
ern civilization has yet broken down, since it cannot
be excused on the plea of insufficiency of evidence,
betrays a radical unclarity in his concept of a break-
down. The internal links between the concepts re-
sponse, growth, creativeness, dominance, and break-
down are plain enough; but what states of affairs in
the world any one of them describes is obscure. Al-
though Vico's and Spengler's theories are less objec-
tionable in this respect, all three have been severely
criticized both philosophically and historically. Most
of the philosophical criticisms are weak. The common-
est is the charge that they involve universal determin-
ism, which we have already shown to be false: a non-
deterministic world may contain deterministic systems.
Another common objection is that Spengler and
Toynbee especially generalize from too few cases; but
Kepler obtained his laws of planetary motion from
even fewer. R. G. Collingwood denounced Spengler
for not “working at” history but only talking about
it, on the ground that he relied on others for informa-
tion about individual facts; and for not “determining
either past or future,” but only “attaching labels” to
them, on the ground that, in making such predictions
as that, between A.D. 2,000 and 2,200 somebody will
arise in the Faustian culture corresponding to Julius
Caesar in the Apollonian one, he did not tell us who
that person would be. Yet Collingwood would hardly
have taxed Kepler with not working at astronomy,
because he relied on Tycho for astronomical observa-
tions; or Adams and Leverrier with only “attaching
labels” to space, because, in predicting that a planet
of specified mass and orbit would be at a certain posi-
tion at a certain time, they could not have told you
that that planet would be the concrete object we know
as “Neptune.”
The cyclical theories of Vico, Spengler, and Toynbee
have been refuted not by philosophers, but by histori-
ans. Each, as elaborated by its author, contains radical
errors of historical fact; and none has found a defender
capable of revising it to accord with the facts estab-
lished by its critics. It is as though every known theory
of the solar planetary system as deterministic had been
shown to contain radical errors about the orbits of
several of the planets.
