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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
  
  
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III. TWENTIETH-CENTURY
DEVELOPMENTS

Only two influential theories of cycles need be cited
as representative of twentieth-century thinking on this
problem, the theories of Oswald Spengler and those
of Arnold Toynbee.

According to Spengler, and Toynbee as well, human
history must be divided longitudinally into the biogra-
phies of civilizations, cultures, nations. These historical
items are to be considered under the metaphor of a
living organism which is born, matures, and dies. In
Spengler's view, as given in his Decline of the West
(German 1918; English 1926-28), people begin in a
creative state of mind, which he calls “Faustian”—very
similar to what Nietzsche had called in his Birth of
Tragedy
“Dionysian,” where music and the dance,
where the dramatic and the lyrical, are the dominant
features of life. This period he calls that of a culture.
But as a culture develops, it inevitably gives way to
rationality, and the Apollonian attitude, where the
geometric, the static, the formal predominate. When
such features reach their height, there is no longer a
culture, there is only a civilization. As a result the
people's creative spirit dies. The Decline of the West
is the story of how this has happened in the Occident.
The same story has been repeated and presumably will
be repeated again in the Orient. Thus the cycle of
culture-civilization-death-culture goes on forever.

Toynbee is a bit less discouraging. For to his way
of thinking there have been twenty-six nations or civi-
lizations so far in world history. All have undergone
the same stimuli, known as challenges. To these chal-
lenges they have responded in various ways and the
ways are what we call their histories. So far none has
succeeded in successfully meeting the challenges which
have been put to them. But there is always the possi-
bility that some civilization will succeed in doing so.
The latter half of the twentieth century will see how


627

successfully occidental civilization can meet the chal-
lenge which has confronted it. Just what this challenge
is, is far from clear, unless it is the challenge that
communism has put up to capitalism. But since capi-
talistic countries have absorbed certain socialistic de-
vices and communistic countries have either retained
or introduced capitalistic devices, there must be some
other explanation that Toynbee has in mind. What
recurs eternally in both Spengler and Toynbee is the
general pattern of history, not the individual events.
There have been and probably will continue to be
international wars, for instance, but no given war will
be repeated. The problem that such historians have
to face is how to use their classifications, how much
similarity they will demand of those events to which
they give the same name. In one sense of the word,
every time a person is born there is a repetition of
a set of events. But what is born, beyond that which
is named by the noun “person,” is individual and
different from every other member of his class. This
problem is one that few historians have been willing
to face, for it carries one off into the regions of meta-
physics.

Related to the doctrine of historical cycles is that
based on the metaphor of the swinging pendulum,
according to which an historical movement will reach
an extreme and then turn back until it reaches an
opposite extreme. Thus radicalism and conservatism in
politics, romanticism and classicism in art, skepticism
and authoritarianism in religion, have all been said to
occur in this manner. But the extremes have never been
clearly defined except possibly by Hegel, whose histor-
ical theory is discussed elsewhere.