Word: riencourt
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...History? THE COMING CAESARS (384 pp.)- Amaury de Riencourt - Coward-McCann...
...Decline of the West Oswald Spengler announced with a certain gloomy satisfaction that "the Caesarism that is to succeed approaches with quiet, firm step." History was always goose-stepping its way through the centuries in Spengler's vision. Compared with his German mentor France's Amaury de Riencourt, 38, a freelance writer and lecturer who now lives in the U.S., is more amiable, less apocalyptic. Compared either with Spengler or other determinist philosophers of history- Toynbee, Pareto, Marx-Author de Riencourt works on an intellectual shoestring...
F.D.R. on the Lupercal. Author de Riencourt adopts these arbitrary terms to pose an equally arbitrary theorem: Greek culture was to Roman civilization what European culture is to the coming American civilization. U.S. bread and circuses -"Hollywood's sleek motion pictures, American newspapers and magazines, soft drinks, dentistry"-already dominate Europe. He cites a ream of historical parallels that do not prove the theory but endlessly restate it. American readers are used by now to the pat European charge of ubiquitous vulgarity, and will bear the tag of "The New Rome" peaceably. But they will bridle at the suggestion...
Having released his special demons of Caesarism, De Riencourt in a kind of guilty afterthought tries to pour the jinn back into the bottle and mix with the tonic of a higher historical synthesis: he lamely concludes that there are "ways and means of reviving our moribund Culture while retaining all the good and necessary features of Civilization...