Word: spengler
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Shot Down. As they would later with Arnold Toynbee, whose sweeping theory of flowering civilization resembles Spengler's earlier conception, teams of specialists ? anthropologists, economists, art critics as well as historians ? fell upon the cosmic thinker. Toynbee is an immeasurably more learned and more scrupulous scholar than Oswald Spengler, and his Christianity helped him to see not only the possibility of self-rejuvenation in a dying civilization but the hope as well of a spiritual development for mankind...
Under attack, Toynbee merely revised some of his broader conclusions. Spengler was all but shot down in flames. The experts demonstrated that he knew almost nothing about Chinese culture, nothing at all about Mexican. His Time Chart, marking off the exact number of years spent by each culture in each Spenglerian phase of its doomed history, was riddled with errors of fact. His parallels between cultures were often forced. All this was true. If the West was declining, it was not doing so according to any rules or laws the book had demonstrated...
...Spengler's master plan for comparing cultures had no provable validity, it did provide his readers with an exciting excursion through history. Even in this cut-down version (Editor Helmut Werner has scrapped the Time Chart and much of the Teutonic repetition), it remains a kind of cosmic Baedeker of art and idea, of anthropological and architectural insight, of historic and religious parallel...
Inspired Guess. Thus Spengler proposes that the music of Mozart and "the glad fairyland of Moorish columns that seem to melt in air'' are contemporary because they express the golden flowering of two comparable cultures (Western and Middle Eastern). In Western culture (which Spengler regards as entirely separate from Greco-Roman), Cecil John Rhodes's campaign to exploit Africa is made equivalent to Caesar's foray into Gaul. Both mark the start of expansionist drives that Spengter sees as the beginning of the culture's final decline...
...emerged into consciousness, he has been trying to descry order in the world around him, often by resorting to provocative guesswork. It was an inspired guess by Dmitri Mendeleev that helped organize the elements into the periodic table. Historical guesswork is harder to prove definitely right or wrong. Spengler, who died in 1936, remains one of the few men of modern times who have attempted to assimilate all knowledge and discern a broad design. Even wrong, Spengler is more stimulating than many another historian who has never guessed...