Word: spengler
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Critic Van Wyck Brooks pondered a theory and a project. His project was to write a synthesis of U. S. culture in terms of the New England mind. The theory, used chiefly as a literary framework for the project, was German Philosopher Oswald Spengler's theory of cultural cycles: that cultures, like individuals, pass through youth and maturity to old age and death. Cultures are born in the countryside among "a homogeneous people, living close to the soil, intensely religious. . . . There is a springtime feeling in the air . . . a mo ment of equipoise, a widespread flowering of the imagination...
...American behavior . . . supporting Oswald Spengler's theory of Western decadence? Have a half-dozen decades of comparatively easy living so softened our pioneer spirit that we of the U. S. are proving ourselves to have been as little aware of the realities of German and Japanese social dynamics as the English Conservatives have proved themselves...
According to German Philosopher Oswald Spengler (Decline of the West), civilizations are born and die like human beings, their average life-span about 1,500 years. One crusty old civilization that lived longer than Spengler's average was Persia's. In 4000 B. C. Persia got started. The Greeks and Romans, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, came & went, and still Persia was going strong. Not until the 18th Century, after some 6,000 continuous years of art, culture and prosperity, did Persia finally bite the dust. Even then it was European commercial competition, more than...
...books have been given since 1712. Among the awards this year were Professor Kitredge's edition of Shakspere; Morison's "Three Centuries of Harvard"; Spengler's "Decline of the West"; Craven's "Art Masterpieces"; and Sandburg's "Abraham Lincoln: The War Years...
...sacrificial altar. Alarm clocks jangle so early that they scare the mice back into their holes. Extra chairs are brought into the libraries, and the book return service does a rushing business. It is a picture that might interest a Pareto or a Spengler, the spectacle of a society under stress...