Word: spenglerians
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...starts with the Spenglerian notion that a society is like an organic plant, with a seasonal life cycle-spring, summer, autumn, winter. To this he adds the Spenglerian distinction between culture and civilization, i.e., during its culture phase a people paints its masterpieces, and during its civilization phase a people builds the museums to house the masterpieces it can no longer paint. Cultures are creative, instinctive, combative, individualistic. Civilizations are practical, scientific, peace-and-unity-minded, conformist...
Imaginary, too, are the Phragians whom Stewart uses to illustrate the city's neatly Spenglerian life cycle. Archias arrives with the first settlers as a boy stowaway. Ragged and kinless, he carries on his forehead the scar of a cut made as an identification mark during the sack of his unknown native city. Grown prosperous and middle-aged in the hilltop village of Phrax, he fathers Bion, who appears later in the chronicle as a sturdy citizen of a city that is still raw but has years of greatness ahead. Bion's son Callias, heir to wealth, enters...