Word: spenglerians
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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...
...entertaining and closely reasoned article, "By-Paths on the Road to Rome," Eric Larrabee evaluates contemporary religious revivalism from a Spenglerian deterministic point of view. His main point, that thinkers should try to understand the war in its relation to their ideals, to "assimilate their own tragedy," rather than fleeing to comforting but false "eternal verities," is well taken. In the case of Huxley and T. S. Eliot, however, he fails to make it clear why the Christian mystical experience is not a valid truth-criterion for anyone lucky enough to have...
Solution. Perhaps not this week, not this month, but soon-in six weeks, almost certainly-the U. S. will know who Franklin Roosevelt is. The answer will come piecemeal, in reactions to his words, movements, decisions. To a U. S. gnawed by anxiety at the overwhelming, catastrophic fulfillment of Spenglerian prophecies, to a nation wondering whether its morale, mind, muscles have been too much enfeebled (by years of cynicism, of tolerance without discrimination) to fight now for the things democracy holds dear; to such a worrying, mistrustful, anxious country the answer will come clear only if Franklin Roosevelt acts boldly...
...shown a facile imagination and a brilliant hand at silken, vivid prose. Ostensibly a narrative of travel from Syria to China, The Asiatics told of hair-raising adventures, lubriciously glamorous encounters, incredible coincidences and cosmic conversations with the casual air of an article in the National Geographic. More Spenglerian than picaresque, The Seven Who Fled brought together to their mutual doom seven characters symbolic of European races, let them slowly disintegrate with their bewildered sensuality and inter minable talk into the vast oblivion of Asia...