Word: spenglerism
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...last week. U.S. reporters on board heard one of the blackest assessments of global events ever uttered by a certain "senior American official." That prescribed euphemism, of course, failed to disguise the obvious source: Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. To hear him tell it, sounding like an airborne Spengler. American foreign policy seemed to be spinning out of control-and almost solely because Americans had plunged masochistically into a self-destructive attitude toward world affairs induced by their Viet Nam and Watergate experiences. Kissinger warned that the Russians and Chinese might conclude that the U.S. no longer has the will...
People are out there in the land of Midcult, My Not-So-Dear Editor, who should be warned against Marshall McLuhan (compared to whom "Spengler is cautious and Toynbee positively pedantic"). Buckminster Fuller (whose prose reads like Archie the cockroach with his capital shift working). And of course Tom Wolfe-"Parajournalist!" -who presumed to attack The New Yorker, the Golden Arches Macdonald calls home. Could a Macdonald enemies list be complete without those sparring partners Cozzens (James Gould) and Cousins (Norman), the author of By Love Possessed who was by Macdonald savaged and the editor of Saturday Review/World? (When Macdonald...
...first press conference in July, France's President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing fielded questions while standing behind a lectern. At his second conference last week he somberly remained seated, in perhaps unconscious symbolism of the dour words to follow. Sounding like a Spengler with a French accent, for much of the conference he all but prophesied the decline of the West...
...validity of such visions and the nature of leadership itself depend very much on time and place, the deepest patterns of a society. Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler constructed cyclical, organic theories of history. All civilizations, they said, passed through similar stages of growth and decay and eventually perished, whether from internal or external wounds. The 14th century Berber historian Ibn-Khaldun prefigured the idea by concluding that history repeatedly moves through the same cycles. According to Ibn-Khaldun's theory, a youthful, growing society is animated by asabiyya, the spirit of social solidarity found in what he called...
...spectacle that Heilbroner's thesis represents is almost as distressing as his prospect for the race. Here is no Spengler taking a sardonic pleasure in declines and falls. Here is a man of practical intelligence and good will, a man equipped by temperament and upbringing to hope. Yet his book is an epitaph on liberalism written with conspicuous pain by an author who includes himself in the epitaph. Heilbroner fits his own description of Promethean man, full of "driving energy," "nervous will": a problem solver. Now, he grimly concludes, that gift of fire may burn up the world...