Word: spenglerism
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...announcement was made at last night's cross country dinner at the Faculty Club. Later in the evening, Tom Spengler was presented the J.D. French Memorial Award. It recognizes "outstanding improvement and/or significant contribution to the team...
...scholar can do now is assert that tomorrow's weather will be much the same as today's, then the intellectual in such a setting is dead and in his place civilized mysticism and astrological superstition will flourish most luxuriantly. Here one is not being merely speculative. Oswald Spengler-another famous twentieth-century cynical historian-veers dangerously close to this position. In the second volume of The Decline of the West he wrote that "The regular periodicity of certain events is yet another indication that the cosmic surgings in the form of human life on a small planet...
Finally, Professor Lipset's view of historical cycles is, of course, none too eccentric a view of history: Plato, Polybius, Machiavelli, Vico, Spengler form an impressive pedigree. He need not even be too cautious in predicting when the next conservative cycle will dawn. After all, Plato-boldly and rather sensibly, as it would be well-nigh difficult and unnecessary to prove him wrong-calculated that history returned upon itself in 72,000 years! From internal evidence there is no doubt that for Lipset the periodicity of this circular movement by which the history of the states returned, over and over...
...against its fundamental principles may have been courage, but it was the courage which has been immortalized by the dangerous pen of Cervantes." But for "cyclical" Lipset there is never "a different world." It is ever and always the same, a world of domination. For as Adorno observed of Spengler, the principle of relentlessly self-per-petuating domination is hypostasized as something eternal and inexorable. James Shotwell in his penetrating critique of Spengler is worth pondering in this juncture. In his own words: "Winter followed Autumn in the past because life was repetitive and passed within limited areas of self...
...Spengler agreed. "It's easy to say you'd like to do well, but to actually get the adrenaline rolling is a different thing," he explained...