Word: spenglers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Cultural Interaction. McNeill's title would appear to give the lie direct to Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West. His book indeed emerges, though he nowhere claims such a purpose, as an arresting alternative to the speculations and systems of Arnold Toynbee, too. Here are no gloomy metaphysics about the soul of a culture or its organic life cycle, no simplistic tabulations of 21 separate civilizations mechanically rising and then running down in helpless isolation from one another...
Recently published in England, Crowds and Power impressed all critics with its erudition, dazzled some into superlatives, and numbed others. Like Spengler, Toynbee and other sweeping theorists, Canetti casts a net over all of human history and tends to describe the entire sea from what he finds...
...Spengler's master plan for comparing cultures had no provable validity, it did provide his readers with an exciting excursion through history. Even in this cut-down version (Editor Helmut Werner has scrapped the Time Chart and much of the Teutonic repetition), it remains a kind of cosmic Baedeker of art and idea, of anthropological and architectural insight, of historic and religious parallel...
Inspired Guess. Thus Spengler proposes that the music of Mozart and "the glad fairyland of Moorish columns that seem to melt in air'' are contemporary because they express the golden flowering of two comparable cultures (Western and Middle Eastern). In Western culture (which Spengler regards as entirely separate from Greco-Roman), Cecil John Rhodes's campaign to exploit Africa is made equivalent to Caesar's foray into Gaul. Both mark the start of expansionist drives that Spengter sees as the beginning of the culture's final decline...
...emerged into consciousness, he has been trying to descry order in the world around him, often by resorting to provocative guesswork. It was an inspired guess by Dmitri Mendeleev that helped organize the elements into the periodic table. Historical guesswork is harder to prove definitely right or wrong. Spengler, who died in 1936, remains one of the few men of modern times who have attempted to assimilate all knowledge and discern a broad design. Even wrong, Spengler is more stimulating than many another historian who has never guessed...