Word: spenglers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...gloomier metaphor was ever coined to lend a semblance of shape to man's long struggle through history. Cultures, said Oswald Spengler, are limited biological forms of life?like inchworms, like oak trees, like men. Mysteriously born, they inexorably grow old, decay according to discernible pattern and then die. What is more, Spengler insisted, Western culture has already reached the last stages of its allotted life span...
...book. The answer is no. Anyone who has read the History knows that he treats himself too harshly. The ignorance he pleads is, in fact, a relative thing: what single historian other than he knows so much or has used his knowledge with such soaring imagination? And who besides Spengler has had the audacity to escape from the drugging minutiae of documentary sweepings into the exhilarating reaches of man's whole past? Toynbee lacerates himself too much, and the total effect is damaging. But not annihilating. For after all, A Study of History exists, and it is Toynbee...
...Germans got a leader to their taste. He points out that the industrialists assumed the debt of the Nazi Party, that most Protestant pastors swore a personal oath of allegiance to Hitler, that the average man hardly seemed to notice the loss of his liberties, and quotes Philosopher Oswald Spengler's comment after Hitler's takeover: "It is no victory, for the enemies were lacking...