Cyclical Historians

Discussion

H. Stuart Hughes:

"A second aspect of the revolt against positivism, more lax, perhaps, in its intellectual standards than neo-idealism, but of greater relevance for the study of Spengler, was the revival of cyclical theories. The cyclical historians broke less radically than the idealists with the prevailing positivist tradition. All of them, in fact, remained within that tradition to a greater or lesser extent.

But they went much farther than the idealists in the vigor of their generalizations and in their willingness to raise on shaky foundations of evidence or hypothesis the most alarmingly novel historical constructions.

For this reason, the cyclical historians were, and are to this day, regarded with deep suspicion by the rest of the profession.

Most of them were non-professionals themselves, gentlemen scholars and men of the world—or even (most suspicious of all) sociologists. They were more interested in discovering grandiose explanations for large events than in verifying their detailed evidence, and they loved to ride a theory to the farthest limits of its applicability. Much of what they wrote paralleled or was influenced by the anti-rationalist tendencies discussed in the previous chapter. Like Nietzsche, Pareto, or Sorel, the cyclical historians had sensed the possibilities inherent in the classical doctrine of eternal recurrence and had embarked on a systematic effort at their exploitation.

In so doing, these writers obviously upset the major premise of Western or Christian historical writing—the notion of straight line direction. To this extent, they represented a throw-back to the attitude of the ancients. But not entirely: within each cycle, or separate civilization, they admitted the possibility of a goal.

They retained the idea of direction, the dynamic quality of Western history, while drastically limiting its scope. The com¬ promise was perhaps illogical. Yet it had behind it the example of the historian whom the cyclical theorists regarded as their original precursor—the twelfth-century monk Joachim of Floris.

Joachim had divided history into three stages, that of the Father, that of the Son, and that of the Spirit, corresponding respectively to the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the promised future time. The originality of his scheme lay in his conception of correspondences between the different stages. Every event or figure in the Old Testament Joachim viewed as corresponding, in a spiritual sense, to a parallel event or figure in the New Testa¬ ment. Each stage of history, he taught, rose to its own climax, and each successive stage naturally represented a higher level of spiritual development. Yet within each stage, the course of its unfolding bore a detailed resemblance to the course of its prede¬ cessor.

The other precursor whom the cyclical historians might have regarded with reverence was Giambattista Vico. Yet none of them recognized the extent to which he had anticipated their theories, and most appear to have had only a vague acquaintance with his work. An obscure, misunderstood Neapolitan professor of the early eighteenth century, Vico was so alien to the dominant spirit of the Enlightenment, and he cast his writings in so cryptic and difficult a form, that a century was to pass before his ideas could find a sympathetic understanding. It was only after the Romanticists had done their work of intellectual preparation that Vico could take his proper place in the succession of Western historians. From this standpoint, he may be regarded as the first “historist.” As the tutelary deity of Benedetto Croce, he is also the spiritual father of neo-idealism. In fact, for a century and a half now, nearly every movement of renovation in the writing of his¬ tory has fastened on Vico as its sponsor. His contributions to cyclical theory, then, do not remotely exhaust his permanent sig¬ nificance for the study of history.

To future cyclical historians, Vico bequeathed, in addition to the notion of cycles as such, a series of precepts for a more judicious understanding of the past. He warned against certain types of “pride” that had led his predecessors into error. He found, for example, that the “magnificent opinions” historians cherished about the Greeks and Romans caused them to exaggerate the virtues and achievements of antiquity. Similarly, he reproached his predecessors with an unwillingness to believe that a nation or people could invent, on its own, ideas or institutions resembling those of earlier nations; in accordance with what Vico called the error of the “scholastic succession of nations,” historians kept insisting that each people must have learned these things from a people farther advanced on the path of civilization. Such a theory Vico rejected as obvious nonsense. In thus reducing antiquity to human scale, and in affirming the spiritual autonomy of individual cultures, Vico established two principles that have been fundamental to twentieth-century historical writing. And to these critical precepts he added a number of positive canons for an imaginative reconstruction of the past—the study of myths and artistic monuments, for example, and the use of comparisons between familiar historical developments and those known only in fragmentary fashion, in order to fill in by analogy the missing stages and details. Together, these injunctions made for the sort of detachment and sense of relative values that we of today prize as the historian’s essential qualities.

As for the cycles themselves, the core of Vico’s teaching was the theory of ricorsi or historical returns—to which we have already seen Sorel turning for moral inspiration. Each period in a nation’s history, Vico found, had a general character resembling that of a similar period in the life of another nation, and from this similarity it was possible to chart a typical course for the history of all peoples. Starting with a warrior or “heroic” age, they passed through a major phase of true civilization, arriving eventually at a second barbarism. This new “barbarism of reflection” was actually worse than the primitive “barbarism of the senses,” since it was mean-spirited and over-subtle, where the character of the heroic age had been generous and imaginative.8 With the advent of an intellectualized barbarism, civilized society had reached its limits, and the cycle ended. Then came the ricorso — the beginning of a fresh cycle—with a new heroic age. Such were the European Middle Ages, which, to Vico’s eyes, reproduced the essential features of an earlier heroic age, the Homeric era of antiquity.

Each new cycle, however, was not simply a repetition of its predecessor. In the meantime, fresh cultural elements had ap¬ peared, which gave a new spiritual content to the ricorso. Thus the advent of Christianity profoundly differentiated the medieval period from its Homeric prototype. This concept of change from cycle to cycle has led some critics to describe Vico’s theory as more spiral than circular. Here again, as with Joachim, the sense of direction, the dynamism, of the Western attitude toward his¬ tory entered in to modify and enlarge the strictly cyclical concept of the ancients. For, beyond the notion of direction within the cycles, this view of history gave to the whole succession of cycles an ultimate goal—the Christian apocalypse. To sincere Christians like Joachim and Vico, history could not possibly appear as a mere treadmill: that would have been blasphemy. Yet Vico had too critical a mind, too fine a sense of comparisons and relative values, to be able to write a dogmatic history of salvation. Like his spiritual successor Toynbee, he was constantly pulled in one direction by his critical faculties and in another by his Christian conviction that history must point toward a higher goal.

Thus the theory of ricorsi that he left behind him was “all broken up with exceptions.” His infatuation with the history of Rome—here again, a fateful legacy to his successors—led him to force the history of other nations to fit what he regarded as a typical pattern. His New Science was far more suggestive than exact. It was an ideal construction, to be confronted only subsequently with the intractable data of history. As Croce reminds us: Rather than narrating or describing, Vico classifies. But there are classifications and classifications: those that are made in the service of a superficial thought and those that serve a profound thought. And the historical part of The New Science represents a great substitution of profound for superficial classifications.

Such a dictum may properly stand for the majority of his successors, and in particular for Oswald Spengler, whose best efforts were directed toward the replacement of the conventional historical categories by new groupings calculated to stimulate both controversy and though.

(https://archive.org/details/oswaldspenglercr0000hugh/page/66/mode/2up?view=theater)

Source

• Book: H. STUART HUGHES. Oswald Spengler. A CRITICAL ESTIMATE. Scribner's 1952. [1]