Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee's Views on Collapse

Discussion

Danilo Brozović:

"For example, most of the overviews of collapse research anchored in history (e.g., Robertson, 2012) pointed out the significance of Oswald Spengler's (1926) The Decline of the West and Arnold Toynbee, 1946, Toynbee, 1957 A Study of History. The former work offered a historical-philosophical account of world history, explaining that cultures evolve just as organisms and that they also decline, with the Western World reaching its final stage. The latter is a comparative analysis of past civilizations, explaining their genesis and, eventually, their breakdown and disintegration. Toynbee, 1946, Toynbee, 1957 also likened civilizations to organisms and postulated that societies confront various challenges or pressures that require them to respond so that civilizations can grow and expand (Sanderson, 1995). Their contemporaries tended to critique Spengler (1926) for his deterministic, fatalistic, and atomistic view of history, as well as for his methodology (Ţabrea, 2011), and Toynbee, 1946, Toynbee, 1957 for oversimplification, relatively free interpretations, and that his religious views occasionally distorted his scholarship (Coulborn, 1956). Today is evident that, although both analyzed a variety of cultures, this analysis was simplistic and stereotypical, and their essential focus and point were the decline of the Western civilization (Mottahedeh, 2003). Spengler's (1926) ideas of the decline of the West are today sometimes associated with, for example, far-right’s ideas of “the de-Christianizing of Europe,” the so-called “rights-culture,” and mass migration threatening Europe (for such examples, see Buchanan, 2002, Buchanan, 2011; Scruton, 2015). Locher (2013) also shows a long historical tradition of linking migratory issues with environmental ones, in terms of overpopulation and collapse. Yet another critical view on the whole concept of societies changing and evolving is provided by Darwin (2008). In his treatise of how different empires contributed to the advancement of the modern globalized world, Darwin (2008) noted that the Western concept of time, with societies “evolving” and thus existing on different levels of historical progress, developed during the European exploration of America, in meetings with Native Americans. With such a perspective, categorizations of other cultures as “lower” also appeared. In this sense, it was especially Spengler (1926) that tended to Westernize the East (Yurdusev, 2005).

One contemporary critique of Spengler (1926) and Toynbee, 1946, Toynbee, 1957 was Russian sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, who formulated his theory of cultural change in Social and Cultural Dynamics (1937). Sorokin was arrested by the Bolsheviks, and he later emigrated to the United States, where he founded the sociology department at Harvard University (Bainbridge, 2016). For him, civilizations were “cultural supersystems,” and he theorized that societies are organized around specific principles and that they pass through them in a cyclical fashion, rhythmically changing and experiencing regular downfalls, when one set of principles replaces the former one (Sanderson, 1995). His work also experienced controversy, partly because it was considered “unscientific” and partly because of his assertions that European and American cultures were in decline and in the midst of an extraordinary crisis, and that they would eventually be transformed in a religious direction (Nichols, 1989).

Spengler (1926), Toynbee, 1946, Toynbee, 1957, and Sorokin (1937) were described to encapsulate the sense of crisis in the 20th century (Joll, 1985, Sanderson, 1995). This sense was caused by the world wars in the first part of the century, whereas after the Second World War and the economic expansion in the West, it was fueled by the environmental movement emerging in the USA in the 1960s and the 1970s’ fossil fuels crisis (Robertson, 2012)."

(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328722001768)