View source for Five Laws of Civilization According To Nikolai Danilevsky


=Discussion=

H. Stuart Hughes:

"The development of each “type” or civilization conformed
to five basic laws. The first three Danilevsky outlined as follows:


===First Law.===

Every tribe or family of peoples identified
by a language or by a group of languages whose resemblance
is perceived directly, without deep philological explorations,
constitutes an original historico-cultural type if it is mentally
or spiritually capable of historical development and has
already outgrown its childhood.


===Second Law.===

It is necessary that a people enjoy political independence if its potential civilization is to be actually
born and developed.


===Third Law.=== 

The basic principles of a civilization of one
historico-cultural type are not transmissible to the peoples of
another historico-cultural type. Each type creates its own
civilization under the greater or lesser influence of alien—
preceding or synchronous [contemporaneous] — civilizations.


===Fourth Law===

For his fourth law, Danilevsky cited Greece and Western
Europe as brilliant examples:

A civilization of a given historico-cultural type reaches
its fullness, variety, and richness only when its “ethnographic
material” is diverse and when these ethnographic elements
are not swallowed by one body politic, but enjoy independence and make up a federation or political system of states.


===Fifth Law===

The fifth law set the limits to the creativity of each civilization:

The course of development of historico-cultural types is
similar to the life-course of those perennials whose period of
growth lasts indefinitely, but whose period of blossoming
and fruitbearing is relatively short and exhausts them once
and for all.


==Comments on the Five Laws==

H. Stuart Hughes:

"To a present-day reader, the first two of these laws are doubtless
self-explanatory. The third raises one of the basic questions confronting all historians of comparative civilizations—the extent
and character of the influence of one civilization on another.

Danilevsky’s answer represented a sensible compromise between
the virtual denial of such influence (a position that Spengler was
later to adopt) and the notion of the “scholastic succession of
nations” on which Vico had heaped his scorn.

In Danilevsky’s view, a nation or civilization could influence
another in one of three ways. The first two—colonization and
“grafting”—were comparatively superficial and gave unsatisfactory results. The second, in fact, might be positively harmful to
the younger nation, since (and here again the metaphor was
botanical) one carefully cultivated branch simply exploited for
its own benefit the tree on which it had been grafted. The third
and only fruitful method of cultural influence was that by which
the Romans had learned from the Greeks, and the Western Europeans from both of the classical nations—“an effect that we may
compare to the influence of soil fertilization on the organism of
plants or ... of improved nourishment on an animal organism.” Such a method produced excellent results so long as the
younger society took from the older one only such things as stood
“outside the sphere of national character, that is, the results and
methods of exact science” and the “technical usages and achievements of the arts and of industry.” But political institutions, re¬
ligion, and the like could foster national creativity only if they
remained the spontaneous outgrowth of indigenous sentiments
and traditions.

...

All nations, Danilevsky maintained, initially went through a long
“ethnographic” period of preparation. This was succeeded by a
period of state organization, stimulated by threats from without.

And on this latter phase, there followed an era of true civilization
lasting from four to six centuries. Such was the period in Roman
history from the Punic Wars to the third century A.D., and in
Western European history since the age of humanistic revival and
scientific and geographical discoveries.

This period ends, however, when the creative activity of
the peoples of a certain “type” dries up: either they relax
with what they have already achieved, maintaining the legacy of antiquity as the eternal ideal for the future and growing old in the apathy of self-satisfaction (as, for example, in
China), or they advance into antinomies and contradictions
that can no longer be resolved from their point of view and
that prove that their ideal (like all things human) was incomplete, one-sided, and faulty, or that unfavorable out¬
ward circumstances had diverted its development from its
true course; in this case disillusionment grips the peoples
and they sink into the apathy of despair. So was it in the
Roman world at the time of the spread of Christianity.

Where, then, in this predetermined course of cultural development and decline, did Western Europe stand? Not yet in
decay, Danilevsky answered, but past its zenith. Europe was in
that afternoon, that autumn, that period of middle age when the
time of true creativity is past and the fruits of an earlier season
are gathered in. Such a period, in Danilevsky’s view, necessarily
brought the most impressive cultural harvest. Unquestionably,
the products of the nineteenth century were more numerous and
better-adapted to their purposes than the corresponding creations
of the sixteenth and seventeenth. Yet, more critically regarded,
the nineteenth century would prove to be primarily an era of
exact and applied sciences, systematically exploiting the guiding
conceptions in philosophy and the arts inherited from the
creative activity of the three centuries preceding. And on this
era of autumn harvest there would inevitably follow the true
winter of cultural sterility.

With Europe nearing its decline, Danilevsky triumphantly
concluded, Russia and the Slavic world were at length free to
create their own civilization. The artificial dependence of the
Slavs on the Germano-Latins would soon be ended. And the
young peoples of Eastern Europe would do what no nation had
before accomplished: they would prove themselves creative in
all the major fields of cultural and social activity. Just as each
nation in the past had given its special imprint to the arts and
even to the sciences in which it had engaged, so some had excelled
in one field, some in another, but none in all."

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

[[Category:Civilizational Analysis]]