Comparative History

Oswald Spengler

(29 May 1880 – 8 May 1936) German historian and philosopher whose interests also included mathematics, science, and art. He is best known for his book The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes), published in 1918, which puts forth a cyclical theory of the rise and decline of civilizations. In 1920 Spengler produced Prussiandom and Socialism (Preußentum und Sozialismus), which argued for an organic, nationalist version of socialism and authoritarianism. He wrote extensively throughout World War I and the interwar period, and supported German hegemony in Europe. Some National Socialists (such as Goebbels) held Spengler as an intellectual precursor but he was ostracised after 1933 for his pessimism about Germany and Europe's future, his refusal to support Nazi ideas of racial superiority, and his critical work The Hour of Decision.

Nature of the PatternA new culture starts, Spengler held, when persons in a dying, static, or purposeless society—at first only a few visionaries, often widely isolated—begin to see their surroundings from a new perspective. This intruding viewpoint, he suggests, becomes a driving force that grows to dominate their thinking like a Jungian archetype. Step by step the increasing influence of this new point of view transforms that entire society—its political and social structures, its business organizations and commercial practices, its technologies, mathematics, religious beliefs, music and visual arts, and architecture—to exemplify this unique outlook; he terms it the culture’s “prime symbol.”

The process, always similar, takes 1000–1200 years to run its course. In their final 200–300 years, Spengler said, all civilizations stiffen into rigidity and formalism; creativity dies out and cynicism surges, the countryside empties and cities grow gigantic, and continuous warfare ends in coalescence of a political-economic world state. Writing in 1910-1915, he evaluated Western Civilization as already embarked well into this phase.

Spengler made detailed analyses of six cultures, illustrating in charts of parallel columns how five passed through the same changes at corresponding stages in their development. Spengler described the dominating viewpoints of these cultures as:

Egyptian—An arrow-straight path into eternity.Chinese—An indirect, seemingly meandering path towards life’s goal.Hindu—Prime symbol not diagnosed by Spengler. Possibly nirvana, extinction through fulfillment. (The mathematical concept of zero was invented by the Hindu culture, which passed it to the West via Arabic mathematicians).Classical (Greek-Roman)—The tangible, free-standing object, exemplified by the nude statue.Magian (early Christianity, Mohammedanism)—A magical closed cavern, from whose upper reaches divine grace descends like a golden mist.Western (present culture, born in Western Europe about 1000 A.D.)—A spiritual reaching out into boundless space.Spengler also suggests a 'Prime Symbol' for the (recently born):Russian Culture—The unlimited horizontal plane.

Our present Western Culture, Spengler estimated, is one or two centuries from its demise, which he does not see necessarily as obliteration—the civilization of Ancient Egypt, he pointed out, continued in fellaheen form for centuries.

The ossified forms of exhausted cultures, he wrote, can persist like pyramids for thousands of years. A new culture may emerge from their detritus or from within a society hitherto lacking a prime symbol. If the new culture’s start overlaps a dominant but dying culture, its early development will be masked and for a time, warped by that prior culture.Spengler’s two-volume “The Decline Of The West” was published in German in 1917 and sold more than 100,000 copies. It was translated into English in 1926; its popularity has declined steadily since then. Traditional historians initially criticized it for factual errors; when these were corrected in a second edition, the critics dismissed Spengler’s approach as incompatible with conventional interpretation of human history. Defenders pointed to Santayana's observation that those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Acceptance of Spengler’s philosophy of history also has been handicapped by the study’s pessimistic-sounding title (“Harvest-time of Western Civilization” might have been more warmly received), by his dense vocabulary, and by his attempt to make the theory more understandable by likening the successive changes in a culture to the progression of a plant through its natural life cycle.

Arnold Joseph Toynbee

(April 14, 1889 – October 22, 1975) A British historian whose twelve-volume analysis of the rise and fall of civilizations, A Study of History, 1934–1961, was a synthesis of world history, a metahistory based on universal rhythms of rise, flowering and decline, which examined history from a global perspective. A religious outlook permeates the Study and made it especially popular in the United States, for Toynbee rejected Greek humanism, the Enlightenment belief in humanity's essential goodness, and what he considered the "false god" of modern nationalism.

CivilizationsToynbee's ideas and approach to history may be said to fall into the discipline of Comparative history. While they may be compared to those used by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West, he rejected Spengler's deterministic view that civilizations rise and fall according to a natural and inevitable cycle. For Toynbee, a civilization might or might not continue to thrive, depending on the challenges it faced and its responses to them.

Toynbee presented history as the rise and fall of civilizations, rather than the history of nation-states or of ethnic groups. He identified his civilizations according to cultural or religious rather than national criteria. Thus, the "Western Civilization", comprising all the nations that have existed in Western Europe since the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, was treated as a whole, and distinguished from both the "Orthodox" civilization of Russia and the Balkans, and from the Greco-Roman civilization that preceded it.

With the civilizations as units identified, he presented the history of each in terms of challenge-and-response. Civilizations arose in response to some set of challenges of extreme difficulty, when "creative minorities" devised solutions that reoriented their entire society. Challenges and responses were physical, as when the Sumerians exploited the intractable swamps of southern Iraq by organizing the Neolithic inhabitants into a society capable of carrying out large-scale irrigation projects; or social, as when the Catholic Church resolved the chaos of post-Roman Europe by enrolling the new Germanic kingdoms in a single religious community. When a civilization responds to challenges, it grows. Civilizations declined when their leaders stopped responding creatively, and the civilizations then sank owing to nationalism, militarism, and the tyranny of a despotic minority. Toynbee argued that "Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder." For Toynbee, civilizations were not intangible or unalterable machines but a

network of social relationships within the border and therefore subject to both wise and unwise decisions they made.

Joseph Tainter

(Born December 8, 1949) is a U.S. anthropologist and historian.Tainter is the author or editor of many articles and monographs. His best-known work is The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988), which examines the collapse of Maya and Chacoan civilizations,[2] and the Roman Empire, in terms of network theory, energy economics and complexity theory. Tainter argues that sustainability or collapse of societies follow from the success or failure of problem-solving institutions and that societies collapse when their investments in social complexity and their "energy subsidies" reach a point of diminishing marginal returns. He recognizes collapse when a society rapidly sheds a significant portion of its complexity.

According to Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies, societies become more complex as they try to solve problems. Social complexity can be recognized by numerous differentiated and specialised social and economic roles and many mechanisms through which they are coordinated, and by reliance on symbolic and abstract communication, and the existence of a class of information producers and analysts who are not involved in primary resource production. Such complexity requires a substantial "energy" subsidy (meaning the consumption of resources, or other forms of wealth). When a society confronts a "problem," such as a shortage of energy, or difficulty in gaining access to it, it tends to create new layers of bureaucracy, infrastructure, or social class to address the challenge. Tainter, who first (ch. 1) identifies seventeen examples of rapid collapse of societies, applies his model to three case studies: The Western Roman Empire, the Maya civilization, and the Chaco culture.

Tainter begins by categorizing and examining the often inconsistent explanations that have been offered for collapse in the literature. In Tainter's view, while invasions, crop failures, disease or environmental degradation may be the apparent causes of societal collapse, the ultimate cause is an economic one, inherent in the structure of society rather than in external shocks which may batter them: diminishing returns on investments in social complexity. For contrast, Jared Diamond's 2005 book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, focuses on environmental mismanagement as a cause of collapse. Finally, Tainter musters modern statistics to show that marginal returns on investments in energy, education and technological innovation are diminishing today. The globalised modern world is subject to many of the same stresses that brought older societies to ruin.