Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T20:24:27.250Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Two prophets of the twentieth century: Spengler and Toynbee*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 1985

Extract

In the summer of 1920 Arnold Toynbee's old friend and contemporary at Balliol, L. B. Namier, a historian of a very different school, brought him a book which had been published 18 months earlier, the first volume of Oswald Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes, The Decline of the West. ‘As read these pages teeming with firefly flashes of historical insight,’ Toynbee recalled some years later, ‘I wondered at first whether my whole enquiry had been disposed of by Spengler before even the questions, not to speak of the answers, had fully taken shape in my own mind.’ He decided nevertheless to go on with his own equally ambitious account of the rise and fall of civilizations. From the start, therefore, Toynbee's vast life-work, the 12 volumes, over three million words, of A Study of History, has been coupled with and compared to the two volumes, a mere 400 thousand words, of Spengler's Decline of the West. Both were best-sellers: the original German edition of The Decline of the West sold 100,000 copies in its first eight years; the abridged edition of A Study of History sold over 300,000 and even the ten volume edition (the two subsequent volumes were an atlas and a volume of second thoughts entitled Reconsiderations) sold 7,000 complete sets within a year of the publication of the final volume. Both are, if not forgotten (Spengler at least turns up in unlikely places, such as President Nixon's desk, placed there by Dr Kissinger) certainly largely unread. Yet each is interesting because of the great gifts of their very different authors and because of what they tell us not just about the past but about the twentieth century and the sense of crisis with which we have lived for the last 70 years.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1985

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Toynbee, Arnold J., ‘My view of history’. Civilization on Trial (London, 1948), p. 10.Google Scholar

2. Hughes, H. Stuart, Oswald Spengler (paperback edn., New York, 1962), p. 89.Google Scholar

3. Ashley Montagu, M. F. (ed.), Toynbee and History (Boston, 1956), p. vii.Google Scholar

4. Brzinski, Zbigniew, ‘From Cold War to Cold Peace’ in Urban, G. R., Detente (London, 1976), p. 279.Google Scholar

5. Koktanek, Anton Mirko, Oswald Spengler in seiner Zeit (Munich, 1968), p. 8.Google Scholar

6. Spengler, Oswald, Reden undAufsatze (Munich, 1937), pp. 78–9.Google Scholar

7. Koktanek, op. cit., pp. 439–41.

8. Documents on British Foreign Policy, 2nd series, vol. XVI (London, 1977), pp. 73–4.Google Scholar

9. Spengler, Oswald, Jahre derEntscheidung (Munich, 1933), p. ix.Google Scholar

10. Toynbee, Arnold J., A Study of History, vol. X (London, 1954), p. 139.Google Scholar

11. Spengler, Oswald, The Decline of the West (Eng. tr. by C. F. Atkinson, New York, 1932), Part II, p. 435.Google Scholar

12. Toynbee, Study, vol. IV, pp. 11–12.

13. Toynbee, Study, vol. I, p. 37.

14. Hughes, H. Stuart, Oswald Spengler (New York, 1952, rev. edn., 1962).Google Scholar

15. Spengler, Decline, II, p. 58.

16. Spengler, Decline, I, p. 343.

17. Spengler, Decline, I, p. 31.

18. Spengler, Decline, II, p. 434.

19. Spengler, Decline, II, p. 186.

20. Spengler, Decline, II, p. 461.

21. Spengler, Decline, II, p. 105.

22. Spengler, Decline, II, p. 414.

23. Spengler, Decline, I. p. 37.

24. Spengler, Decline, II, p. 507.

25. Febvre, Lucien, ‘Deux philosophes opportunistes de l'Histoire: de Spengler a Toynbee’, Combats pour I'Histoire (Paris, 1953), p. 124.Google Scholar

26. Toynbee, Study, vol. VII, pp. vii-viii.

27. Toynbee, Study, vol. VIII, p. 1.

28. Toynbee, Study, vol. Ill, p. 154.

29. Toynbee, Study, vol. Ill, p. 172.

30. Toynbee, Study, vol. VI, p. 59.

31. Toynbee, Study, vol. VIII, p. 511.

32. Toynbee, Study, vol. IX, p. 502.

33. Toynbee, Study, vol. IX, p. 409.

34. Spengler, Decline, II, p. 193.

35. Spengler, Jahre der Entscheidung, p. 44.

36. Spengler, Decline, II, p. 454.

37. Toynbee, Study, vol. II, p. 202.

38. Toynbee, Study, vol. Ill, p. 200.

39. Toynbee, Study, vol. VIII, pp. 111–12.

40. Spengler, ‘Politische Pflichten der deutschen Jugend' (1924), in Politische Schriften (Munich, 1932), p. 136.

41. Toynbee, Study, vol. VI, p. 181

42. Toynbee, Study, vol. IV, p. 135.

43. Toynbee, Study, vol. VI, pp. 300–1, fn. 5.

44. Toynbee, Study, vol. V, pp. 466–7.

45. Toynbee, Study, vol. VIII, p. 312.

46. Spengler, Decline, II, p. 429.

47. Spengler, Decline, II, p. 430.

48. Spengler, Decline, II, p. 507 (I have revised the translation of this passage slightly.)

49. Toynbee, Study, vol. VI, p. 320.

50. Toynbee, ‘After the Age of Affluence’, Guardian, 14 April 1974.

51. Toynbee, Study, vol. IX, p. 630.

52. Toynbee, Study, vol. V, p. 439.

53. Toynbee, Study, vol. VIII, p. 525.

54. Lattimore, Owen, ‘Spengler and Toynbee’, Atlantic Monthly, vol. 181, no. 4 (04 1948).Google Scholar