2. Two Theses

Thesis One: Oswald Spengler

The thesis that Oswald Spengler wrote before the outbreak of the First World War, entitled “The Decline of the West” and first published in 1923, may seem daunting to a contemporary reader. Two volumes of more than four hundred pages each, with a small and tight typography, in a writing style not easy to follow. Moreover – and this may shock more than one reader – the author, strongly influenced by Nietzsche’s work and perhaps even more so by Hegel, is a fervent defender of the mission of the Germanic race. He puts forward the notions of “purity of the blood”, of “chosen people” that we find in the national-socialist German doctrine between the wars, period when his work was published. However, if one knows how to forget his nationalist fervour, one discovers in Spengler an extremely precise and rich description of the development of civilisations, at least for a part of the cycle, that of the separating phase.

Oswald Spengler studied the existence of a metaphysical structure of humanity, not only independent of visible phenomena, but, also that which could be the cause of this reality, of vital currents of surfaces that we call cultures and civilisations. He is one of the first – if not the first – to introduce the concept of civilisation. From the historians’ point of view, “his originality lies in the fact that he applies the mechanism specific to the Greco-Roman world to all societies (…) which would inevitably have passed from culture to civilisation”. (see in French, Les Écoles historiques; Guy Bourdé; Hervé Martin. Coll. Points. Seuil 1983 et 1997).

From our point of view, he does much more: he anticipates the successive thousand year lifetimes of culture-civilisations and presents a very elaborate linear vision of the stages of their life, from the nascent culture to the stage of the decline and death of the civilisation. He tries to apply this hypothesis, without however justifying it, to the main known civilisations.

Without a doubt, strongly influenced by the ideas developed by Hegel concerning the soul, genius and destiny of peoples, he starts from the recognition that “people are not linguistic, political, or zoological units, but psychic units”, individual souls. He deduces that these people manifest their identity – or their particular soul – in a specific culture. This culture, just like any living form, knows birth, youth, maturity, old age and death.

Civilisation represents only the final phase of the maturity and decline of this culture. It develops in the cities, then, having lost all creativity, calcifies and dies. Civilisation is therefore the inevitable “destiny” of a culture, which is characterised by the most external and artificial states that can be claimed by the human species. Thus, he tells us, the Romans are the civilised successors of the Hellenes: they are the barbarians who close a great evolution. They are “soulless, philosophical, artless, racist to the point of brutality, shamelessly attached to practical success. (…) Greek soul and Roman intelligence (…), that is also the difference between culture and civilisation”

Considering that every culture is a particular living soul, Spengler fiercely denies any resurrection hypothesis, or any form of Renaissance/Rebirth. For him, the European Renaissance owes much more to the Gothic spirit and Arab civilisation than to the Greco-Roman civilisation. If there is a connection between the two, this is only because the Renaissance appears in European history at the same “time” as the beginnings of Hellenism. Indeed, Spengler calls “contemporary epochs” similar periods of development of civilisations, no matter how much time separates them. He speaks then of simultaneity. Thus, he describes as “contemporary” the periods of early Hellenism and the European Renaissance despite the two thousand years that separate them. Another attribute he uses for these times is “simultaneous”. Thus, he says, Pythagoras and Descartes, Ionic and Baroque, Alexander and Napoleon are contemporary. In our theory, this means that these “events” are located exactly at the same places on the curve.

For him, if some believe that the Roman Empire is continued in the Eastern Empire or in the ephemeral attempts of Charlemagne, these are only misuses of language or the mere inertia of men allied to their desire for greatness. Essentially, the underlying cultures have nothing in common anymore.

Spengler thus introduces an immense difference in value between the nascent culture and civilisation, which manifests itself in a continual decline. Respect for the natural order of things, adequacy to destiny, creative power belong to culture. The growing chaos, barbarism, the attraction and the power of money, calcification, and sterility belong to civilisation.

According to him, history always follows the same pattern, according to successive periods of about one thousand years each, for which he refuses to give any causation.

He attempts to describe and compare three great culture-civilisations: the Antiquity or Greco-Roman, which he calls Apollinian, the Occidental, which he calls Faustian, and between the two, the Arab, which he calls Magical. He devotes a large part of his work to characterising the specific soul of each of them: the Antique civilisation is characterised by the static, the Western by the dynamic, whereas, between the two, the Arab civilisation is magical. The Greek sought the nature of the visible being; the Arab, that of the invisible being; the Occidental seeks to make himself master of becoming.

However, if the parallel between the Greco-Latin and Western civilisation proves easy, even after adding Chinese civilisation, the parallelism with the Arab magic civilisation is much more difficult. And for good reason! The two Greco-Latin and Western periods correspond to two separating epochs; the Arab/magical period, being a period of fusion, can only be compared with a similar period, something that Spengler could not imagine, for lack of having perceived this cyclical course, in which the Arab culture evolves in contrast to the Greco-Roman and Western cultures. He was constrained to force the historical interpretation. Not wishing to give up his theory of the thousand-year cycles, he devoted more than one hundred and fifty pages to the Arab/magical civilisation in an attempt to explain its peculiarities. If it has known a particular development, that, he says, would be due to its nature, its own soul.

Without dwelling on the numerous examples and historical justifications that Spengler produces, we now present the unfolding in time of a culture-civilisation as he described it, since we will find this model in all civilisations.

As we already pointed out, Spengler has particularly developed the whole ascending part of the curve, which starts from the deepest of the feminine/fusional period, until the apogee of civilisation and its fall. On the other hand, the whole period of descent towards interiority, such as the High Middle Ages or the pre-Hellenic period (before 1100 BC.), is treated as part of the magical period.

At the origin of every culture-civilisation, he tells us, or in pre-cultures, is the mass of peasantry, without time or history. “All real history begins with the constitution in primary orders of the nobility and the clergy and by the rise of these orders above the peasants”. (In Spengler’s work, despite the indication of the thousand-year period, it is also difficult to determine where the history of a culture/civilisation begins and ends.) At the source of all culture is religion: the two are inseparable, just like civilisation and irreligious materialism. “Irreligion” and not “a-religion”, because in civilisation any notion of sacred gradually disappears, although religions are maintained in hollow forms.

In every emerging culture, he tells us, the fundamental form is the opposition of the nobility and the gentry, of the king and vassals, of secular and ecclesiastical power. This is true of the Homeric Greeks, the ancient Chinese, as well as the Goths. The peasant is “a-historical”. He remains unchanged throughout evolution, out of history, independent of any culture that develops in cities.

At first, each of the two orders is in its place: the spiritual with the clergy, the power and the order with the nobility. Then comes the struggle for supremacy, which is manifested fairly quickly by the predominance of the clergy, at a time which is at the bottom of our fusion curve.

Thus, Pope Innocent III (1198-1216) materialised what his predecessors Nicolas I and Gregory VII had dreamed of: an empire under the rule of the Papacy which included England, Portugal, Denmark, Poland, Hungary, and all the Latin Empire which had been founded at Byzantium. In other words, almost all the parts of the world that were important at the time.

Thus an empire of faith was constituted, under a feudal regime – that is to say, strictly hierarchical and sacralised – to which corresponds, a thousand years earlier, the secular, universal, irreligious and materialistic Empire of Ancient Rome and a thousand years later, our modern times.

Then, in the shadow of this feudalism, a bourgeoisie which claims its participation in an increasing way, the power develops first in the villages, before reaching the cities. It is the time of the apogee of personal power by divine right, or absolutism, which precedes the end of the power of the orders, clergy and nobility. In China, it is the century of the Great Protectors (from – 685 to – 591 BC), and in Europe, that of our absolute royalties: Richelieu, Cromwell etc. With the rise of the bourgeoisie and the progressive loss of symbolism, comes the re-emergence of reason through the “Enlightenment”. Philosophy and arts are free from religion. Then follows a period of revolt, led mostly by the bourgeoisie in the name of the people. It is, in Antiquity, the general revolt of 471 BC. and the creation of the Tribunate in Rome, and 2160 years later, in the Europe of Modern Times, the great crisis of 1687 which saw the establishment of the first bourgeois regime in England in 1688, a century before the French Revolution.

Throughout this phase of rising power of the bourgeoisie, religion is also forced to adapt, under the effect of the rise of rationalism. Schisms, reforms, wars of religion will succeed each other until the Church abandons all pretensions to power, when the separation of Church and State is pronounced.

With the seizure of power by the bourgeoisie, a period of about three centuries of struggle between the city-states or nations that historians have called the era of “warring States” begins. In ancient times, it extends from Alexander (331 BC.) to Augustus. In China, it covers the years from -480 to -230 BC.; and, by analogy in the Western modern world, it would extend, according to our hypothesis, from the Napoleonic Empire to about 2100. It ends only when, in one way or another, one of the protagonists has established undisputed supremacy over the whole known world, or at least, over the entirety of the world which is important to him, for political and commercial reasons. The unified secular empire is born. From this moment, the struggle of the States gives place to the battle of personal interests and individuals for the gain of the supreme power. It is the time when the emperor attributes a divine quality to himself, such as Augustus at the summit of his glory. This is the beginning of a period of “world peace”.

During this long march towards the Universal Empire, the value put forward is the concept of freedom. The radical change in mindsets, and in the human values that stem from them, is the passage from faith to reason, from the sacred to the profane, from space to time. Spengler calls this “an exhaustion of the soul, a regression of the cosmic tact of the being”. A cold sense of reality has taken the place of the respect for tradition. The religion of the heart has given way to scientific irreligion. Doubt and scepticism reign where, in ancient times, reason had meaning only if it could prove religion.

Customary law based on holy texts has given way to written law. Natural rights have given way to acquired rights. Humanist religions and materialistic philosophies arouse the enthusiasm of the crowds. Spengler says: “The scientific worlds are superficial, practical worlds, soulless, purely extensive. They are the base of Buddhism, Stoicism, and socialism as well. (…) [Buddhism is not] a religion like that of the Vedas or the one of the Apostle Paul, but a last, secular, purely practical mentality of exhausted urban dwellers, who have only a completed culture behind them and no future before them”.

According to him, the top of the curve is represented by the educated, sceptical man who worships spiritual mediocrity and opinion. He notes that the civilised are becoming increasingly sterile. As a collectivity, the last men of the global cities lost their joie de vivre and their desire to live. Intelligence no longer finds reason for its own existence. (Which, in our time, makes these periods so dangerous for the survival of humanity). With the ascent to the top of the curve, uniformity also appears as the culmination of the reign of quantity.

To this overflowing materialism, and to triumphant imperialism, is added what he calls “the second religiosity”, a kind of mystico-humanist sentimentality, which soothes the conscience easily and mainly relies on luck. In ancient times, it was at the origin of the Roman cult of Isis. (Nowadays, it is easy to recognise it under its many aspects such as cheap astrology, all kinds of clairvoyance, and the slick ways of the New Age).

Another characteristic of the Universal Empire is what he calls “the death of art”: true art, which brings out the hidden essence, gives way to copy and the quest for personal originality.

With World Peace, he expresses that there is nothing but private history (a strange resemblance to a current thesis on the end of history): the Caesars’ quarrels over the private possession of the world, the quarrels of the cities for money, the quarrels between individuals. This peace implies the renunciation of the great majority to war, which is also a renunciation of raising a hand when misfortune strikes only the neighbour. But this universal peace of the Empire is fragile. Under the combined effect of the barbarians from within – that is to say the populations left behind in the long ascent to the Empire, slaves, serfs, peasants, etc. – and the barbarians from without – less civilised populations of the confines of the Empire who dream only of seizing wealth, it will gradually disintegrate. The apparition of armed gangs in the cities is the first sign of this disintegration.

But it is at the climax of this imperialist period that the seed of the following civilisation appears: Arab culture is fertilised by Christianity and the Mande and Manichaean religions. Spengler tells us: “A culture is born when a great soul awakens. It dies when the soul has realised the entire sum of its possibilities.”

Spengler distinguishes a succession of different epochs in the development of a culture-civilisation, which can be summarised as follows. Feudalism marked by a rural spirit and a chivalrous ideal is followed by the crisis of patriarchal forms, then the constitution of states with rigorous forms. After a last perfection of the political form marked by absolutism, comes revolution, the victory of intelligence over tradition, of the city over the countryside. Finally comes the reign of money, closely linked to the emergence of democracy, which culminates in the formation of Caesarism (the Empire), consecrating the victory of the politics of violence over money.

Having thus traced the essential characteristics of the different epochs, he easily deduces a parallel between Antiquity and Modern Times. Thus become “contemporary” the Trojan War and the Crusades, Doric art (-1100/-650) and Gothic art (900/1500), Orphic movement, religion of Dionysus (7th century) and Luther and Calvin (1560), the ionic and the Baroque, the Pythagoreans (‑540) and Descartes (1630), Plato (-346) and the Euler /Lagrange /Laplace trilogy (1800), etc. Note that in almost all correspondence established by Spengler, the gap between dates is always very close to 2160 years.

As the Greco-Roman and Euro-American civilisations occupy a similar place on our curve, the parallel is known to historians and does not prove too difficult to establish. On the other hand, as we pointed out, when it comes to finding correspondences with the Arab civilisation, (because, let us recall, for Spengler, the lifespan of a civilisation is about a thousand years) this task is much more difficult. So he circumvents the problem by attributing the particular development of Arab civilisation to the “magical” style of its soul. When he explains what he means by that, we find all the characteristics of the periods we have called “fusional” and which we will develop in detail: “a nation of magical style is the confessional community (…). One belongs to an ancient nation by the possession of the right of citizen, and to a magical nation by a sacramental act (…). The magical nation is completely merged with the notion of Church. In a magical nation, the first question asked to the foreigner is “what is your faith?”, not “what is the colour of your skin?” Spengler tells us that the Arab of that time has no homeland or mother tongue and that, if the multiplicity of cults characterises the ancient nation, one can only belong to one magic religion.

The forms of conquest in magical times are conversions, possibly achieved by force (Crusades). The prevailing atmosphere is that of The Tales of the Arabian Nights, the dominant colour is gold, which expresses the essence and authority of God, covering the places of worship. It is a civilisation of the “sacred crypt”, where the individual, the “me”, is denied as an independent power. The word that translates this feeling is “Islam”: “submission”. The central idea is unity: a separation of politics and religion is therefore impossible and meaningless in the magical world. If causality is one of the presuppositions of the Western mind, God is the only presupposition of the Arab culture.

It is a period dedicated to the woman, to the Virgin, with a deep feeling of Good, and, consequently of Evil too: the myth of Mary and that of the Devil are contemporary. A deep joy of life and a fear of hell that we would judge as unhealthy coexist. How else can we explain the million witches that were sent to the stake at the end of the Middle Ages? Instead of judging, in terms of barbarism our time is not much better, we must try to understand that we no longer think or feel the same way than in these fusional periods. And in this context, it is very difficult for our current mindset to envision the passionate interest for magical problems and the ontological questions about divinity broached by the councils of Nicaea, Ephesus and Chalcedony.

A particular aspect of culture – justice – may be better able to make us apprehend this: the ancient law created by citizens based on practical experience is replaced in the year 200 by customary law. It comes from God who announced it through his chosen and illuminated ones. The magical citizen never asks for the logical foundations of judgment: in Arab law, man submits. In ancient and modern law he confesses when proof is furnished to him. The magical judgment is infallible because the spirit of God and that of the community, stated by its rabbis, priests, ulemas, muphtis, and mullahs, are identical in nature.

To finish the presentation of Oswald Spengler’s work, we must point out that he has also tried to generalise his thesis to other civilisations, although the Antique civilisation, the magic-Arab civilisation and that of modern times occupy the majority of his work. If he managed to apply it roughly to the Chinese civilisation, without even trying to justify the discrepancies – sometimes consisting of more than three hundred years of difference – existing within its thousand year cycles, he had to admit his incomprehension of the Mexican civilisation that he estimated to be two hundred years late compared to the Arab culture and seven hundred years ahead of the Western culture.

If the theses of Spengler were so easily rejected outside Germany, it was not only because of the author’s personal opinions, although he had separated from the Nazi movement as early as 1934. It was also above all because his thesis could only incorporate a small number of civilisations. He admits from the very beginning of his work that he renounced to justifying the symbolic duration of a thousand years that presides over his thesis: “What does the ideal duration of one thousand years for each culture mean (…)?” Sticking to this millennial period against all opposition, he was forced to bend History to his thesis. The soul of the people served as an argument for Arab civilisation, while he used lack of information as an excuse when it came to the Mexican and Egyptian civilisations. Moreover, most of the time, the events he cites are closer to the 2160-year gap in our curve than to the 1000 years (or 2000 years) gaps in his curve.

Furthermore, his personal opinions and perhaps his exacerbated sense of belonging to the Germanic race led him to outrageously value the periods we call “fusional”, periods of order and faith. And this was undoubtedly intolerable for a civilisation which moving towards progress and individuation, had to inevitably throw back into oblivion.

Due to the author’s lack of knowledge, he does not wish to enter the debate with the authors of the “historical schools”, that Spengler, brought nothing new. Without wanting to take him out of the shadows where the aforementioned authors would like to see him disappear, because it makes for tedious reading, his work is nonetheless a very rich source when one wants to deepen the cyclical conception of History and to open oneself to an understanding of what mentalities could have been at the time of the Arab civilisation and the Middle Ages.

Thesis Two: Arnold Toynbee

The second outstanding personality who was been deeply interested in the cycles of history, is an Englishman, Arnold Toynbee, born at the end of the 19th century. As a historian, he elaborates a synthesis of the history of civilisations in twelve volumes, of which only a summary “History”, published in 1975, has been translated into French.

While Spengler, with a Germanic sensitivity was fascinated by the Arab civilisation, with all the magic, mysteries and order that it symbolised, Toynbee declared himself an unconditional partisan of the civilisations of progress, which were masculine and victorious, nearly to the point of leaving the Middle Ages untold. Only higher civilisations and religions interest him, he says. If Spengler was in the “wrong time”, the same cannot be said of Toynbee. Although very controversial, it is he, however, who took the laurels of Spengler’s work, even wondering, according to Raymond Aron who wrote the preface to the French edition, “how much of the ideas he had conceived by himself had already been elaborated in The Decline of the West“.

If he achieved indisputable success with the general public, it would seem that it was not the same with professional historians. We consider him a poor thinker, with an arrogance that cannot be justified by his discoveries, which we do not see any to speak of. He was unable to elevate his thought even to such a simple law as “All things being equal, the same causes produce the same effects.” By treating his predecessor, who had humbly admitted his ignorance of subtle causes, with murderous sarcasm, Toynbee contributed, in our opinion, through a stupid theory, to discredit an understanding of history that was just emerging from the fog. However, it had the merit of presenting the model of civilisation already elaborated by Spengler in a much more pleasant and readable way.

He started with the model of development of the Helleno-Roman civilisation, already widely accepted by his predecessors, which can be summarised by the following major phases:

1. Cultural unity and political pluralism.
2. Battling States.
3. Universal Empire and germ of the new higher religion.
4. Decadence. Revolt of the inner and outer proletariats.
5. Destruction of the Empire (not always completely). Establishment of the higher religion.

He was, however, obliged to admit that this model did not suit the history of China, at least from – 221, date of the constitution of its universal Empire, with the Ch’in or Tsin regime. Indeed, the whole history of China after this date seems to consist only in a continual attempt at restoring this unitary Empire, so much so that Chinese scholars and historians wanted to make it clear that it had always been thus, since the first legendary Hsia Empire, founded by the wise. Now, it is easy to see that the preceding historical period is entirely in keeping with the Hellenic model.

(We will have the opportunity to return to this characteristic of Chinese scholars which incessantly pushed them to rewrite history so as to present it as a celestial and immutable phenomenon that did not suffer the slightest change. They tried to justify the immobility of the established order. The science of mutations or changes was accepted only to the extent that it was part of immutability, just as the seasons do not disturb the eternally identical succession of years. History had to be a continuity in the movement, or a movement in continuity, as described by Yi Jing “Continuity is what delivers things from their torpor and sets them in motion. Change is what gives them another form by fitting them together.”)

Toynbee thus introduced a second model of the evolution of civilisations, according to the Chinese model, which presents itself in the simple form of a series of disorders and restorations of the Empire. He naturally proposed a composite Helleno/Chinese model, which he took as a general model of all civilisations, at least of those which he classified as independent and unaffiliated with others, namely: Central America, Andes, Egypt, Indus, China and Sumero-Accadians. All the others were either affiliated, satellites, or aborted. Thus the Arab civilisation was affiliated with the Hellenes, themselves affiliated with the Aegens and Syrians, affiliated in turn to Sumero-Accadians, Egyptians, Aegeans and Hittites. With this sleight of hand, he dispensed with all further study and left behind the important problem of magical civilisations raised by Spengler.

By this model which included successive rebirths, he also contradicted Spengler who radically refused any rebirth to a civilisation that would have exhausted its soul.

If he managed to understand that the attempts to restore the Universal Empire were a logical continuation of the process brought to light by Spengler, and that a gestation and a maturation of a higher religion whose seed was deposited in the culmination of the Empire were happening simultaneously, he failed to integrate the whole into a coherent and comprehensible global diagram. For having reached this point of his theory, he found that no civilisation, to this day, had succeeded in maintaining its state of universal Empire and that all either disappeared at once or lived a succession of disturbances, intermediate periods and restorations, before sinking inexorably.

Applying this diagram to our brilliant Western civilisation was a terrible blasphemy in his eyes, or at least an insoluble mental problem: Once unity is achieved – if it is – we will not see the renewal of the old “failure-recovery” alternating rhythm. For at the atomic age, any division or disorder would be a threat to the existence of the human race”. He then rejects, without further examination, the Chinese explanation of a fundamental cosmic rhythm of Yin and Yang which remains, he said, inexplicable and axiomatic and proposes “a human explanation with this rhythm, and it is an economic explanation”.

He denies all action of forces unknown to man: “one of the congenital infirmities of man is to attribute his failures to the action of forces that totally escape his authority” and this infirmity, according to him, reaches particularly sensitive minds during periods of decline and fall. He rejects Spengler’s thesis with contempt: “to declare dogmatically with Spengler that any society has a predetermined duration is as stupid as to maintain that all plays should necessarily include a certain number of acts”.

Although he accepts periodic repetitive movements, he suggests that they are only supportive movements to a progressive order, which seems difficult to contradict if we consider human evolution since its inception. What he rejects above all else is the idea of determinism and blind fate: “Dead civilisations have not succumbed to destiny (…). A civilisation like that of the West is not inexorably condemned (…) We have the divine spark of creative power within us; and if grace is given to ignite it, then the stars in their path will not prevent us from attaining the goal set for our human endeavors”.

Toynbee radically refuted the idea that human behaviour would be predetermined by some non-human or supra-human force. For him, “determinism and fatalism are the refuge of weak, defeatist or vain minds too weak to face this humiliating yet liberating truth: we are betrayed by what is false within”. This falseness was of course, also the origin of the fall of civilisations, according to him.

Such a fear of the future and a vision so imbued with the omnipotence of man could only lead him to construct a theory which is both the thesis of Marx and that of Darwin: civilisations evolve in response to a series of economic challenges. The growth factor is the creative energy implemented, the ever-growing power of self-determination. This criterion of growth makes it possible to observe that Toynbee considers only those which developed in the separation periods of the curve, the phases of progress, such as ancient Greece, Egypt of the Old Kingdom, and the contemporary Western civilisation as civilisations. All others are either affiliated or in their static period of culture, which is the reverse of the dynamics of civilisation.

Considering the civilisations on the way towards the “Universal Empire”, he notes that the action tends to move from the outside environment – human or physical – towards the interior of the personality and that the pregnant Empire gradually loses all its exterior enemies. In the end, civilisation becomes its own environment and its own challenge (also the general belief of the civilised, arrogant 20th century man).

He insists that the universal states are negative institutions, born after and not before the collapse of civilisations to which they bring political unity. These are the products of dominant minorities, which have lost their creative power. At least in the beginning, they have little reason to worry about their safety as there is nothing left to threaten them.

And yet they are deluding themselves. The history of universal states suggests that they have an almost demonic appetite for life, despite all obstacles. Their citizens tend to desire the immortality of the institution, but also to believe in it passionately: “I do not assign limits to their power or their duration; I gave them an endless empire”, says Virgil’s Jupiter. And Nero institutes games devoted to the eternity of the Empire. Toynbee tells us that, the universal states are the political expression of a sense of unity and universality which is one of the psychological products of the process of disintegration. But these states, because of the falsehood they contain, carry within themselves the germ of their own destruction. He insists that universal empires do not take hold of the world, but that the surrounding world is no longer resisting. Thus the Romans only took what was allowed to be taken: “The Imperial Romanum results not from an extreme tension of all the military means, as was once the case against Carthage, but from the abandonment of external signs of autonomy by the oriental world.”

Then, Toynbee tells us, about the decline of civilisations by the lack of creativity and loss of personal decision-making. They sink under the combined assault of the abandoned – the barbarians from within, the marginals – and the barbarians from the outside who want their slice of the cake.

The atrophy of the martial spirit among the subjects of the universal state gives the opportunity to the proletariat, which has already proved its creative energy in founding a universal church, to seize authority in a weakened state.

Toynbee continues his analysis with a study of the higher religions that arise on the soil or the manure of decaying civilisations and flourish when the latter decline. “Neither cancer nor chrysalis,” he tells us, “they are not only the religious aspects of the culture of civilisations, but societies of a distinct type that must be treated as such. (…) If civilisations aspire to political unity, religions are interested in the soul. These two levels of history cannot be studied in terms of a single type of society that encompasses everything.” However, having said this, Toynbee has scarcely ventured further into the study of these institutions, except to celebrate what he calls the higher religions which directly address men as individuals.

To conclude, noting on the one hand the close parallelism between Greco-Latin civilisation and Western civilisation, on the other hand posing the hypothesis that civilisations owe their failure to their defects, admitting that man hardly changes during the centuries, finally fearing an atomic conflict above all, he comes to entrust the fate of the world to some Providence, hoping, against his own theses, a return of Yang to Yin, from discord to concord.

As we have just seen, Toynbee, did not bring much to the work of his predecessors from the point of view of the study of cycles. He set aside all the problems that arose, either by dismissing them outright, through the system of affiliation, or by refusing, with contempt, interest in cycles, probably afraid to be called a determinist or defeatist, in a period (before and after the World War II), where there was little question of the value of Anglo-Saxon civilisation. The authors of “Les Écoles historiques” are hardly more tender: “A Study of History (A. Toynbee), which initially appears as a philosophy of history apprehended in an empirical way, ultimately leads to a theology of history, based on an archaic providentialism”.

Moreover, it seems to us that Toynbee has confused “a strong and centralised regime” with a universal state, for want of having understood the meaning of the mindsets of such a state, or of those of a magical civilisation. Indeed, strong and centralised regimes could be established and maintained at times that had nothing to do with each other. Thus, for Toynbee, Egypt was, from start to finish, only a universal state. Now, even a superficial study shows that the periods after the Old Kingdom, which saw the realisation of the universal state, were only prolonged by mimicry in the Middle and New Kingdoms. Just as the orthodox Christian civilisation was only an extension of the Greek civilisation

Similarly, Toynbee considers that the Indian and Chinese civilisations have maintained their universal state from -500 to the present day, which is obviously not the case, even if Chinese historians want it to be believed.