THE WORLD HISTORIANS
365
renaissance of a universalistic trend even in
the
thoroughly "spe–
cialized" field of the historical sciences. Yet any tendency in this
direction had to overcome a set of formidable obstacles, and when
"universalism" finally reappeared in the historical thought of a
generation that had gone through the first world war, it had
acquired an entirely different character.
The actual result of the "Westernization" of the universe was
indeed too different from that world unity which had been the
dream of earlier generations of universal historians to deceive any
hut the most credulous victims of that system of illusions and pre–
tensions which was the League of Nations. On the political plane,
the conflicting interests of nations had been replaced by graver
conflicts between the so-called "Great Powers"; on the economic
plane, competition by individual traders in the "free" world mar–
ket had been superseded by a struggle for monopolistic control of
ever widening "spheres of influence." In total, this new universe
was nothing hut a universal extension of that
"warre of every
man
against every man,"
as the nature of capitalist society had been
described in its very beginnings by the author of
Leviathan.
The naive cosmopolitanism of the age of the Enlightenment,
when Voltaire and Gibbon treated such remote countries as China
and India in a mood of respect and curiosity, had been turned into
an atmosphere of mutual contempt and hostile indifference between
East and West. The humble Dutch trader who for more than two
centuries had willingly endured, year after year, the most excru–
ciating penalizations in his tiny insular ghetto off the Japanese
port of Nagasaki for the privilege of holding his ground and mak–
ing his money, had changed his ethos when his status had been rein–
forced by the .guns of Admiral Perry's squadron in Yedo Bay in
1853. The last illusions of the age of Free Trade were scattered
by
the All-Western Crusade against the Boxer Rebellion in
Peking, 1900.
Thus it is little wonder that the first important work on uni–
versal history that resulted from the new period in no way pointed
to the ·renaissance of a cosmopolitan and optimistic mood. Speng–
ler's magnum opus,
The Decline of the West,
which appeared in
war-torn Europe in 1918-22, was indeed the first manifestation of
a new tendency in historical thought. It inaugurated, with all its
old-fashioned philosophical style, the only form of world historY.
