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which is still possible in the modern world. Yet, at the same time,
it did not free itself entirely from the fatal ambiguity pervading
all previous phases of the bourgeois epoch.
Just as previous historians had represented the necessity of
the accumulation of capital as an eternal law of progress and the
creation of the world market as a world wide expansion of the
blessings of civilization, so the philosopher of
The Decline of the
West
translated the present troubles of big business into the terms
of a cosmic catastrophe.
The optimistic mood of the earlier phases is replaced in
Spengler by skepticism and despair. Yet this is only a transition
from one to another form of the ideological glorification of an
unsatisfactory reality. The "pessimism" of monopoly capitalism
is no more realistic than the "optimism" of Free Trade.
6.
The decisive step taken by Spengler and followed in a per·
haps even more important work by the English historian Arnold
J.
Toynbee,
*
consists in a break with the strange illusion that had
beset all previous philosophers and historians. They had mistaken
their own civilization for the
o~ly
existing
Civilization
(in the
singular and with a capital C) that needed to be taken care of in a
truly "universal" history. The stubbornness with which this bar–
rier of Western historical thought persists to the present day is well
illustrated by the tremendous contradiction between the purported
and the real scope of recent history books. Thus we find that even
a bold broadener of the · narrow concepts of traditional history
proposed in one of his volumes to deal with "the background of
contemporaneous ways of doing and thinking not only in Europe
but in North and South America, Australasia, latterly, even in
India, Japan, western Asia, and Africa," but actually discussed
extra-European affairs only in a single chapter (18 out of a total
of 770 pages) under the well known aspect of
"The Expansion of
European Influence in the 19th Century."*
This strange pre-Copernican view which regards its own re·
stricted sphere as the center if not as the whole extent of the
"world" has prevailed during the last two hundred years among
•
A Study of History,
vols. 1-3, London 1934, vol. 4-6, London 1939. No fewer than
three additional volumes
will
follow.
•T. H. Robinson,
The Ordeal of Civilization,
New York, 1926
pp.
4; 615-32.
