THE WORLD HISTORIANS
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the most "cosmopolitan" liberals as well as among the most "inter–
national" socialists. Except for the revolutionary Marxists and a
few anthropologists, the only people who opposed the narrowness
of the one-civilization concept of the Western historians, and who
can thus be regarded in a sense as forerunners and allies of the
new pluralistic world history of Spengler and Toynbee, are to be
found in that counter-revolutionary undercurrent of 19th century
historical thought which kept itself comparatively free from the
intoxications of the age of progress. Here belong, to mention only
writers who have exerted a lasting influence, certain early Roman–
ticists (F. Schlegel), the older generation of the "Historical
School" (Moeser, Herder, Goethe), the Frenchman de Gobineau,
imd the whole school of German "Geopolitics" from Ratzel · to
Haushofer.
.For a discussion of the new, pluralistic type of universal
history we need not deal in detail with a number of important
theoretical problems which are solved in different ways by
Speng~
ler and by Toynbee. The decisive question was not into how many
independent civilizations the one Civilization of the preceding
phases should be split-whether into eight, as in Spengler, or into
twenty-one, as in the more elaborate, less dogmatic, and empiri–
cally much better founded scheme of Toynbee. The important
point was to split it at all. The narrow unitarian concept had
become ever more untenable, not only on theoretical grounds but
also because the dream of world-unification on a Western basis
had entirely outlived its former practical expediency. The world
wide expansion of Western technics, science, political and eco–
nomic institutions, nationalism, methods of warfare, had turned
out to be not at all equivalent to a transformation of the whole
world into one huge colony of the West. It had created new
weapons which the peoples of China, Japan, India, and the Arabian
world in Eastern Asia and Egypt could turn against the Western
aggressor. Thus it became necessary for the Western powers to
find new and more efficient weapons, and for the Western his–
torians to form the new concepts of a world in which those weapons
could be used. We shall presently see how this practical problem
is approached by the new Geopolitics of German totalitarianism.
First, a rapid glimpse at the incredibly increased scope of
the new type of universal history contrasted with the narrow circle
