JOHN E. TASHJEAN
297
remarked that Borkenau was strongest in conveying a sense of "what
it must have been like to live in an age of deep mental distress" (
Con–
cept of Ideology, 1967).
III
In the years following
Ubergang,
Borkenau altered course con–
ceptually and in his research interests. The seventeenth century, no
doubt a strategic subject for a cultural historian, allowed him to do
his homework on the origins of the modern West. Later in the thir–
ties, Borkenau studied Pareto in order to explicate totalitarianism as
the terminal syndrome of the modern West. Pareto, like Marx, had
a philosophy of history. It was a vision of eternal return, almost clas–
sically Mediterranean, and centering on the interactions between
social psychology and the political process. In that scheme, sec–
tarians of all kinds, including Marxist sectarians of progress, are
doomed to defeat by overriding long cycles. Borkenau must have
come away from the thirties not, of course, uninterested in the Stal–
inist chapter of communism, but inclined toward the deeper and
broader subjects raised by the apparent disintegration of Western
civilization; and this in the context of conflicting Marxist, Paretian,
Spenglerian, and Freudian interpretations.
In 1944 in a forgotten essay in the
Dublin Review,
Borkenau
returned to Spengler; and he revealed the foundations of
End and
Beginning:
The nineteenth century was substantially divided between two
schools of historical interpretation: the one denied the existence
of any pattern of historical development; the other accepted such
a pattern - but it was invariably a rigid unilineal pattern of prog–
ress from aboriginal man to industrial man. During the twen–
tieth century the situation began to change. A few scholars began
to see the possibility of a determined pattern of historical evolu–
tion which yet need not be a pattern of unilineal progress. "Rise
and decline" had been a favourite subject with social philosophers
ever since Machiavelli, but for a long time both rise and decline
appeared as the accidental results of institutions which could be
changed at will. Those who believed in necessary development
only accepted rise, and regarded declines regularly following it
as untoward incidents not worthy of a theory. Vico, the great
Neapolitan of the eighteenth century, whose main ideas were so
