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1. Their freebooting autonomy was the mark of the modern world.
2. Every other significant figure of the Italian Renaissance succeeded by adopting the cultural posture of
the condottiere.
3. The confidence that Burckhardt s swashbucklers exhibited, however, did not stand up well to the cauldron that
was the First World War.
C. Among the heirs of Dilthey and Burckhardt, a new version of cultural history arose that focused on the symbols and
gestures that marked the death of cultures.
1. An example of this was Johan Huizinga s The Waning of the Middle Ages, which could as easily have been a
description of his own world after the end of the Great War.
2. In Huizinga s late Middle Ages, death was macabre grisly and gruesome.
3. Culture had become a spider web of pessimism and decay.
Suggested Reading:
Burrow, A History of Histories, chap. 23.
Gay, Style in History, chap. 4 (on Burckhardt).
Kelley, Fortunes of History, chap. 7.
Questions to Consider:
1. Is deduction or induction a more desirable methodology in history?
2. Why did Burckhardt choose a mercenary like Sforza as his model of the Italian Renaissance?
©2008 The Teaching Company.
31
Lecture Twenty-One
Civilization as History
Scope: The collapse of European confidence during the First World War turned the meaning that the culture historians were
looking for into the channels of cultural relativism, psychiatry, and religion. Oswald Spengler, Sigmund Freud, and
Arnold Toynbee all worked to unearth patterns of cultural development in the past, and all three were united by an
underlying conviction that these patterns presaged tension and decline in Western civilization. Samuel P. Huntington
takes an even harder-edged version of culture history when he states that the real struggle is not within civilizations
but between them.
Outline
I. Postwar history writing turned cultural historians into purveyors of sackcloth and ashes.
A. The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler s attempt to write a vast cultural history of Western decline, was very
much a Romantic rant. In his view, each great culture (Indian, Babylonian, Chinese, Egyptian, Arabic, Mexican,
classical, and modern Western) follows an arc similar to that of the seasons.
1. The vital cultural springtime becomes the summer of culture, when rationality and mathematics assume the
dominant role. The cultural autumn is characterized by abstraction, decadence, and fatalism, and in the cultural
winter philosophy turns uselessly academic, art becomes a pastiche of revivals, religion withers, and politics is
swamped by authoritarian Caesarism.
2. Each of these four-part cycles lasted about a thousand years.
3. Spengler conceded no sort of privileged position for Western culture.
4. All political cultures were destined for some form of Caesarism.
B. Sigmund Freud treated the history of culture as an ironic commentary on unresolved tensions, as he used the lessons
he had learned from his patients to psychoanalyze European cultures as well.
1. Human societies possess a collective id in the form of aggressive and sexual drives.
2. Human history is an account of how societies create cultural structures that restrain these drives.
3. Freud set off a chain reaction of attempts to apply psychoanalysis to historical groups.
4. But psychohistory fared substantially less well than psychobiography.
II. Arnold Joseph Toynbee was rare among the culture historians for being an academic historian.
A. Toynbee started with a similar premise to Spengler s in A Study of History: to write a universal history based on the
genesis, growth, breakdown, and disintegration of civilizations.
B. But Toynbee had a much, much sturdier grasp on the history he was writing about.
C. Toynbee also had a much more flexible notion of how civilizations rise or fall.
1. Spengler s cycles are rigid and deterministic.
2. In Toynbee, civilizations follow a rough-and-ready dialectic, constantly meeting challenges and struggling to
meet them.
3. But no breakdown is necessarily final, nor does it lead mechanically to disintegration.
4. Toynbee put religion as the ground from which civilizations emerged.
III. It is the harder-edged versions of culture history that are still with us.
A. Samuel P. Huntington s The Clash of Civilizations argues that the real struggle is not within civilizations but
between them.
B. Future conflicts would not be based on social or economic differences but would be caused by differences between
people of differing religious and cultural backgrounds.
Suggested Reading:
Dawson, Oswald Spengler and the Life of Civilizations, in The Dynamics of World History.
Gilderhus, History and Historians, chap. 7.
Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, chap. 1.
Questions to Consider:
1. How was Freud s analysis of civilization a development of his analysis of human psychology?
2. In what ways are Toynbee, Spengler, and Huntington all based on the same premise?
©2008 The Teaching Company.
32
Lecture Twenty-Two
The American History Lesson
Scope: Americans tend to think that they have no need for elaborate histories of the past, since the American experiment is
designed to point to the future. But Americans have been involved in history writing since colonial times although
in those times, much of it was written from the viewpoint of Protestant apocalyptic. Gradually, as the American
colonies developed cultural patterns of their own, the bias toward religious apocalyptic grudgingly yielded to
celebration. With the American Revolution, a narrative dedicated to celebration of the new republic became virtually
the only permissible narrative.
Outline
I. The American attitude toward history is that we haven t got any and don t need any.
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