Books, Arts & Manners: The Descent of Decline

The Idea of Decline in Western History, by Arthur Herman (Free Press, 521 pp., $30)

THE idea of decline, you may suppose, ain’t what it used to be. The words “decadence” and “degeneracy,” so commonly invoked by politicians and cultural critics three or more generations ago, are scarcely the key terms of present-day political debate. Grandiose pessimistic theorizing of the sort that gave us Brooks Adams’s The Law of Civilization and Decay or Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West is out of fashion; the last person to attempt it, Arnold Toynbee, was slowly taken to pieces by other historians and is little read today.

NM

About the Author

Noel Malcolm

Featured Tags

The Idea of Decline in Western History, by Arthur Herman (Free Press, 521 pp., $30)

THE idea of decline, you may suppose, ain’t what it used to be. The words “decadence” and “degeneracy,” so commonly invoked by politicians and cultural critics three or more generations ago, are scarcely the key terms of present-day political debate. Grandiose pessimistic theorizing of the sort that gave us Brooks Adams’s The Law of Civilization and Decay or Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West is out of fashion; the last person to attempt it, Arnold Toynbee, was slowly taken to pieces by other historians and is little read today.