The Perfection of the West

About the Book

Even before Oswald Spengler published The Decline of the West at the end of the First World War, many acute observers were already convinced of his general thesis: Western civilization had entered a period like late antiquity, when the Hellenistic Age crystallized into the Roman Empire. In that ancient time, democracy expanded to a maximum and then turned into its opposite; the secularization of culture began to reverse; a universal state arose, chiefly through the acquiescence of a world exhausted by war. The history of the modern West, it was thought, would see many of the same developments during the 20th and 21st centuries.

These are very general parameters; certainly it is possible to imagine several futures that would fit them equally well. Spengler and other macrohistorians, with the dark 20th century before them, not unreasonably imagined that history would develop in the worst possible way. By the beginning of the 21st century, the basic insights of the macrohistorians had stood the test of time, but it was also clear that the worst had failed to happen. Even with today’s disturbed history, we are now in a position to look again at what Spengler said was the real meaning of his famous book: not the decline of the West, but its fulfillment; even its perfection.

The Perfection of the West brings together essays and reviews of books that deal with the questions of world order and cultural climax that first began to trouble the West more than a century ago. Some of the books are recent and topical; some are quite old. Taken together, they afford a perspective on the no-longer distant end of the modern era. The book is divided into six parts:

I Terminal States: Models of history and the archetype of “empire.”

II Imperial Ethics: Political theory for the world after national sovereignty.

III The Great Republic: The United States, its political culture, and its historical role.

IV The Evil Empire: The dark, “Traditional” alternative to a Whiggish, “Conservative” world.

V Late Culture: Care for the past in the age of the twilight of the arts.

VI Fiction: Speculative futures, with particular attention to The Glass Bead Game.

Quite deliberately, The Perfection of the West does not attempt to state a new model of history; neither does it try to lay out a detailed scenario for the 21st century. Rather, using some solid historical analogies, it takes snapshots of history: real and imaginary; past, present, and future. The meaning of these images will be known in full only to people as far in our future as the publication of The Decline of the West is in our past. Even today, however, we can see that the images are not as dark as we might have feared.

About the Author

John J. Reilly is a member of the Center for Millennial Studies and the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations.