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The Idea of Decline in Western History
Historian Arthur Herman traces the roots of declinism and shows how major thinkers, past and present, have contributed to its development as a coherent ideology of cultural pessimism.
From Nazism to the Sixties counterculture, from Britain's Fabian socialists to America's multiculturalists, and from Dracula and Freud to Robert Bly and Madonna, this work examines the idea of decline in Western history and sets out to explain how the conviction of civilization's inevitable end has become a fixed part of the modern Western imagination. Through a series of biographical portraits spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, the author traces the roots of declinism and aims to show how major thinkers of the past and present, including Nietzsche, DuBois, Sartre, and Foucault, have contributed to its development as a coherent ideology of cultural pessimism.
From Nazism to the Sixties counterculture, from Britain's Fabian socialists to America's multiculturalists, and from Dracula and Freud to Robert Bly and Madonna, this work examines the idea of decline in Western history and sets out to explain how the conviction of civilization's inevitable end has become a fixed part of the modern Western imagination. Through a series of biographical portraits spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, the author traces the roots of declinism and aims to show how major thinkers of the past and present, including Nietzsche, DuBois, Sartre, and Foucault, have contributed to its development as a coherent ideology of cultural pessimism.
528 pages, Hardcover
First published January 8, 1997
About the author
Arthur Herman
17 books279 followersArthur L. Herman (born 1956) is an American popular historian, currently serving as a senior fellow at Hudson Institute. He generally employs the Great Man perspective in his work, which is 19th Century historical methodology attributing human events and their outcomes to the singular efforts of great men that has been refined and qualified by such modern thinkers as Sidney Hook.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 40 reviews
February 5, 2016
one of the most important books i have ever read
August 16, 2018
Arthur Herman is a conservative historian and this book is a study of the phenomenon of "cultural pessimism,” which he describes as an apocalyptic sense that (Western) civilization is doomed by its very nature. Herman rounds up the thought of a disparate range of "pessimistic" thinkers on both the left and right, including W.E.B. Dubois, Lothrop Stoddard, Sartre, Heidegger, Foucault, Oswald Spengler, Marcus Garvey, the Unabomber, Toynbee, Gobineau, Nietzsche and many more. Herman has an established gift for adequately summarizing the positions of intellectuals within a short span and he does a good job of it here. The book was rare in that it started off so unpromisingly I almost abandoned it, but ended up being so interesting that I couldn’t put it down by the end.
Contrary to the book's branding, this is really only a history of the last two centuries of "declinist,” thinking rather than something that extends back to antiquity. Such thinking is clearly a unique product of modernity rather than something timeless. As he establishes, most cultural pessimism actually draws from the same source: German Romanticism. The birth of liberal technocratic societies in Europe in the early 19th century gave rise to a group of anguished intellectuals in Germany, and later the rest of Europe, who began to feel deep reservations about what was being created and what was being lost. These men began to lament what they saw as the loss of an authentic vitalist Kultur in the face of a rationalizing Zivilisation. Kultur stood for a natural way of being and existing in the world, whereas Zivilisation stood for alienation and anomie, even while it afforded human beings greater raw power over nature. Another way to think about it would be the contrast between Gemeinshaft and Gessellshaft (community vs society), also terminology that came from the German thinkers.
The German Romantics went on to influence generations of thinkers and ordinary people in places they could have scarcely imagined. One thing all these people had in common was that they were latecomers and subjects of modernity, rather than its creators. W.E.B. Dubois for example helped create the notion of "soul" in African-American culture. But Dubois himself had been educated in Germany and deeply influenced by the Romantic ideological trends of the time. The "soul" he was talking about was in fact Kultur, which he defined African-Americans as possessing in contrast with the sterile and brutal white Europeans who held power in the United States. While Dubois started off as a patrician and ended up as a supporter of the Soviet Union, the core of Romantic thought tended to view industrial capitalism and socialism as "a distinction without a difference," as Nietzsche said, both being an expression of the same alienating vulgar materialist worldview. The idea of living vitally, which led some to promote the “purifying” utilization of violence and sexuality, came out of an attempt to negate Zivilisation. We can see this in the thought of Nietzsche and his varied European offspring (including indirectly the Nazis), but also in Franz Fanon, Stokely Carmichael and other Third World revolutionaries. American pop culture like action movies and popular genres of music continue to embrace this logic in an unconscious way, glorifying violence and coarseness for its own sake. The idea of a "rebel without a cause" is a crude attempt to revive Kultur in the face of Zivilisation.
The other major theme of the book was the consistent fear of "degeneration," under modernity. This has taken the form of fears of racial pollution, environmental degradation, the hollowing out of the soul by technology, and decadence of all types. Gobineau and Lothrop Stoddard in France and the United States respectively helped articulate the fear of a “pure” nation being submerged by degenerate racial Others, with specific degenerate types supposedly identifiable by physical characteristics such as skull size. There was a pronounced fear in many places that the physical conditions of modernity would slowly lead people to waste away physically and morally, a fear that has not gone away at all and continues to be expressed widely in certain circles. There has also been a longstanding fear, as well as hope, that the people of the Third World who have maintained their vital force could either overwhelm or revive a decadent West through immigration and foreign confrontation. The absence of war, acceptance of a shiftless liberalism and alienation caused by technology has long been accused of consigning people to a slow, degenerative death. Germany was a latecomer to modernity so it made sense that its thinkers were the first to articulate the pain of what seemed to be the inner degeneration caused by losing ones their soul (Kultur) to the machine. As Bismarck proceeded to centralize and modernize Germany, some people in that country even began to shortsightedly yearn for a war that would perhaps reawaken people’s spirits and break the bovine, soul-destroying boredom that seemed to characterize their new modern lives. The degrading mass culture and minimalist anthropology of modernity chafed and dehumanized them. The chief enemy as they saw it was the ideology of liberalism, with capitalism and technology being its footsoldiers in the war against humanity’s vital nature.
Herman’s idea of “cultural pessimism” seems quite flexible and able to encompass all the people who criticize the conservative liberal Enlightenment that he identifies with Western civilization. While he is a historian, this is clearly a work of polemic and literary criticism, both of which he is actually quite gifted at. I had to laugh at some of his razor-sharp attacks on the thinkers whose work he reviews here, including some whom I am generally quite sympathetic towards. I picked up the book hoping to be snapped out the prevalent pessimism of contemporary politics, as I hoped that Herman would articulate deeper roots of this phenomenon. Upon completing the book I’m not so sure that all of today’s pessimism is unwarranted, nor was that of yesterday. Those who warned of the doom of Western civilization at the turn of the 20th century were not exactly proven wrong by the horror of the world wars and totalitarianism. Its also very unclear that the “eco-pessimism” he excoriates in the last chapter is at all irrational or unfounded. In Herman’s defense this book was written in 1999 and thus at a high-point of Western triumphalism, so perhaps these blind spots can maybe be forgiven.
Despite his naked partisanship, which I actually kind of appreciate for its transparency, I thought this was a very entertaining and enlightening read. It never ceases to amaze me how a seemingly broad diversity of movements, including Afrocentrism, conservative reaction, anarcho-primitivism and Islamism, always seemingly to end up tracing their roots back to a small group of German thinkers who first confronted what it meant for people to truly live in the modern world.
Contrary to the book's branding, this is really only a history of the last two centuries of "declinist,” thinking rather than something that extends back to antiquity. Such thinking is clearly a unique product of modernity rather than something timeless. As he establishes, most cultural pessimism actually draws from the same source: German Romanticism. The birth of liberal technocratic societies in Europe in the early 19th century gave rise to a group of anguished intellectuals in Germany, and later the rest of Europe, who began to feel deep reservations about what was being created and what was being lost. These men began to lament what they saw as the loss of an authentic vitalist Kultur in the face of a rationalizing Zivilisation. Kultur stood for a natural way of being and existing in the world, whereas Zivilisation stood for alienation and anomie, even while it afforded human beings greater raw power over nature. Another way to think about it would be the contrast between Gemeinshaft and Gessellshaft (community vs society), also terminology that came from the German thinkers.
The German Romantics went on to influence generations of thinkers and ordinary people in places they could have scarcely imagined. One thing all these people had in common was that they were latecomers and subjects of modernity, rather than its creators. W.E.B. Dubois for example helped create the notion of "soul" in African-American culture. But Dubois himself had been educated in Germany and deeply influenced by the Romantic ideological trends of the time. The "soul" he was talking about was in fact Kultur, which he defined African-Americans as possessing in contrast with the sterile and brutal white Europeans who held power in the United States. While Dubois started off as a patrician and ended up as a supporter of the Soviet Union, the core of Romantic thought tended to view industrial capitalism and socialism as "a distinction without a difference," as Nietzsche said, both being an expression of the same alienating vulgar materialist worldview. The idea of living vitally, which led some to promote the “purifying” utilization of violence and sexuality, came out of an attempt to negate Zivilisation. We can see this in the thought of Nietzsche and his varied European offspring (including indirectly the Nazis), but also in Franz Fanon, Stokely Carmichael and other Third World revolutionaries. American pop culture like action movies and popular genres of music continue to embrace this logic in an unconscious way, glorifying violence and coarseness for its own sake. The idea of a "rebel without a cause" is a crude attempt to revive Kultur in the face of Zivilisation.
The other major theme of the book was the consistent fear of "degeneration," under modernity. This has taken the form of fears of racial pollution, environmental degradation, the hollowing out of the soul by technology, and decadence of all types. Gobineau and Lothrop Stoddard in France and the United States respectively helped articulate the fear of a “pure” nation being submerged by degenerate racial Others, with specific degenerate types supposedly identifiable by physical characteristics such as skull size. There was a pronounced fear in many places that the physical conditions of modernity would slowly lead people to waste away physically and morally, a fear that has not gone away at all and continues to be expressed widely in certain circles. There has also been a longstanding fear, as well as hope, that the people of the Third World who have maintained their vital force could either overwhelm or revive a decadent West through immigration and foreign confrontation. The absence of war, acceptance of a shiftless liberalism and alienation caused by technology has long been accused of consigning people to a slow, degenerative death. Germany was a latecomer to modernity so it made sense that its thinkers were the first to articulate the pain of what seemed to be the inner degeneration caused by losing ones their soul (Kultur) to the machine. As Bismarck proceeded to centralize and modernize Germany, some people in that country even began to shortsightedly yearn for a war that would perhaps reawaken people’s spirits and break the bovine, soul-destroying boredom that seemed to characterize their new modern lives. The degrading mass culture and minimalist anthropology of modernity chafed and dehumanized them. The chief enemy as they saw it was the ideology of liberalism, with capitalism and technology being its footsoldiers in the war against humanity’s vital nature.
Herman’s idea of “cultural pessimism” seems quite flexible and able to encompass all the people who criticize the conservative liberal Enlightenment that he identifies with Western civilization. While he is a historian, this is clearly a work of polemic and literary criticism, both of which he is actually quite gifted at. I had to laugh at some of his razor-sharp attacks on the thinkers whose work he reviews here, including some whom I am generally quite sympathetic towards. I picked up the book hoping to be snapped out the prevalent pessimism of contemporary politics, as I hoped that Herman would articulate deeper roots of this phenomenon. Upon completing the book I’m not so sure that all of today’s pessimism is unwarranted, nor was that of yesterday. Those who warned of the doom of Western civilization at the turn of the 20th century were not exactly proven wrong by the horror of the world wars and totalitarianism. Its also very unclear that the “eco-pessimism” he excoriates in the last chapter is at all irrational or unfounded. In Herman’s defense this book was written in 1999 and thus at a high-point of Western triumphalism, so perhaps these blind spots can maybe be forgiven.
Despite his naked partisanship, which I actually kind of appreciate for its transparency, I thought this was a very entertaining and enlightening read. It never ceases to amaze me how a seemingly broad diversity of movements, including Afrocentrism, conservative reaction, anarcho-primitivism and Islamism, always seemingly to end up tracing their roots back to a small group of German thinkers who first confronted what it meant for people to truly live in the modern world.
May 27, 2015
We all have had some thoughts/fears about "the end" from time to time, so a book about the idea of decline in western history seems interesting. Unfortunately the author also have a political agenda which weakens the book drastically.
First some technicalities.
1. The book needs to be renamed to: "The idea of decline in western history from 1800-2000"(its published in 1997 though). You cant write 10 pages about the idea of decline before 1800 and then think you have covered the whole period. He is primarily interested in "newer" decline, so the title should reflect that fact.
2. I miss a proper outline in the introduction. What is his plan for the different chapters? Why are they included? An explanation of the choices. This is Intellectual history, order is everything when you are dealing with such amount of information. This isnt only about doing the audience a favour, but also himself, its much easier to write when you know more or less exactly what to do.
Lets take the thesis and some distinctions next.
He seems to have two intensions writing the book:
1. Quote: "This book is about the origins and diffusion of an Intellectual tradition, the idea of 'decline of the west'"(introduction).
Or stated otherwise: "This book has been primarily about the idea of civilizational decline and the rise of of cultural pessimism"(afterword).
This seems fairly neutral and scholary. And although he does not state a particular thesis you can regard what he is trying to do as a kind of thesis/goal and ask if he succeeds(although I think authors should be more explicit).
Alternatively, you can take this as a form of Thesis/conclusion(from the afterword):
"In the end, the whole debate over 'the decline of the west' presents us with a false set of choices. The alternative to historical pessimism about the future of modern society is not optimistic complacency: they are opposite sides of the holistic views"(afterword).
The problem is that the book is not really about any of these "thesis suggestions". The book is not primarliy about a scholary thesis, its more about a political thesis(some would even say "rant", at least on certain pages). That brings us to intention number two - and unfortunately the most important one:
2. The best way to illustrate what he really tries to do is to continue the first quote:
"This book has been primarily about the idea of civilizational decline and the rise of of cultural pessimism......But in some ways, ironically, it has also turned out to be a history of another kind of decline - the decline of the liberal humanist image of man and society, of its morals and values, in the face of its various opponents.
There you have his real agenda. A defense of the enlightment values and some sort of liberalism(conservative maybe). Although you should state it more explicitly I dont think a political perspective is a bad thing - but it can be if it ruins the the schoolarship. Here it sometimes does.
- First I have a problem with terminology."Historical pessimism" and "Cultural pessimism" are maybe his two most important analytical "tools". Thats ok, but considering his political intentions, words with negative and positive connotations shouldnt be used as central analytical tools. Scholary wise it seems like a bad decision.
- Many of the people he regards as "cultural pessimist" is pessimistic on behalf of their contemporary culture, but optimistic on behalf of a future culture, is it then wise to use the term "cultural pessimists" denoting these people. It isnt an adequate description. You are maybe pessimistic about the soccer results this years, but next year you think your team will win everything - are you essentially an pessimist? Of course not. Given the authors political intensions I again think that it is a debatable term.
- Another problem with his central distinction is that it is ambiguous. Pessimism is in my opinion both: a, a psychological attitide and b, An intellectual position. This means that labeling a person as "cultural pessimist" dosent say anything about if his position is correct or not.
Worse: The author tries to show that being a cultural pessimist neccesarily isnt a legitimate intellectual position. Sometimes he commits the "guilt by association" fallacy(read the intro about the unabomber and environmentalism). Actually this is an important point in the book: Construct a link between something everyone finds disgusting and something/someone no one finds disgusting - and both suddenly become disgusting. All the time he tries to link up people whose political position he dislikes. If you look you will find plenty of them. One variation of this way of thinking is:
"Just as historical pessimists as burckhardt and henry adams had believed that capitalism would dry up the sources of human creativity and thought, so were advocates of sustainable development convinced that normal capitalism would dry up the sources of raw materials".
He is often trying to create connections to justify his political grand sweeping narrative. But sometimes the connections looks forced. In my opinion "connections" are fine, but they schould be scholary rather than political.
- The main problem with the book is probably the categorizations and definitions: What is a cultural pessimist?
"A cultural pessimist insists that that the ordinary, normal course of civil society on the western model, as a capitalist or "commercial" society resting on rational and scientifical principles, democratic political institutions, and self-consciously 'modern' cultural and social attitudes, awaits it secular apocalypse."
Further:
"For the cultural pessimist, then, bad news is actually good news. He greets economic depression, unemployment, world worlds and conflicts, and enviromental disasters with barerly concealed glee, since these events all foreshadow the final destruction of modern civilization"
This is supposed to be an important analytical tool in the book and the definition we are given is a very bad one. Its emotional, tendentious, too wide. Not something to work with really: "Greets world worlds, enviromental disasters, depression...glee..". Not good scholarship. The most important terms should be defined in an neutral way. That strengthens a book.
There are too many people under one umbrella if I can put it that way. Everyone he disagrees with is a cultural pessimist. Nietzsche, chomsky, heidegger, foucault, adorno, sartre and so and so on.
And I dont know if any of them really fits the definition and his opinions at all. Chomsky loves science, rationality, democracy, freedom, the enlightment ideals. He debated foucault. He despise postmodernism. Nietzsche dosent like any of that(freedom maybe), they are different in every way, but they somehow share some assumptions and can be called "cultural pessimists". I think the author should have reworked his definitions, he can't call nearly everyone a cultural pessimist!
He also concludes that neither optimism nor pessimism is legitimate. That indicates that he has disproved 100's of intellctuals in some 400 pages. Remember: The "pessimism" of these guys is not just a psychological attitude, its an intellectual attitude based on advanced thinking, on rationality. In other words, the author cant just label their position, he has to argue point for point - is sartre, foucault, chomsky, the enviromentalists, adorno and so on wrong on these matters, why?
In my opinion he cant draw the conclusion that the rational "pessimism" of some of these intellectuals are wrong based on what he has written in this book. 4-5 pages isnt enough to disprove a major thinker. It can be done of course, but then you should write another kind of book, more debunking styled and argumentative.
This is just a portion of my notes, but I think its fair to say that the author's political views did not do the book any favours. And this is really sad, because the topic is interesting.
Some positives though:
1. He writes well. I would not have anything against reading another book by this author if he left the politics out of it.
2. "Details". There are so many minor interesting details here. I am sure I noted at least 25. Things you have read and forgotten or maybe some genuinly new info. Your "inner big picture" becomes clearer with the lacking small details.
To Read or not to read?
Some interesting info here, but there are so many books.....better books.
First some technicalities.
1. The book needs to be renamed to: "The idea of decline in western history from 1800-2000"(its published in 1997 though). You cant write 10 pages about the idea of decline before 1800 and then think you have covered the whole period. He is primarily interested in "newer" decline, so the title should reflect that fact.
2. I miss a proper outline in the introduction. What is his plan for the different chapters? Why are they included? An explanation of the choices. This is Intellectual history, order is everything when you are dealing with such amount of information. This isnt only about doing the audience a favour, but also himself, its much easier to write when you know more or less exactly what to do.
Lets take the thesis and some distinctions next.
He seems to have two intensions writing the book:
1. Quote: "This book is about the origins and diffusion of an Intellectual tradition, the idea of 'decline of the west'"(introduction).
Or stated otherwise: "This book has been primarily about the idea of civilizational decline and the rise of of cultural pessimism"(afterword).
This seems fairly neutral and scholary. And although he does not state a particular thesis you can regard what he is trying to do as a kind of thesis/goal and ask if he succeeds(although I think authors should be more explicit).
Alternatively, you can take this as a form of Thesis/conclusion(from the afterword):
"In the end, the whole debate over 'the decline of the west' presents us with a false set of choices. The alternative to historical pessimism about the future of modern society is not optimistic complacency: they are opposite sides of the holistic views"(afterword).
The problem is that the book is not really about any of these "thesis suggestions". The book is not primarliy about a scholary thesis, its more about a political thesis(some would even say "rant", at least on certain pages). That brings us to intention number two - and unfortunately the most important one:
2. The best way to illustrate what he really tries to do is to continue the first quote:
"This book has been primarily about the idea of civilizational decline and the rise of of cultural pessimism......But in some ways, ironically, it has also turned out to be a history of another kind of decline - the decline of the liberal humanist image of man and society, of its morals and values, in the face of its various opponents.
There you have his real agenda. A defense of the enlightment values and some sort of liberalism(conservative maybe). Although you should state it more explicitly I dont think a political perspective is a bad thing - but it can be if it ruins the the schoolarship. Here it sometimes does.
- First I have a problem with terminology."Historical pessimism" and "Cultural pessimism" are maybe his two most important analytical "tools". Thats ok, but considering his political intentions, words with negative and positive connotations shouldnt be used as central analytical tools. Scholary wise it seems like a bad decision.
- Many of the people he regards as "cultural pessimist" is pessimistic on behalf of their contemporary culture, but optimistic on behalf of a future culture, is it then wise to use the term "cultural pessimists" denoting these people. It isnt an adequate description. You are maybe pessimistic about the soccer results this years, but next year you think your team will win everything - are you essentially an pessimist? Of course not. Given the authors political intensions I again think that it is a debatable term.
- Another problem with his central distinction is that it is ambiguous. Pessimism is in my opinion both: a, a psychological attitide and b, An intellectual position. This means that labeling a person as "cultural pessimist" dosent say anything about if his position is correct or not.
Worse: The author tries to show that being a cultural pessimist neccesarily isnt a legitimate intellectual position. Sometimes he commits the "guilt by association" fallacy(read the intro about the unabomber and environmentalism). Actually this is an important point in the book: Construct a link between something everyone finds disgusting and something/someone no one finds disgusting - and both suddenly become disgusting. All the time he tries to link up people whose political position he dislikes. If you look you will find plenty of them. One variation of this way of thinking is:
"Just as historical pessimists as burckhardt and henry adams had believed that capitalism would dry up the sources of human creativity and thought, so were advocates of sustainable development convinced that normal capitalism would dry up the sources of raw materials".
He is often trying to create connections to justify his political grand sweeping narrative. But sometimes the connections looks forced. In my opinion "connections" are fine, but they schould be scholary rather than political.
- The main problem with the book is probably the categorizations and definitions: What is a cultural pessimist?
"A cultural pessimist insists that that the ordinary, normal course of civil society on the western model, as a capitalist or "commercial" society resting on rational and scientifical principles, democratic political institutions, and self-consciously 'modern' cultural and social attitudes, awaits it secular apocalypse."
Further:
"For the cultural pessimist, then, bad news is actually good news. He greets economic depression, unemployment, world worlds and conflicts, and enviromental disasters with barerly concealed glee, since these events all foreshadow the final destruction of modern civilization"
This is supposed to be an important analytical tool in the book and the definition we are given is a very bad one. Its emotional, tendentious, too wide. Not something to work with really: "Greets world worlds, enviromental disasters, depression...glee..". Not good scholarship. The most important terms should be defined in an neutral way. That strengthens a book.
There are too many people under one umbrella if I can put it that way. Everyone he disagrees with is a cultural pessimist. Nietzsche, chomsky, heidegger, foucault, adorno, sartre and so and so on.
And I dont know if any of them really fits the definition and his opinions at all. Chomsky loves science, rationality, democracy, freedom, the enlightment ideals. He debated foucault. He despise postmodernism. Nietzsche dosent like any of that(freedom maybe), they are different in every way, but they somehow share some assumptions and can be called "cultural pessimists". I think the author should have reworked his definitions, he can't call nearly everyone a cultural pessimist!
He also concludes that neither optimism nor pessimism is legitimate. That indicates that he has disproved 100's of intellctuals in some 400 pages. Remember: The "pessimism" of these guys is not just a psychological attitude, its an intellectual attitude based on advanced thinking, on rationality. In other words, the author cant just label their position, he has to argue point for point - is sartre, foucault, chomsky, the enviromentalists, adorno and so on wrong on these matters, why?
In my opinion he cant draw the conclusion that the rational "pessimism" of some of these intellectuals are wrong based on what he has written in this book. 4-5 pages isnt enough to disprove a major thinker. It can be done of course, but then you should write another kind of book, more debunking styled and argumentative.
This is just a portion of my notes, but I think its fair to say that the author's political views did not do the book any favours. And this is really sad, because the topic is interesting.
Some positives though:
1. He writes well. I would not have anything against reading another book by this author if he left the politics out of it.
2. "Details". There are so many minor interesting details here. I am sure I noted at least 25. Things you have read and forgotten or maybe some genuinly new info. Your "inner big picture" becomes clearer with the lacking small details.
To Read or not to read?
Some interesting info here, but there are so many books.....better books.
May 31, 2018
This is a brightly written history of what Herman terms the idea of “decline” in the secular modern Western philosophical tradition. The best thing about the book is the connections of mutual reading and references that he uncovers between French, English, German, Italian, and American intellectuals (he cites only translated sources, and makes almost no references to authors from outside those five countries). He does a good job of showing the political contexts that drove these ideas of decline during the Long Nineteenth Century.
The biggest trouble with the book is its undertheorized title concept. By “decline” Herman seems variously to be referring to collapse, demise, degeneration, dissolution (that’s just in the first two paragraphs), even though these are not exactly identical concepts. The through line seems to be a kind of spiritual weariness and fundamental pessimism. He is also a bit loose with exactly what the object of decline is — sometimes it is of a certain kind of homogeneous national society, sometimes it is “the West,” sometimes it is “the race,” and toward the end it becomes “nature” writ large. He largely ignores the religious antecedents and parallel developments — visions of eschatology and apocalypse — which produces a certain blindness to the deep roots of this sort of thinking. And he sometimes plays fast and loose even with all this, noting that some of these thinkers are not merely gloom-and-doomsayers, but in fact manufactured positive, activist programs. There’s an awful long ways between the positions and dispositions of figures as diverse as Arthur Gobineau, Marcus Garvey, Arnold Toynbee, and Theodor Adorno, and Al Gore — all of whom are dragooned into the volume as exemplars of what is depicted as a single intellectual tradition. Herman might also have noted directly that there are essentially no women in this book, and reflected on why that is.
By the time you get to the end, you realize that the whole first 400 pages are basically there to provide an account of what he sees as the intellectual antecedents of the American right’s chief cultural villains of the 1990s: multiculturalism, environmentalism, and Clinton-esque liberalism. At first blush, it seems very odd to think that declinist thinking is the right way to think about the politics of an era whose president danced to “(Can’t Stop) Thinking about Tomorrow” at his 1993 inauguration. But what’s especially weird about this attempt to pin “declinism” on critical theory, multiculturalism, and environmentalism is that the most prominent political exponents of declinist narratives in the United States, especially in the 1990s but also today, were most certainly not progressives, but rather conservatives, especially those of the alt-right and paleo- variety (less so for neocons). After all, who is the author of “The Death of the West” and “The Decline of Christian America”? Was it Tom Friedman or Paul Krugman? No, it was Pat Buchanan, that’s who. And who are the most conspicuous heritors of the nihilism and cultural despair described by Nietzsche? Is it the sentimental feminists at Jezebel, or rather today’s online trolls and the so-called men’s rights movement? The idea that the contemporary left holds a monopoly on declinism, especially when that term is defined as capaciously as Herman does, is simply not supportable.
This book would be helpfully read beside Joshua Foa Dienstag’s PESSIMISM, and perhaps even Pinker’s ENLIGHTENMENT NOW!
The biggest trouble with the book is its undertheorized title concept. By “decline” Herman seems variously to be referring to collapse, demise, degeneration, dissolution (that’s just in the first two paragraphs), even though these are not exactly identical concepts. The through line seems to be a kind of spiritual weariness and fundamental pessimism. He is also a bit loose with exactly what the object of decline is — sometimes it is of a certain kind of homogeneous national society, sometimes it is “the West,” sometimes it is “the race,” and toward the end it becomes “nature” writ large. He largely ignores the religious antecedents and parallel developments — visions of eschatology and apocalypse — which produces a certain blindness to the deep roots of this sort of thinking. And he sometimes plays fast and loose even with all this, noting that some of these thinkers are not merely gloom-and-doomsayers, but in fact manufactured positive, activist programs. There’s an awful long ways between the positions and dispositions of figures as diverse as Arthur Gobineau, Marcus Garvey, Arnold Toynbee, and Theodor Adorno, and Al Gore — all of whom are dragooned into the volume as exemplars of what is depicted as a single intellectual tradition. Herman might also have noted directly that there are essentially no women in this book, and reflected on why that is.
By the time you get to the end, you realize that the whole first 400 pages are basically there to provide an account of what he sees as the intellectual antecedents of the American right’s chief cultural villains of the 1990s: multiculturalism, environmentalism, and Clinton-esque liberalism. At first blush, it seems very odd to think that declinist thinking is the right way to think about the politics of an era whose president danced to “(Can’t Stop) Thinking about Tomorrow” at his 1993 inauguration. But what’s especially weird about this attempt to pin “declinism” on critical theory, multiculturalism, and environmentalism is that the most prominent political exponents of declinist narratives in the United States, especially in the 1990s but also today, were most certainly not progressives, but rather conservatives, especially those of the alt-right and paleo- variety (less so for neocons). After all, who is the author of “The Death of the West” and “The Decline of Christian America”? Was it Tom Friedman or Paul Krugman? No, it was Pat Buchanan, that’s who. And who are the most conspicuous heritors of the nihilism and cultural despair described by Nietzsche? Is it the sentimental feminists at Jezebel, or rather today’s online trolls and the so-called men’s rights movement? The idea that the contemporary left holds a monopoly on declinism, especially when that term is defined as capaciously as Herman does, is simply not supportable.
This book would be helpfully read beside Joshua Foa Dienstag’s PESSIMISM, and perhaps even Pinker’s ENLIGHTENMENT NOW!
January 31, 2021
9.9/10
This is a brilliant work.
This is a brilliant work.
March 7, 2020
When I'm 96 years old and on my deathbed, someone will ask "What's the best book you read in your lifetime?" And I'll probably die while ruminating on it, but I'm able to guarantee this book will be in strong consideration. And I've still got 55 years of reading to do! It's that good.
March 27, 2017
I enjoyed the historical survey of this cycle of decline throughout western history. It was part of my attempt to understand why we are where we are as a country in 2017.
January 3, 2019
I dunno I think the pessimists made some good points.
September 30, 2023
Arthur Herman's work, "The Idea of Decline in Western History," offers a comprehensive exploration of a recurring theme in Western thought - the notion of decline. In this academic review, we shall critically assess the author's arguments, methodology, and overall contribution to the field of intellectual history.
Herman's central thesis revolves around the idea that Western civilization has been plagued by an enduring belief in its decline since antiquity. He meticulously traces the evolution of this concept through various historical periods, from classical Greece to contemporary America. The author argues that this belief in decline has played a pivotal role in shaping Western intellectual, political, and cultural landscapes.
Herman's book exhibits a commendable level of scholarship. His extensive research is evident through the multitude of primary and secondary sources cited, which contribute to a well-rounded historical narrative. The author's commitment to scholarly rigor is commendable.
The clarity with which Herman articulates complex historical concepts is a strength of this work. He skillfully navigates through centuries of Western thought, making it accessible to both scholars and general readers. However, at times, his argumentation could benefit from a more nuanced exploration of counterarguments and alternative perspectives.
Herman adeptly places the idea of decline within its historical context, demonstrating how it has been influenced by events, thinkers, and cultural movements. This contextualization adds depth to his analysis and enables readers to appreciate the idea's evolution.
While Herman convincingly argues for the persistence of the idea of decline, some readers may question the extent to which it has been a driving force in Western history. A more balanced consideration of other factors shaping Western civilization would strengthen his argument.
The book's examination of the idea of decline in contemporary Western society is particularly engaging. Herman connects historical themes to present-day concerns, encouraging readers to reflect on the continued relevance of these ideas.
"The Idea of Decline in Western History" by Arthur Herman is a significant contribution to the study of intellectual history. It skillfully traces the trajectory of a compelling theme through centuries of Western thought. While the book exhibits scholarly rigor and clear articulation, a more balanced consideration of alternative viewpoints would enhance its argument. Overall, it is a valuable resource for scholars and students interested in the intellectual foundations of Western civilization.
GPT
Herman's central thesis revolves around the idea that Western civilization has been plagued by an enduring belief in its decline since antiquity. He meticulously traces the evolution of this concept through various historical periods, from classical Greece to contemporary America. The author argues that this belief in decline has played a pivotal role in shaping Western intellectual, political, and cultural landscapes.
Herman's book exhibits a commendable level of scholarship. His extensive research is evident through the multitude of primary and secondary sources cited, which contribute to a well-rounded historical narrative. The author's commitment to scholarly rigor is commendable.
The clarity with which Herman articulates complex historical concepts is a strength of this work. He skillfully navigates through centuries of Western thought, making it accessible to both scholars and general readers. However, at times, his argumentation could benefit from a more nuanced exploration of counterarguments and alternative perspectives.
Herman adeptly places the idea of decline within its historical context, demonstrating how it has been influenced by events, thinkers, and cultural movements. This contextualization adds depth to his analysis and enables readers to appreciate the idea's evolution.
While Herman convincingly argues for the persistence of the idea of decline, some readers may question the extent to which it has been a driving force in Western history. A more balanced consideration of other factors shaping Western civilization would strengthen his argument.
The book's examination of the idea of decline in contemporary Western society is particularly engaging. Herman connects historical themes to present-day concerns, encouraging readers to reflect on the continued relevance of these ideas.
"The Idea of Decline in Western History" by Arthur Herman is a significant contribution to the study of intellectual history. It skillfully traces the trajectory of a compelling theme through centuries of Western thought. While the book exhibits scholarly rigor and clear articulation, a more balanced consideration of alternative viewpoints would enhance its argument. Overall, it is a valuable resource for scholars and students interested in the intellectual foundations of Western civilization.
GPT
April 29, 2024
A fascinating, well-written tour through a couple hundred years of history and philosophy of history that embrace what Herman calls “cultural pessimism,” the idea that one’s culture/civilization is being debased by fill-in-the-blanks, usually outsiders or their ideas. The tour moves fast, which one feels most strongly as it nears the present and authors one knows better are summed up in ways that can make you groan, but it’s still a good tour of places I, at least, hadn’t been or hadn’t seen through this lense.
I felt that Herman’s politics were not worn on his sleeve until we near the present and he slashes away at “multiculturalism,” dating the book already, and "eco-pessimism" (before he had reached this point, I noted to my wife that there were some things that are undeniably in decline today, such as species and the effects of climate change; it isn’t just how we spin things, and the blame isn’t on others, but on ourselves).
I felt that Herman’s politics were not worn on his sleeve until we near the present and he slashes away at “multiculturalism,” dating the book already, and "eco-pessimism" (before he had reached this point, I noted to my wife that there were some things that are undeniably in decline today, such as species and the effects of climate change; it isn’t just how we spin things, and the blame isn’t on others, but on ourselves).
October 12, 2021
The most politically incorrect position today is that of optimism. It is taken as unserious, uncaring and implied to reflect an embrace of all the worst elements of our society and situation. Such gloom, Herman shows, is however often more reflective of the critics than the world they condemn.
Herman concentrates on the era 1800-1980 moving briskly and adeptly across the work of hundreds of thinkers, with names such as Rousseau, Gobineau, Burkhardt, Adams, Nietzsche, Heideggar, Sartre, Toynbee, Marcuse, Adorno, Dubois, Foucault, tracking across the page. Among these authors Herman identifies two broad strands of decline theory. Historical Pessimism – “We’re doomed” – and more sinisterly Cultural Pessimism, “We deserve to be doomed”.
Historical pessimism is common enough. It has often been adopted by those who held power and found themselves increasingly out of power with social change, unable to grasp or appreciate the changes occurring. Often this challenge has value, lamenting declining standards, or motivating change. Cultural Pessimism is an entirely different beast. It not only focuses on decline but degeneration. It not only identifies collapse, it welcomes it. Such material often revels in the idea of damage and harm to society and its citizens` and provides fertile soil for others to pursue revolutionary change to restore the ‘vitality’ of society. From racial Darwinists who helped encourage the Nazi movement on the right to left wing anti-capitalist supporters of violent communist insurgencies.
Herman wrote The Idea of Decline in 1997 but it resonates powerfully today (2021). Declinism of both historical and cultural perspectives is widespread. The environmental movement on the left is the loudest example, one Herman briefly explores. To give them credit, Climate Change is a very large and very real problem. But you don’t have to read much of the book-length treatment or even mere tweets on social media to see that many also embrace the coming harm as a way of demonstrating the failure of western society and its capitalist, individualistic ways. More recently, and far uglier is the rise of right-wing cultural pessimism with its belief our societies are fracturing thanks to immigration and weak leadership and only whole-sale revolution can stop the decline.
Herman doesn’t offer a lot of personal engagement in much of the body of the text. That’s a little bit of a shame as it leads to several areas of only implicit critique and often robs the analysis of its context. The modern chapters critiquing the Frankfurt School, and strident versions of Multicultural and Environmentalism end up feeling like exercises in selective quoting. Herman doesn’t seem to view all of these movements as harmful, but the thread of decline sometimes seems to disappear, being replaced by a general critic of the critics of western society.
While capitalism is often the common thread behind why pessimists can’t seem to stand or even understand Western society, Herman notes two intriguing and very common assumptions that are widely found. First, the metaphor of society as an organism. This idea which started off as a message of vibrant growth and progress has decline built into it. Living things inevitably age and die. If society is an organism, at some point it must age out, and pass on. Our metaphors matter.
The other assumption is one the first assumption itself embodies: the attempt to understand through a holistic perspective. Society as contained within an interconnected system. Which goes up and down as one, where new vitality may flow through all the veins, but so too can poison. Adopting a holistic view, a preference we can find everywhere from intersectionality through to grand strategy is however to inherently debase individual problems, individual trends and often enough, individuals as well. Not only is this usually a poor basis for analysis – everything is not connected – it’s even worse as a basis for political influence. Groups wanting to change everything, either change nothing, or decide there should be no limits in how they pursue change.
I can’t remember how I came to first hear about this book. It was one which had sat in my Amazon ‘save for later’ list for a few years before I finally put it in the cart. I am so very glad I did. This is a profound book and one urgently needed. It covers so much ground so well, that it is easy to forgive its occasional stumble. Strongly recommended.
Herman concentrates on the era 1800-1980 moving briskly and adeptly across the work of hundreds of thinkers, with names such as Rousseau, Gobineau, Burkhardt, Adams, Nietzsche, Heideggar, Sartre, Toynbee, Marcuse, Adorno, Dubois, Foucault, tracking across the page. Among these authors Herman identifies two broad strands of decline theory. Historical Pessimism – “We’re doomed” – and more sinisterly Cultural Pessimism, “We deserve to be doomed”.
Historical pessimism is common enough. It has often been adopted by those who held power and found themselves increasingly out of power with social change, unable to grasp or appreciate the changes occurring. Often this challenge has value, lamenting declining standards, or motivating change. Cultural Pessimism is an entirely different beast. It not only focuses on decline but degeneration. It not only identifies collapse, it welcomes it. Such material often revels in the idea of damage and harm to society and its citizens` and provides fertile soil for others to pursue revolutionary change to restore the ‘vitality’ of society. From racial Darwinists who helped encourage the Nazi movement on the right to left wing anti-capitalist supporters of violent communist insurgencies.
Herman wrote The Idea of Decline in 1997 but it resonates powerfully today (2021). Declinism of both historical and cultural perspectives is widespread. The environmental movement on the left is the loudest example, one Herman briefly explores. To give them credit, Climate Change is a very large and very real problem. But you don’t have to read much of the book-length treatment or even mere tweets on social media to see that many also embrace the coming harm as a way of demonstrating the failure of western society and its capitalist, individualistic ways. More recently, and far uglier is the rise of right-wing cultural pessimism with its belief our societies are fracturing thanks to immigration and weak leadership and only whole-sale revolution can stop the decline.
Herman doesn’t offer a lot of personal engagement in much of the body of the text. That’s a little bit of a shame as it leads to several areas of only implicit critique and often robs the analysis of its context. The modern chapters critiquing the Frankfurt School, and strident versions of Multicultural and Environmentalism end up feeling like exercises in selective quoting. Herman doesn’t seem to view all of these movements as harmful, but the thread of decline sometimes seems to disappear, being replaced by a general critic of the critics of western society.
While capitalism is often the common thread behind why pessimists can’t seem to stand or even understand Western society, Herman notes two intriguing and very common assumptions that are widely found. First, the metaphor of society as an organism. This idea which started off as a message of vibrant growth and progress has decline built into it. Living things inevitably age and die. If society is an organism, at some point it must age out, and pass on. Our metaphors matter.
The other assumption is one the first assumption itself embodies: the attempt to understand through a holistic perspective. Society as contained within an interconnected system. Which goes up and down as one, where new vitality may flow through all the veins, but so too can poison. Adopting a holistic view, a preference we can find everywhere from intersectionality through to grand strategy is however to inherently debase individual problems, individual trends and often enough, individuals as well. Not only is this usually a poor basis for analysis – everything is not connected – it’s even worse as a basis for political influence. Groups wanting to change everything, either change nothing, or decide there should be no limits in how they pursue change.
I can’t remember how I came to first hear about this book. It was one which had sat in my Amazon ‘save for later’ list for a few years before I finally put it in the cart. I am so very glad I did. This is a profound book and one urgently needed. It covers so much ground so well, that it is easy to forgive its occasional stumble. Strongly recommended.
September 13, 2018
I really enjoyed a few of the Arthur Herman's other books (To Rule the Waves and Cave and the Light) , but this was more of a slog. The author became hyper focused on the detail/name/date style of history writing, loosing or obfuscating how the events tie into the central thesis of many passages and chapters. It is clear that this is more of a seriously or scholarly approach especially compared to his later works, which still have a great amount of historical information but in a much easier to read approach.
This brings me to my struggle, the book was good was for what the title suggests, a study of the evolution of the concept of cultural pessimism, or decline in western history (big caveat here, this "history" starts around 1800). On the other hand, for me it was a slog to read, burying the lead in an overload of names, dates and philosophical terms and sociological theories. On its own that is okay in some books, dense subject matter often results in dense reading, but the Authors later works are immensely more engaging and easy to read (To rule the Waves and Cave and the light for example ), both taking similarly dense subjects (the history of British Naval exploration and combat and the history and impact of Plato and Aristotle's philosophies respectively). Both of these still use extensive research, end notes and citations for content and accuracy but make the books actually engaging and fun to read, while "Decline" is neither.
To anybody that reads this review, do you give your ratings (for a non fiction book) based on how "good" the book is (meaning the quality of the writing, historical accuracy, information it provides, etc) or how much you enjoyed reading it? Does (or should) the work stand alone or in comparison to the other works on the same subject or by the same author? When a book is hyper dense with facts, jargon and data and the reader struggles with comprehension or enjoyment is that a fault of the reader for lack of knowledge or intelligence or a fault of the author for making their text hard to read or understand? I struggle with these questions a lot.
This brings me to my struggle, the book was good was for what the title suggests, a study of the evolution of the concept of cultural pessimism, or decline in western history (big caveat here, this "history" starts around 1800). On the other hand, for me it was a slog to read, burying the lead in an overload of names, dates and philosophical terms and sociological theories. On its own that is okay in some books, dense subject matter often results in dense reading, but the Authors later works are immensely more engaging and easy to read (To rule the Waves and Cave and the light for example ), both taking similarly dense subjects (the history of British Naval exploration and combat and the history and impact of Plato and Aristotle's philosophies respectively). Both of these still use extensive research, end notes and citations for content and accuracy but make the books actually engaging and fun to read, while "Decline" is neither.
To anybody that reads this review, do you give your ratings (for a non fiction book) based on how "good" the book is (meaning the quality of the writing, historical accuracy, information it provides, etc) or how much you enjoyed reading it? Does (or should) the work stand alone or in comparison to the other works on the same subject or by the same author? When a book is hyper dense with facts, jargon and data and the reader struggles with comprehension or enjoyment is that a fault of the reader for lack of knowledge or intelligence or a fault of the author for making their text hard to read or understand? I struggle with these questions a lot.
February 4, 2019
This is a truly amazing work connecting various pessimistic philosophies or just general perspectives and cultural trends from the last few centuries. The author is surprisingly unbiased and does a great job of explaining various theories (which he doesn't agree with) in a way that is fair, in a way that puts them into a larger context by analysing their similarities and development and in a way that is entertaining, with anecdotes being used in just the right extent to not pull away from the more serious nature of the book. This book is informative, enjoyable and will make you feel sorry that there are so many names you don't know more about. The reader might wish that some other authors were focused on, but wanting more only shows the quality of the book and the book is already pretty lengthy and detailed so more of it is not necessary. I would definitely recommend this book if it wasn't clear enough already.
June 24, 2014
I was expecting an interesting if conservative, eurocentric, leaning survey of Western history and philosophy instead I got a lot of idealogical posturing. The author tries to contort any historical figure or event that doesn't match his political view into a todays tired 'left vs. right' trope. Basically anyone who's ever criticized capitalism is in league with racists but any Westerner who shows an interest or sees something virtuous or appealing in non-Western culture is a race traitor. False binaries and hypocrisy don't make good reading so I abandoned this thing about 230 pages in. It's a shame because this is actually a really interesting idea for a book and in the hands of an actual historian it could have been a five star read.
Read
June 25, 2022Declinism--the idea that society's best days are behind it--can be found throughout arts, philosophy, and political rhetoric. Just think of the last book you read or movie you watched; I would be willing to bet even money that it featured declinism. For me, it was No Country for Old Men, a story that has declinism right in the freaking title (although the story also critiques the knee jerk declinism exhibited by one of the main characters).
In The Idea of Decline in Western History, Arthur Herman provides a page turning, pop history account of modern declinist philosophy. He starts the historical account with a group of largely German romantic philosophers in the 1800s and proceeds to the near-present day. The book manages the remarkable feat of covering huge amounts of ground in a comprehensible, readable, and--given the breadth--not too shallow way. I really have to commend Herman for his ability to keep things pithy.
For a review that provides a more thorough overview of the book, I recommend Murtaza's review on Goodreads. Here, I will focus on a few points that struck my personal interest.
First, in Herman's account, preoccupation with decline has swung between the political left and right over time. Declinism is typically conservative. It is the belief, after all, that the past was better than the present. And that is reflected in many early declinists in the 1800s who were obsessed with racial purity and the perceived corruption of vital essence. But declinism can also be widespread on the progressive left.
For example, the book ends with a discussion of the environmental movement and Al Gore (who Herbert weirdly insists on calling Albert Gore--more on that later). In Herbert's account, environmental declinism is conservative in some of the same ways as cultural declinism. A fixation on purity. A sense of irreversible loss. Both even have similar "return to the land" volkish sentiments.
And of course this cycle of left-right declinism continues to the present day. Declinism has retaken--if it ever left--a strong hold on American conservatives over the last few years, so maybe we are due for a 25th anniversary edition of the book.
Second, in the afterword, Herbert talks about Robert Samuelson's The Good Life and Its Discontents, written at about the same time as Idea of Decline. Samuelson talks about how the pessimistic public mood clashes with improvements in health, material wealth, political freedom, etc. that have occured over recent decades. Is it this clash that was the primary impetus for me to read Idea of Decline. Since the late 1990s, my sense is that the national mood in the US has gotten, if anything, even more pessimistic (opinion polls are essentially useless here, but ironically, when looking over the last 40 years, the late 1990s were a high point in how many people thought the US was heading in the right direction).
Part of the increased pessimism is likely do to real setbacks in some of the improvements Samuelson points out. As we have learned, the apparent material gains since the late 1970s/early 1980s have largely accrued to a narrow sliver of the top 1% wealthiest households. There have been notable setbacks in health even before COVID. Political freedoms....
But to what extent is this pessimism driven more by a philosophical attitude than any objective observation? And what, if anything, should be done about these attitudes. Herbert recommends pushing back on historicist accounts of decline:
Here, Herbert echoes Graeber and Wengrow's Dawn of Everything, which tries to supplant historicist narratives of early human history with more empirically grounded accounts that highlight substantial diversity in social and political arrangements.
This particular type of pessimism isn't new, of course. A quote from Arnold Toynbee in 1969 makes a similar point:
Why do budget constraints seem to bind so hard these days(/century)? I was watching a youtube video about bridges in London, and the person in the video claimed that the world wars essentially ended large public infrastructure projects in the city because public funds were used up during the war. This seems incredible to me, but the timing sure lines up.
Third, it was humorous to see that social scientists have been misinterpreting the second law of thermodynamics basically since the first day it was articulated. Georgescu-Roegen, one of the founders of modern ecological economics, famously mis-applied the second law of thermodynamics to ordinary matter, and in this book, I learned that Herbert Spencer learned about the law in 1858, saying "Your assertion that when equilibrium was reached life would cease, staggered me...I still feel unsettled." Bro, hate to break it to you, but life is going to cease way before the heat death of the universe. But rejoice! After the heat death, there will be an infinity of Boltzmann brains. Utilitarianism is meaningless!
Fourth, racists are so predictable. Joseph Arthur de Gobineau is a figure I hadn't heard of before reading this book, but he is responsible for many of the race-based declinist theories we are still saddled with today. He was one of the major originators of the aryan myth, for instance, and he regularly bemoaned the weakened, fallen state of European society. He thought that only a race of aryan aristocrats could put Europe on the right path again. One little problem: he wasn't an aristocrat himself. No problem! He just invented his own family tree to make it seem like he had an aristocratic lineage. He provides me with further justification for my scepticism of anyone who is really into genealogy.
Fifth, this book drew a clear link between volkisch movement in Germany and Du Bois' writing. Du Bois took the term volksseele, commonly translated as collective soul, and used it in very much the same way as 19th century German social theorists in The Souls of Black Folk.
Sixth, Herman is generally pretty good about not judging the declinist philosophies he presents. But he is a conservative, and there are many points in the book (like the insistence on Albert Gore) where he gets away from himself. This happens especially often when discussing Marxism. Marxism is historicist, but it isn't obviously a declinist philosophy. If anything, it says that the best is (inevitably) yet to come. To argue that Marxism is declinist, Herman resorts to a rhetorical trick that, just a few pages earlier in the book, he chastises the Frankfurt school of social theorists for using:
Just 20 pages later, we see Herman say the following about Herbert Marcuse, the Frankfurt School Marxist: "Behind every prophet of decline lurks a vision of progress." This is really having the cake and eating it too. If a group is declinist, then great, put them in the book. If they are progressives, though, then they are really secret declinists in disguise. Herbert also repeatedly conflates Marxist critiques of currently bad conditions--static critiques of society--with declinism which is inherently dynamic. Pessimism alone is not declinist.
Finally, I would be curious to see a similar book about panglossian optimists. Almost the exact counterpoint to the declinists featured here. I am happy to help write the chapters on freshwater macro.
In The Idea of Decline in Western History, Arthur Herman provides a page turning, pop history account of modern declinist philosophy. He starts the historical account with a group of largely German romantic philosophers in the 1800s and proceeds to the near-present day. The book manages the remarkable feat of covering huge amounts of ground in a comprehensible, readable, and--given the breadth--not too shallow way. I really have to commend Herman for his ability to keep things pithy.
For a review that provides a more thorough overview of the book, I recommend Murtaza's review on Goodreads. Here, I will focus on a few points that struck my personal interest.
First, in Herman's account, preoccupation with decline has swung between the political left and right over time. Declinism is typically conservative. It is the belief, after all, that the past was better than the present. And that is reflected in many early declinists in the 1800s who were obsessed with racial purity and the perceived corruption of vital essence. But declinism can also be widespread on the progressive left.
For example, the book ends with a discussion of the environmental movement and Al Gore (who Herbert weirdly insists on calling Albert Gore--more on that later). In Herbert's account, environmental declinism is conservative in some of the same ways as cultural declinism. A fixation on purity. A sense of irreversible loss. Both even have similar "return to the land" volkish sentiments.
And of course this cycle of left-right declinism continues to the present day. Declinism has retaken--if it ever left--a strong hold on American conservatives over the last few years, so maybe we are due for a 25th anniversary edition of the book.
Second, in the afterword, Herbert talks about Robert Samuelson's The Good Life and Its Discontents, written at about the same time as Idea of Decline. Samuelson talks about how the pessimistic public mood clashes with improvements in health, material wealth, political freedom, etc. that have occured over recent decades. Is it this clash that was the primary impetus for me to read Idea of Decline. Since the late 1990s, my sense is that the national mood in the US has gotten, if anything, even more pessimistic (opinion polls are essentially useless here, but ironically, when looking over the last 40 years, the late 1990s were a high point in how many people thought the US was heading in the right direction).
Part of the increased pessimism is likely do to real setbacks in some of the improvements Samuelson points out. As we have learned, the apparent material gains since the late 1970s/early 1980s have largely accrued to a narrow sliver of the top 1% wealthiest households. There have been notable setbacks in health even before COVID. Political freedoms....
But to what extent is this pessimism driven more by a philosophical attitude than any objective observation? And what, if anything, should be done about these attitudes. Herbert recommends pushing back on historicist accounts of decline:
It is legitimate to deplore certain trends and developments in any society as malign or destructive. However, it is quite another thing to draw, or allow to be drawn, a picture that suggests that these problems have such deeply rooted causes that they are unsolvable, or have such far-reaching implications that only a drastic overhaul of society or culture as a whole can fix them. Yet this is precisely what large numbers of Western intellectuals did at the end of the nineteenth century and again in the century that followed. It is this assumption--that modern Western civilisation functions as a whole, and that its problems require holistic, not piecemeal, solutions--which lies at the hart of both the pessimistic persuasion and its optimistic counterpart, the blind faith in Progress.
Here, Herbert echoes Graeber and Wengrow's Dawn of Everything, which tries to supplant historicist narratives of early human history with more empirically grounded accounts that highlight substantial diversity in social and political arrangements.
This particular type of pessimism isn't new, of course. A quote from Arnold Toynbee in 1969 makes a similar point:
At one time, Toynbee wrote later, Europe's nation-states could afford to expand both as 'welfare states' and as 'war-making states.' In the twentieth century, they could no longer afford to do both and would have to make a choice.
Why do budget constraints seem to bind so hard these days(/century)? I was watching a youtube video about bridges in London, and the person in the video claimed that the world wars essentially ended large public infrastructure projects in the city because public funds were used up during the war. This seems incredible to me, but the timing sure lines up.
Third, it was humorous to see that social scientists have been misinterpreting the second law of thermodynamics basically since the first day it was articulated. Georgescu-Roegen, one of the founders of modern ecological economics, famously mis-applied the second law of thermodynamics to ordinary matter, and in this book, I learned that Herbert Spencer learned about the law in 1858, saying "Your assertion that when equilibrium was reached life would cease, staggered me...I still feel unsettled." Bro, hate to break it to you, but life is going to cease way before the heat death of the universe. But rejoice! After the heat death, there will be an infinity of Boltzmann brains. Utilitarianism is meaningless!
Fourth, racists are so predictable. Joseph Arthur de Gobineau is a figure I hadn't heard of before reading this book, but he is responsible for many of the race-based declinist theories we are still saddled with today. He was one of the major originators of the aryan myth, for instance, and he regularly bemoaned the weakened, fallen state of European society. He thought that only a race of aryan aristocrats could put Europe on the right path again. One little problem: he wasn't an aristocrat himself. No problem! He just invented his own family tree to make it seem like he had an aristocratic lineage. He provides me with further justification for my scepticism of anyone who is really into genealogy.
Fifth, this book drew a clear link between volkisch movement in Germany and Du Bois' writing. Du Bois took the term volksseele, commonly translated as collective soul, and used it in very much the same way as 19th century German social theorists in The Souls of Black Folk.
Sixth, Herman is generally pretty good about not judging the declinist philosophies he presents. But he is a conservative, and there are many points in the book (like the insistence on Albert Gore) where he gets away from himself. This happens especially often when discussing Marxism. Marxism is historicist, but it isn't obviously a declinist philosophy. If anything, it says that the best is (inevitably) yet to come. To argue that Marxism is declinist, Herman resorts to a rhetorical trick that, just a few pages earlier in the book, he chastises the Frankfurt school of social theorists for using:
This established a principle, and a useful rhetorical device, that became characteristic of other cultural pessimists besides the members of the Frankfurt School: the more things seem to be opposites (liberalism and fascism, affluence and poverty, free speech and censorship) the more they are actually the same.
Just 20 pages later, we see Herman say the following about Herbert Marcuse, the Frankfurt School Marxist: "Behind every prophet of decline lurks a vision of progress." This is really having the cake and eating it too. If a group is declinist, then great, put them in the book. If they are progressives, though, then they are really secret declinists in disguise. Herbert also repeatedly conflates Marxist critiques of currently bad conditions--static critiques of society--with declinism which is inherently dynamic. Pessimism alone is not declinist.
Finally, I would be curious to see a similar book about panglossian optimists. Almost the exact counterpoint to the declinists featured here. I am happy to help write the chapters on freshwater macro.
November 27, 2021
this book has something of a cult following, but didn't reach the same audience as herman's other pop-history works. why? this is a tough sell: theories of historical pessimism and cultural pessimism from both the right and left from the 19th century to the present are self-reinforcing ("it's all one thing") and a threat to liberal individualism (or at least the idea that bougie politics can be contested, individual actions might matter outside a grand scheme or system, etc.). that said, the world would be a better place if all copies of menand's thoroughly mediocre/descriptive "the metaphysical club" were replaced on bookshelves with "the idea of decline" (at least on bookshelves seen during zoom interviews...that menand book is everywhere!).
as a cambridge contextualist, or at least someone who studied with q. skinner and ate dinner with j.g.a. pocock, i do get anxious at herman's weaving together such a grand intellectual history...because it's clear that many of his claims are coming from footnotes to secondary literature ("heidegger quoted in so and so's history of environmental thought") or 1-2 main texts per thinker. there's no sense of context, no sense he's fully digested more than 300 years of intellectual history...it's like he's rushing from summary to summary in service of the thesis spelled out supra. still, a must-read, particularly for the intro, conclusion, gobineau, spengler, and toynbee chapters. with the other stuff i could quibble (though as someone who has read 90% of foucault, i think he more or less nails that, even if he hasn't read that much foucault...marcuse probably gets his due, such as it is...but he rushes through fanon and hasn't really engaged deeply with a lot of the afrocentric texts he cites, probably because he regards them as risible).
as a cambridge contextualist, or at least someone who studied with q. skinner and ate dinner with j.g.a. pocock, i do get anxious at herman's weaving together such a grand intellectual history...because it's clear that many of his claims are coming from footnotes to secondary literature ("heidegger quoted in so and so's history of environmental thought") or 1-2 main texts per thinker. there's no sense of context, no sense he's fully digested more than 300 years of intellectual history...it's like he's rushing from summary to summary in service of the thesis spelled out supra. still, a must-read, particularly for the intro, conclusion, gobineau, spengler, and toynbee chapters. with the other stuff i could quibble (though as someone who has read 90% of foucault, i think he more or less nails that, even if he hasn't read that much foucault...marcuse probably gets his due, such as it is...but he rushes through fanon and hasn't really engaged deeply with a lot of the afrocentric texts he cites, probably because he regards them as risible).
April 29, 2023
Amazone
The survey compensates the rest
This book is a decent introduction to some of the most important trends of though on decline in the modern world. It is worth for that, as little else of what the author writes is coherent with these chapters.
Basically, he believes that there is no real decline.
His conservative liberalism is in constant conflict with the ideas he talks about, which in the end led me to think that he's unwillingly proving to be the wrong one.
J. B. Marques
---
sampler from the book
If Kevin Phillips's dire warnings about the Reagan era's "decade of greed" sound like the verbal assault on America's Gilded Age of Boston Brahmins like Henry Adams, then Paul Kennedy's warnings that the twenty-first century will usher in a struggle of "the West against the rest," with "fast growing, adolescent, resource-poor, undercapitalized, and undereducated populations" on one side "and demographically moribund and increasingly nervous rich societies" on the other, sounds very much like Arnold Toynbee, Oswald Spengler, Benjamin Kidd, or any number of other gloomy prognosticators in the first decades of this century.
Those same writers, in fact, had originally coined the term "Western" to describe a faltering European civilization that, they believed, was steadily fading away, like a brilliant sunset against the western sky.
Then Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's widely publicized The Bell Curve (1994) presented a picture of America's future highly reminiscent of the writings of eugenicists and "race scientists" at the end of the nineteenth century - the fin de siecle in which the image of Western decline first took decisive shape.
Charles Murray warned that America's overly mobile society was about to split in two, based on IQ and cognitive ability. The United States was fast becoming "two nations," a detached and culturally isolated elite holding the bulk of economic and social resources and an increasingly cretinied underclass, both black and white, incapable of taking care of itself.
The political measures to deal with this bifurcation of society "will become more and more totalitarian," Murray predicted, with increased police powers, the spread of racial antagonisms and resentment, curtailed personal freedoms, and the creation of "a lavish and high-tech version of the Indian reservation for a substantial minority of the nation's population."
He conclused that "unchecked, these trends will lead the US toward something resembling a caste society," adding that, "like other apocalyptic visions [of America's future], this one is pessimistic, perhaps too much so. On the other hand, these is much to be pessimistic about."
As if these worries were not enough, there are the current fears about environmental degradation and its consequences for the survival of modern Western society and even of the planet itself. These reached a crescendo with the publication of Vice President Albert Gore's Earth in the Balance in 1992.
.....
The Unabomber accused modern Americans of leading the lives of "decadent leisured aristocrats": they were "bored, hedonistic, and demoralized." People had been brainwashed onto a state of conformity and docility comparable to "domesticated animals," with every aspect of their lives dictated and controlled by the technological corporate elite.....
Some people talk about the decline of civilization. Others live it......
"there is an element of decay in everything that characterizes modern man," Nietzsche wrote in 1885. In fact, a straight line of descent runs from Nietzsvje and his disciples Martin Heidegger and Herbert Marcuse, to the Unabomber and beyond: a line of descent that produced a single view of the modern West, summerd up in Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man: "A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic, unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress."
For the cultural pessimist, the momentous issue for the future is not whether Western civilization will survive, but what will take its place.
In its original European context, cultural pessimism cut across the political and ideological spectru,. Marcuse was a Marxist; Heidegger turned to Hitler with enthusiasm, Oswald Spengler with misgivings. Nietzsche despised all conventional political labels.
Cultural pessimism is an attack on modern Western culture that predates and transcends adherence to any Marxist or socialist creed.
If the leading voices of the antimodern chorus in American today come from the Left, figures like TS Eliot, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Walker Percy, Malcolm Muggeridge, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Thomas Molnar have managed to sustain the refrain from the Right as well.
---
To whom can I speak today?
The iniquity that strikes the land
Has no end.
To whom can I speak today?
There are no righteous men,
The earth is surrendered to criminals.
The sentiments seem recognizably modern, even though the author actually lived in Egypt's Middle Kingdom, circa 2000 BC.
Why is this sense of decline common to all cultures?
---
Interesting that he doesn't name drop Huntington
but lots of Hegel and Heidegger and more on Himmler the Herrnstein!
tons on Toynbee though....
and even two mentions of American fascist, Francis Parker Yockey of all things....
to make this one incredibly strange book
---
one amazon summary
In this ambitious and eminently relevant work of popular intellectual history, Arthur Herman, the coordinator of the Western civilization program at the Smithsonian Institution, makes a broad survey of the literature of cultural decline and a scatter-shot retort to the purveyors of doom and gloom.
Herman attempts to right the balance unset by panicky prognosticators who either decry the defeat of Western values or herald the bankruptcy of Enlightenment idealism, despite the unparalleled worldwide ascendance of market economics, universal human rights, and representational, constitutional government.
Herman is at his best when making erudite replies to today's ill-informed peddlers of doom and gloom.
But when he starts attempting to trace the history of "declinism," to philosophers from Friedrich Nietzsche to Martin Heidegger, and writers from Henry Adams to Robert Bly, his accusations often fall wide of the intended mark.
His assaults on Jean Jacques Rousseau and W.E.B. DuBois will appear particularly unfair to those familiar with the works of these men, though readers who trust in Herman's abbreviated accounts of their thinking will be unknowingly misled.
The "Great Ideas" framework Herman defends in the pages of this book ought to prize the close reading of important texts as much as it seeks to protect a sacrosanct canon or a static notion of prized ideals. Great ideas after all stand up to close attention.
Herman's book conveys a confidence in the values of the Western tradition, but in making its argument, it inspires a casual disrespect from the works of other arguably great thinkers and artists based on Herman's swift survey, a dubious achievement and troublesome side effect of this challenging book.
---
another one from the depths of the Amazon
Herman is a spare conservative in other of his works and expresses a refreshing skepticism toward habitual skepticism. Thinkers like Spengler and Foucault provided important milestones for the viewpoint of pessimism, Spengler's time really was disintegrating, and Foucault was pessimistic in part because he was an intellectual and a gay man at a time when both were undergoing violent assaults (he started out as what he called a Nietzschean Marxist, so there you go).
But Herman provides a bit of sanity to counteract the misery one witnesses in everyday life and continually points out that life has always been pretty rough for most people, but such a fact ought not negate the great achievements of the liberal society.
He represents a classical view of conservatism rather than the mess of popular political representation that has persisted since the days of Goldwater.
The book is just about first-rate and discusses some of my favorite themes in intellectual history, so I am biased toward the likes of Schopenhauer even in refutation.
His thesis is that the idea of decline is perennial and always has been, which means either the pessimist or the progressivist is wrong, but one of them *must* be wrong about the general trend of history.
For every impoverished locale a person sees, hears about, or happens to live in, it is only proper to remind onself that such depressive things need not characterize society in general.
good antidote for intellectuals who tread in Franco-German philosophical waters or who think America is the worst in the world because it describes itself as the best and so must fall short.
My central nitpick is the way Herman describes pessimism as silly, however seriously silly it is. There are reasons for the pessimistic mindset - good reasons, qua perennial reasons - and he tends to push them to the wayside.
Were he a victim of such things I doubt he would have written this book, and so the bias of his birth and profession show through.
Jeremy Brunger
----
My review is a lot more pessimistic
this book ranges from a 2.7 to a 6.2
It's entertaining enough with some really strange biases, and oversimplifications, but you'll always learn something new from a seriously flawed book like this.
The survey compensates the rest
This book is a decent introduction to some of the most important trends of though on decline in the modern world. It is worth for that, as little else of what the author writes is coherent with these chapters.
Basically, he believes that there is no real decline.
His conservative liberalism is in constant conflict with the ideas he talks about, which in the end led me to think that he's unwillingly proving to be the wrong one.
J. B. Marques
---
sampler from the book
If Kevin Phillips's dire warnings about the Reagan era's "decade of greed" sound like the verbal assault on America's Gilded Age of Boston Brahmins like Henry Adams, then Paul Kennedy's warnings that the twenty-first century will usher in a struggle of "the West against the rest," with "fast growing, adolescent, resource-poor, undercapitalized, and undereducated populations" on one side "and demographically moribund and increasingly nervous rich societies" on the other, sounds very much like Arnold Toynbee, Oswald Spengler, Benjamin Kidd, or any number of other gloomy prognosticators in the first decades of this century.
Those same writers, in fact, had originally coined the term "Western" to describe a faltering European civilization that, they believed, was steadily fading away, like a brilliant sunset against the western sky.
Then Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's widely publicized The Bell Curve (1994) presented a picture of America's future highly reminiscent of the writings of eugenicists and "race scientists" at the end of the nineteenth century - the fin de siecle in which the image of Western decline first took decisive shape.
Charles Murray warned that America's overly mobile society was about to split in two, based on IQ and cognitive ability. The United States was fast becoming "two nations," a detached and culturally isolated elite holding the bulk of economic and social resources and an increasingly cretinied underclass, both black and white, incapable of taking care of itself.
The political measures to deal with this bifurcation of society "will become more and more totalitarian," Murray predicted, with increased police powers, the spread of racial antagonisms and resentment, curtailed personal freedoms, and the creation of "a lavish and high-tech version of the Indian reservation for a substantial minority of the nation's population."
He conclused that "unchecked, these trends will lead the US toward something resembling a caste society," adding that, "like other apocalyptic visions [of America's future], this one is pessimistic, perhaps too much so. On the other hand, these is much to be pessimistic about."
As if these worries were not enough, there are the current fears about environmental degradation and its consequences for the survival of modern Western society and even of the planet itself. These reached a crescendo with the publication of Vice President Albert Gore's Earth in the Balance in 1992.
.....
The Unabomber accused modern Americans of leading the lives of "decadent leisured aristocrats": they were "bored, hedonistic, and demoralized." People had been brainwashed onto a state of conformity and docility comparable to "domesticated animals," with every aspect of their lives dictated and controlled by the technological corporate elite.....
Some people talk about the decline of civilization. Others live it......
"there is an element of decay in everything that characterizes modern man," Nietzsche wrote in 1885. In fact, a straight line of descent runs from Nietzsvje and his disciples Martin Heidegger and Herbert Marcuse, to the Unabomber and beyond: a line of descent that produced a single view of the modern West, summerd up in Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man: "A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic, unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress."
For the cultural pessimist, the momentous issue for the future is not whether Western civilization will survive, but what will take its place.
In its original European context, cultural pessimism cut across the political and ideological spectru,. Marcuse was a Marxist; Heidegger turned to Hitler with enthusiasm, Oswald Spengler with misgivings. Nietzsche despised all conventional political labels.
Cultural pessimism is an attack on modern Western culture that predates and transcends adherence to any Marxist or socialist creed.
If the leading voices of the antimodern chorus in American today come from the Left, figures like TS Eliot, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Walker Percy, Malcolm Muggeridge, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Thomas Molnar have managed to sustain the refrain from the Right as well.
---
To whom can I speak today?
The iniquity that strikes the land
Has no end.
To whom can I speak today?
There are no righteous men,
The earth is surrendered to criminals.
The sentiments seem recognizably modern, even though the author actually lived in Egypt's Middle Kingdom, circa 2000 BC.
Why is this sense of decline common to all cultures?
---
Interesting that he doesn't name drop Huntington
but lots of Hegel and Heidegger and more on Himmler the Herrnstein!
tons on Toynbee though....
and even two mentions of American fascist, Francis Parker Yockey of all things....
to make this one incredibly strange book
---
one amazon summary
In this ambitious and eminently relevant work of popular intellectual history, Arthur Herman, the coordinator of the Western civilization program at the Smithsonian Institution, makes a broad survey of the literature of cultural decline and a scatter-shot retort to the purveyors of doom and gloom.
Herman attempts to right the balance unset by panicky prognosticators who either decry the defeat of Western values or herald the bankruptcy of Enlightenment idealism, despite the unparalleled worldwide ascendance of market economics, universal human rights, and representational, constitutional government.
Herman is at his best when making erudite replies to today's ill-informed peddlers of doom and gloom.
But when he starts attempting to trace the history of "declinism," to philosophers from Friedrich Nietzsche to Martin Heidegger, and writers from Henry Adams to Robert Bly, his accusations often fall wide of the intended mark.
His assaults on Jean Jacques Rousseau and W.E.B. DuBois will appear particularly unfair to those familiar with the works of these men, though readers who trust in Herman's abbreviated accounts of their thinking will be unknowingly misled.
The "Great Ideas" framework Herman defends in the pages of this book ought to prize the close reading of important texts as much as it seeks to protect a sacrosanct canon or a static notion of prized ideals. Great ideas after all stand up to close attention.
Herman's book conveys a confidence in the values of the Western tradition, but in making its argument, it inspires a casual disrespect from the works of other arguably great thinkers and artists based on Herman's swift survey, a dubious achievement and troublesome side effect of this challenging book.
---
another one from the depths of the Amazon
Herman is a spare conservative in other of his works and expresses a refreshing skepticism toward habitual skepticism. Thinkers like Spengler and Foucault provided important milestones for the viewpoint of pessimism, Spengler's time really was disintegrating, and Foucault was pessimistic in part because he was an intellectual and a gay man at a time when both were undergoing violent assaults (he started out as what he called a Nietzschean Marxist, so there you go).
But Herman provides a bit of sanity to counteract the misery one witnesses in everyday life and continually points out that life has always been pretty rough for most people, but such a fact ought not negate the great achievements of the liberal society.
He represents a classical view of conservatism rather than the mess of popular political representation that has persisted since the days of Goldwater.
The book is just about first-rate and discusses some of my favorite themes in intellectual history, so I am biased toward the likes of Schopenhauer even in refutation.
His thesis is that the idea of decline is perennial and always has been, which means either the pessimist or the progressivist is wrong, but one of them *must* be wrong about the general trend of history.
For every impoverished locale a person sees, hears about, or happens to live in, it is only proper to remind onself that such depressive things need not characterize society in general.
good antidote for intellectuals who tread in Franco-German philosophical waters or who think America is the worst in the world because it describes itself as the best and so must fall short.
My central nitpick is the way Herman describes pessimism as silly, however seriously silly it is. There are reasons for the pessimistic mindset - good reasons, qua perennial reasons - and he tends to push them to the wayside.
Were he a victim of such things I doubt he would have written this book, and so the bias of his birth and profession show through.
Jeremy Brunger
----
My review is a lot more pessimistic
this book ranges from a 2.7 to a 6.2
It's entertaining enough with some really strange biases, and oversimplifications, but you'll always learn something new from a seriously flawed book like this.
March 17, 2018
This was suggested by one of Tim Ferriss' interviewees in Tribe of Mentors, so I was surprised at how academic it turned out to be. This would be more of a "fun read" in the syllabus of a social thought great books college course than a pragmatic approach to overcoming cultural pessimism post grad.
September 8, 2017
Very thoughtful historical review of "cultural pessimism." Enjoyed the history, enjoyed the biography, enjoyed the stimulating prose.
November 18, 2018
intellectual history ...worth reading..his first book
August 3, 2023
a paradoxically uplifting book
May 23, 2022
I let Herman into my living room with his suitcase full of author-wares to show me how my life might be better off if I came back to my faith in the Enlightenment.
When he opened it, he showed me the volumes of Kant, Schopenhauer, Gobineau, Toqueville (in a leather-binding), Marx, and Mills; he showed me Nietzsche and Wagner, Mann, Henry and Brooks Adams, Spengler, Bergson, Heidegger, and Husserl; Toynbee gets favored status; then there was Sartre, Camus, Fanon, and Marcuse too; don't forget Freud, Foucault, Erikson, Fromm, and then, at the bottom, Lasch, Said, Abbey, Gore, Rifkin, Mailer, Chomsky, Mander, West, and other dark souls.
He tried to tell me that, sure, the death toll from two World Wars, the Holocaust, Stalin's purges, atomic weapons, corrupt corporations using clandestine governmental techniques, multiculturalism, and eco-pessimism were bad, but if only we could bring back faith in reason like the glory days of the Enlightenment. He hinted that I couldn't possibly believe the climate is changing (the book was written in '97)! Herman's 450-page riff on cultural pessimism gets sold with a wry smile, almost a sneer--you see this parade of authors, he implies--they gave up too early, they contributed to recreational complaining rather than offering solutions. Oh, to have Kant and Tocqueville back!
I appreciate reading this book because it inspires me to read more of these authors in his cavalcade, but I am not sold on his premise of cultural pessimism. I don't buy Herman wares. As a conservative Historian, he believes progress is over that next hill, don't be distracted by poverty, nuclear weapons, pandemics, war, the rise of authoritarianism around the world, and reports of a warming planet. Don't be distracted by Said's emphasis on giving the Other a seat at the table or including multiculturalism. We need leadership to reason our way out. Someone?
In other words, after reading it through, it reminds me of the band on the sinking Titanic asking for requests, or asking if they want to hear another verse of "Nearer My God to Thee."
When he opened it, he showed me the volumes of Kant, Schopenhauer, Gobineau, Toqueville (in a leather-binding), Marx, and Mills; he showed me Nietzsche and Wagner, Mann, Henry and Brooks Adams, Spengler, Bergson, Heidegger, and Husserl; Toynbee gets favored status; then there was Sartre, Camus, Fanon, and Marcuse too; don't forget Freud, Foucault, Erikson, Fromm, and then, at the bottom, Lasch, Said, Abbey, Gore, Rifkin, Mailer, Chomsky, Mander, West, and other dark souls.
He tried to tell me that, sure, the death toll from two World Wars, the Holocaust, Stalin's purges, atomic weapons, corrupt corporations using clandestine governmental techniques, multiculturalism, and eco-pessimism were bad, but if only we could bring back faith in reason like the glory days of the Enlightenment. He hinted that I couldn't possibly believe the climate is changing (the book was written in '97)! Herman's 450-page riff on cultural pessimism gets sold with a wry smile, almost a sneer--you see this parade of authors, he implies--they gave up too early, they contributed to recreational complaining rather than offering solutions. Oh, to have Kant and Tocqueville back!
I appreciate reading this book because it inspires me to read more of these authors in his cavalcade, but I am not sold on his premise of cultural pessimism. I don't buy Herman wares. As a conservative Historian, he believes progress is over that next hill, don't be distracted by poverty, nuclear weapons, pandemics, war, the rise of authoritarianism around the world, and reports of a warming planet. Don't be distracted by Said's emphasis on giving the Other a seat at the table or including multiculturalism. We need leadership to reason our way out. Someone?
In other words, after reading it through, it reminds me of the band on the sinking Titanic asking for requests, or asking if they want to hear another verse of "Nearer My God to Thee."
November 30, 2020
I was quite impressed with this book. Herman pours over a stupendous amount of material covering most of the past 200 years and yet manages to make it comprehensible to the reader. I was particularly struck by how well Herman communicates the context and depth of the “fin de siècle” mood that closed the 19th century in Europe.
Focusing on the intellectual traditions of England, Germany, the US and France, Herman connects the lives and thought of the various thinkers who buttressed the idea of a declining West, whether it was viewed through biological, racial or spiritual frames.
Along the way Herman also gives the reader a fascinating look at the work and socio-political context of some of the most consequential thinkers of this time period: Henry & Brooks Adams, Friedrich Nietzsche, W. E. B. Du Bois, Oswald Spengler, Arnold J. Toynbee, Michel Foucault among many others. He similarly chronicles the intellectual foundations of the right and left-wing international movements of the 20th century.
All things considered though, and although I enjoyed the book quite a bit, I do think that Herman is most effective in analyzing the intellectual trends that culminated in the fatalism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Herman’s attempts at analyzing the current, post-Cold War, obsession with decline in the US falls a bit flat. His discussion on the multiculturalist critique from the New Left and the environmental movement let slip his conservative bias and also fail to explain why conservatives also bemoan the decline of US power. Nonetheless the book is a great chronicle of the cultural pessimism that seemed to define the late 19th century and that reached such destructive heights in the early 20th century.
Focusing on the intellectual traditions of England, Germany, the US and France, Herman connects the lives and thought of the various thinkers who buttressed the idea of a declining West, whether it was viewed through biological, racial or spiritual frames.
Along the way Herman also gives the reader a fascinating look at the work and socio-political context of some of the most consequential thinkers of this time period: Henry & Brooks Adams, Friedrich Nietzsche, W. E. B. Du Bois, Oswald Spengler, Arnold J. Toynbee, Michel Foucault among many others. He similarly chronicles the intellectual foundations of the right and left-wing international movements of the 20th century.
All things considered though, and although I enjoyed the book quite a bit, I do think that Herman is most effective in analyzing the intellectual trends that culminated in the fatalism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Herman’s attempts at analyzing the current, post-Cold War, obsession with decline in the US falls a bit flat. His discussion on the multiculturalist critique from the New Left and the environmental movement let slip his conservative bias and also fail to explain why conservatives also bemoan the decline of US power. Nonetheless the book is a great chronicle of the cultural pessimism that seemed to define the late 19th century and that reached such destructive heights in the early 20th century.
November 4, 2023
I would say this book would have been perfect if it were slightly edited down. My favorite topics were Gobineau, Houston Chamberlain and others who picked up the mythology of Aryans to form a basis for the racial pessimism of the mid to late 1800s which inspired European antisemitism.
I also liked learning more about the Frankfurt School, whose advocates turned revolutionary socialism into armchair activism, essentially taking over academia in sociology and psychology through Critical Theory. Ironically, these scholars may have been the first intelligentsia on the left to discard the Soviet Union as essentially "not real socialism", while at the same time advocating for vanguardism socialism led by intellectuals.
The most interesting takeaway of the book is that the ideas of classical liberalism inherited by the Enlightenment were criticized as decadence by the early 1700s. This reference to decline leads to illiberal desires by intellectuals to use collectivism ("will to power", socialism, Nazism, environmentalism, multiculturalism) to try to reset the culture and civilizations they see as in decline.
I also liked learning more about the Frankfurt School, whose advocates turned revolutionary socialism into armchair activism, essentially taking over academia in sociology and psychology through Critical Theory. Ironically, these scholars may have been the first intelligentsia on the left to discard the Soviet Union as essentially "not real socialism", while at the same time advocating for vanguardism socialism led by intellectuals.
The most interesting takeaway of the book is that the ideas of classical liberalism inherited by the Enlightenment were criticized as decadence by the early 1700s. This reference to decline leads to illiberal desires by intellectuals to use collectivism ("will to power", socialism, Nazism, environmentalism, multiculturalism) to try to reset the culture and civilizations they see as in decline.
March 10, 2020
Probably the best mixture of history, art criticism and philosophy I've read. Herman took the canon of western history and philosophy as of the 1990s and not only was able to articulate the genesis of declinist thought, trace it through various political iterations and then connect it with the then present, but also made it readable. The two knocking points that I can think of are that a) the book is dated (it was published in the mid-90's when the Una-bomber was arrested) and b) he didn't give enough screen time to the environmental side of declinist thought. All in all I can't recommend the book enough and wish it was simultaneously better known and that Herman would either write a sequel of sorts or a revised addition after Trumps election.
January 21, 2020
An incredibly well written book that ask the simple question: What if society and civilization is not an organism with a predetermined course and lifespan, but is made up of individual organisms, each with the power to shape his or her own destiny?
By looking at the historical philosophies that have shaped modern pessimism towards the future of society and civilization, Herman shows how such thinking has evolved and why it still exists in our academic institutions to this day. He shows that many of our modern thinkers dont have radically new ideas, but rather have rehashed older ideas that have been around since the post-Enlightenment period.
By looking at the historical philosophies that have shaped modern pessimism towards the future of society and civilization, Herman shows how such thinking has evolved and why it still exists in our academic institutions to this day. He shows that many of our modern thinkers dont have radically new ideas, but rather have rehashed older ideas that have been around since the post-Enlightenment period.
March 10, 2023
I started to read it during one of the most challenging years of my life, and surprisingly it didn't disappoint.
If you're tired of hearing constant moaning of "everything is racist, sexist, neo-liberal, post-capitalistic, fascist, patriarchal etc etc etc", - give it a go.
The book starts slowly cause the first one-third is an introduction to primary philosophical contexts that you will bear till the end of the book. So stick with it.
It's a great insight into the history of cultural and historical pessimism, with many unexpected connections to the modern-day, at the end of the book.
Now, it's in my top 3 or top 5 fav books ever.
If you're tired of hearing constant moaning of "everything is racist, sexist, neo-liberal, post-capitalistic, fascist, patriarchal etc etc etc", - give it a go.
The book starts slowly cause the first one-third is an introduction to primary philosophical contexts that you will bear till the end of the book. So stick with it.
It's a great insight into the history of cultural and historical pessimism, with many unexpected connections to the modern-day, at the end of the book.
Now, it's in my top 3 or top 5 fav books ever.
August 3, 2020
The most universally important book I have read this year. I am very familiar with the philosophers discussed within. I have never thought to put them in the category of pessimists. I did think they were all nihilists. Anyway: every person should read this, esp. the reductionist/violent anarchists cos-play nihilists calling themselves BLM and Antifa. There comes a time when society should not Dr Spock the freaks and agitators. We all need to get on with the serious business of living.
June 15, 2021
This book actually gave me a better outlook on things. There will always be cultural pessimists, but society will march forward regardless.
Very well written, and easy to follow the string of ideas he threads.
I don’t think I would recommend this to the ultra woke, SJW, PC police, as it puts them in the category of armchair cynics, which is kind of on the nose.
Very well written, and easy to follow the string of ideas he threads.
I don’t think I would recommend this to the ultra woke, SJW, PC police, as it puts them in the category of armchair cynics, which is kind of on the nose.
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