by David Boos
Few concepts stir as many associations in the Western mind as “civilisation” and “high culture.” And few works have shaped those associations more than Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, published in 1918. In the wake of World War I, Spengler’s vision of civilisational decay struck a raw nerve. Europe had emerged from the trenches weary and bruised, no longer intoxicated by pre-war optimism. The continent fell into a cultural hangover, while across the Atlantic, the Jazz Age danced on.
A hundred years later, Spengler’s diagnosis still echoes. Commentators regularly point to his work when discussing the wear and tear of the Western project. What many miss, however, is that Spengler did not expect an immediate collapse. He predicted a final phase of grandeur, an imperial crescendo that all mature civilisations pass through before their decline becomes irreversible.
Reactions to Spengler tend to follow the usual script. Progressives wave him off as a crank. Conservatives cite him selectively to add gravitas to their culture-war arguments. In both cases, his deeper message is ignored.
History as a Patterned Drama
Spengler was not alone in seeing history as a rhythm of rise and fall. In 1934, British historian Arnold J. Toynbee launched his own civilisational epic, A Study of History, which became a bestseller. Toynbee suggested that cultures respond to crises. Those that adapt, flourish. Those that fail, fall.
After 1945, the popularity of these grand theories faded. Western societies turned to optimism and growth. Cultural realism, as the Spenglerians called it, lost its audience. It was during this intellectual retreat that Franz Borkenau quietly entered the stage. An Austrian thinker with roots in both communism and sociology, Borkenau died in 1957. His key work End and Beginning was only published posthumously in 1984 and is largely forgotten today. That neglect is undeserved. His ideas display a clarity and depth that rival, and in some ways surpass, those of Spengler and Toynbee.
A Life on the Run
Borkenau was born in Vienna as Franz Pollack, the son of a Jewish bureaucrat in Imperial service. During his studies in Berlin, he became politicised and rose through the ranks of the communist student movement before breaking with Stalinism. He spent a brief period with the Frankfurt School, which ended in mutual frustration. After the Nazi takeover in 1933, he fled to France and found a new intellectual home in the Annales school led by Marc Bloch and Fernand Braudel.
His transition from Marxist activist to cultural theorist was shaped by bitter experience and careful study. Unlike Spengler, Borkenau did not view civilisations as isolated entities. He accepted Toynbee’s idea of affiliation but reworked it. Cultures do not develop in sealed boxes. They influence one another, not through direct transmission, but through a slow and complex blend.
Between the Cycles
Borkenau’s real interest lay in the gaps between civilisational cycles. He focused on the so-called barbarian periods. These are not times of innovation or glory. They are phases of dissolution. Existing orders unravel, core principles are dismantled, and institutions lose coherence. But in this fragmentation, new ideas begin to form. At the root of each new civilisation stands a foundational story, a primal myth, or Urmythos.
For the Western world, Borkenau identified this rebirth in the migration period after Rome, in early medieval power struggles, and in religious reinterpretation. All of this came together in the doctrine of transubstantiation, first formulated in the 9th century. This concept of redemption neither through free will, nor through grace alone, but through the working of the body in Christ within us—a brilliant symbiosis of the then warring concepts of Augustinianism and Pelagianism—became the spiritual cornerstone of a new civilisational identity.
The Shape of Our Present
Understanding where a civilisation begins helps to locate its crisis points. Borkenau argued that the Reformation and the upheavals of early modernity marked a deep internal rupture, which he referred to as Mittelkrise. But if the peak of Western civilisation (which coincides with the Mittelkrise) can be traced to around the year 1500, then its final phase may already have begun. Or perhaps it has already passed.
Some clues support that reading. Rome did not fall on a single day. Its roads endured, its aqueducts flowed long after the last emperors had passed. Civilisations rarely vanish in an instant. The loss of material wealth does not mark their end. The more telling sign is the erosion of their inner vision.
The Enlightenment pushed aside the Church’s authority and offered a secular framework. For a time, this scaffolding held. But it did not replace the core myth. It merely postponed the reckoning.
Today, belief in that secular scaffolding has eroded. Some still hope that reason, rights, and rational discourse will rescue the West. These hopes live mostly among retired scholars and well-read dentists. Meanwhile, new belief systems are competing for primacy. Movements anchored in guilt over historical sins, environmental mysticism, and digital eschatology have begun to fill the vacuum. Some speak of Gaia. Others look to artificial intelligence as the next deity.
A Struggle for Meaning
These new narratives signal a deeper reality. The old myth no longer holds. We live in a time of cultural disintegration. The West is no longer fighting to preserve its past. It is searching for something to believe in again.
Borkenau saw this as a familiar stage. Civilisations break apart, and in the ruins, new myths are born. But he also entertained a more radical possibility. Perhaps the entire age of cyclical culture is coming to a close. If so, we stand before a horizon that has no precedent.
He left that question open. But he was clear on one point. A civilisation’s vitality depends on the breadth and variety of its cultural links. A culture that can draw from many sources and forge them into a new synthesis has a future. The rest do not.
Very interesting discussion, was not familiar with Borkenau previously.
I actually just wrote about Alasdair MacIntyre's analysis of the failure of the enlightenment, and how it shows up today - which might be very interesting to you. In any case it is quite complementary to what you wrote here.
Will be checking out Borkenau's work. Many Thanks.