The Idea of Decline in Western History.

• Author: Minogue, Kenneth

Is the west doomed to go the way of all other civilizations - into history's bin? This question has preoccupied intellectuals, often in the form of a meditation on the fall of Rome, ever since the eighteenth century. More recently, it has become an instrument for claiming political power; those who understand the causes of decline must be given the power to avert it. Such understanding becomes a revelation, a kind of gnosis, marking off an elect from those sunk in quotidian triviality. Fascist doctrines obviously follow this model; more egalitarian forms of salvation merely cover their tracks by pretending that the elect act for the masses. But it takes a vanguard of commissars, judges, bureaucrats, and others to equalize our modern societies, and their work will never be finished.

The way you get elected to this elite is by reading books, and Arthur Herman's The Idea of Decline in Western History is a splendid account of what happens when human beings forsake common sense in favor of exciting abstractions. The story of "declinism" - no doubt we have to confront the idea in portmanteau terms as an "-ism" - is one in which every refuted prophecy survives to be recycled in a new form. The basic idea of decline invokes the most powerful of all social science methodologies: the cycle. As Froude put it, echoing everyone from Polybius to Machiavelli: "Virtue and truth produced strength, strength dominion, dominion riches, riches luxury and luxury weakness and collapse - fatal sequence repeated so often." The point of understanding such cycles was, of course, to stop them revolving. The theory of mixed government combined the virtues of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy in order to neutralize the vices each form of government exhibited in its pure state. Everybody knew that civilizations rose and fell. The nineteenth-century question was whether the new and uniquely powerful European masters of the globe could buck the cycle.

Their unique situation was the lack of any serious competitor since the Ottomans had failed to take Vienna in 1683. Perhaps it is a law of life that the level of anxiety in human affairs, like that of happiness, remains relatively constant. Certainly, Europeans turned their aggressions inward and began to worry about - or alternatively to exult in - the prospect of their own destruction.

The commanding figure of the declinist genre is, of course, Nietzsche, who thought that European civilization had taken a wrong turning about the time of Socrates and that its sickly, priest-dominated culture was in terminal decline. There is no doctrine to be extracted from his largely aphoristic writings - merely flashes of lightning in which points of...