My essay, Adorno’s Critique of Spengler, refuted Theodore Adorno’s essay Spengler After the Decline by addressing how Spengler’s predictive power actually works. Adorno argued that Spengler makes overarching claims about history in a categorical fashion, prompting any evidence within that category to be proof of the claim, while any evidence outside of it is disregarded as arbitrary. His philosophy of Negative Dialectics is explicitly designed as a counter to this line of thinking because he believed it was what led to the Holocaust, so Spengler, in his view, is simply following in the tradition that created it.

But Spengler’s ‘concept’ of prime-symbols is more complicated than this, and it is why, after Adorno, the Decline of the West maintained predictive power when it came to future trends like philosophical scepticism. Spengler predicted that historical relativism would grow and consume all causes into one single cause: the genetic. In the 70s onwards, Foucault’s Genealogy almost accomplished this, relativising all notions of objectivity as solely caused by power relations. The fact of his success took decades to prove, but it is there. I then suggested in a Substack note that this should rightfully place Spengler as Foucault’s superior in academia, and Germany’s loss during World War Two was the reason Spengler is today unfairly disregarded.

I would like to use this article to explore what postmodernism actually is. In university history, you can’t escape the implications of Foucault. He emerges in every essay you not only read from someone else but also the ones you end up producing, because your arguments can only ever be supported by scholars from within his tradition. In understanding the genealogy of Foucault’s philosophy better, we can make a much more effective and precise argument for why Spengler is better and should rightfully sit on his throne in a later post, but for this post, it will suffice to explain why he does not.

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This essay is a continuation of my dissertation in order to explore the implications of what was concluded in it. To get you up to speed, there were three chapters in my dissertation, and within each chapter were three sections each exploring an aspect of Spengler’s commentary about the Greek Polis within the context of his morphology. I compared this to what modern scholars say about each debate and found that the general shape of what Spengler says remains intact, but when in contact with the particular details, (contrary evidence, nuanced information), cultural morphology often disregards it as incidental to the wider zeitgeist.

Sometimes these particular details flesh out Spengler, but most times it reveals a problem with morphology, a problem that none other than Theodore Adorno, the Frankfurt school philosopher, directly criticised in the 1940s:

Adorno, overall, is generally sympathetic to Spengler, but not without qualifications, and he comes to the same conclusion in his 1941 essay Spengler Today, and its revision in 1950 Spengler after the Decline, as I did 85 years later. His was a philosophical criticism, mine is concluded through discovering it nine times in a row. Spengler never honestly carries through the analysis of the interrelationship of concept and detail, making The Decline of the West a thousand pages of describing what fits into his categories while rarely exploring how. In my opinion, this is the most fundamental criticism The Decline of the West faces. I believe that in solving this knot in Spengler’s morphology, by reconciling category with detail, The Decline of the West may prove incredibly valuable in academia and return Spengler and his way of thinking to the spotlight, even in the place of scholarship’s implicit philosophy: Post-Modernism. The value of this for the Right should be obvious. Is there a way of preserving the explanatory force of Morphology without the epistemological dishonesty of assimilating or disregarding particular details?

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3.1 The Polis in the age of the Hellenistic Kingdoms, c.338 – 100 BC

Spengler’s thesis for the polis during the Civilisation period rests on the nature of Hellenistic imperial structure. His argument that extension is antithetical to the nature of the polis1 is falsifiable at the level of the Hellenistic empires and kingdoms. Against this, Spengler argues that the Seleucid and Ptolemaic dynasties ruled from poleis – Antioch and Alexandria respectively – over an outer circle of imperial territory that was not assimilable to the polis identity, which were governed with ‘existing native machinery’2. The polis acts as an administrative core and the surrounding territory remains culturally unintegrated but subordinate to it; this puts the polis form at the command of a larger apparatus without transforming it.

John Ma’s account of the Seleucid empire provides the clearest corroboration as he argues that the exercise of power too place within a framework of compulsion, with local communities controlled by the Seleucids without them being dissolved into an imperial state3. This articulation supports Spengler’s notion of the polis as having a rigid shell which it cannot expand identity beyond, prompting force politics outside its limited field of influence. Graham Shipley places the Greek city-state system within a wider Near Eastern context and asserts that the Classical city-states system was an exceptional interlude in the history of the ancient Near East, which for the most part was dominated by monarchical forms of government4. After Alexander, the form of Monarchy quickly reasserts itself, making the polis form an anomaly that quickly dissolves outside of the classical context into territorial dominions starting with the opposition of city and country. In contrast to Shipley, Hansen provides an additional dimension with his own data. The century that followed Alexander’s conquest saw the founding of several hundred new poleis across Asia, constituted of Greek and Macedonian ruling class and kitted with the typical features of a mature city-state such as a council, courts, an assembly of the people and a gymnasium5. The template-like production of Greek styles of governance suggests the enforcement of a rigid formula and not the organic development of governance on local necessities.

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2.1 The Meaning of Tyranny, c.650 – 500 BC

Spengler describes the first tyrannis, the era of tyrannies within the bounds of the Late period, as being itself the State, with oligarchy opposed to it under the banner of class1. The tyrannical dynasties of this period are either de facto or de jure the embodiments of the state while Oligarchy represents a form of class-rule that has outlived itself. For reference, Spengler likens the first tyrannis to European monarchs between 1500 and 1650 AD. But the tyrant’s power more often rests on the support of the peasants and burghers and not on an ideology of inheritance. Spengler notes that tyrannies would back Dionysiac and Orphic cults against the Apollonian ones because this was a means of fighting against the form-language of the aristocracy2. Herodatus provides us with an account of Cleisthenes of Sicyon and noted that he banned the recitation of Homeric poems ‘because Argives and Argos are celebrated in them almost everywhere’, before he engineered a transfer of choral festivals of the Argive hero Adrastos to Dionysus, renaming the Dorian tribes with contemptuous epithets drawn from the names of a pig and an ass3. He rewrote the symbolic register of his city to extinguish aristocratic culture and ideology. Spengler describes the sixth century Tyrannis as having brought the polis-idea to its completion, establishing the constitutional concept of the polites – the citizen – as irrespective of class-provenance and as the collective body of the city-state4. This made for tyranny being a transitional force, creating the citizen which, at the end of the century, would render the tyrant’s authority obsolete and dispose of tyranny to admit no hereditary transmission of absolute power.

Scholarly literature provides unintentional confirmation of Spengler’s account. Anthony Andrewes’ describes Cypselus of Corinth’s revolution as ‘the purest of its kind, the aristocrats ripe for their downfall, the tyrant as a straightforward liberator, so much identified with his supporters that he never needed a bodyguard’5. This account is corroborated by Herodatus’ narrative of Cypselus: that once established as tyrant he ‘drove many of the Corinthians into exile, many he deprived of their wealth, and very many more of their lives’6. Cypselus is the earliest case of a tyrannical revolution (c. 657 BC), closely aligning with Spengler’s standard Late period dating, and he is also the plainest case of a popular ruler in Archaic Greece challenging an established ruling class and supplanting them. Andrewes’ account of Sicyon also confirms the ceasing of Homeric poetry for celebrating Argive glory and the transference of worship to Dionysus7. Spengler never outright declares Solon to be in the same band of figures, but his reforms also carry the same significance, not simply of expanding the franchise but of establishing the state as partially divorced from hereditary Oligarchy. Raaflaub reminds us in his account of Solon that he introduced property classes to replace birth with wealth as a criterion for political participation8. It removed dynastic qualities from the state that tyranny could enshrine itself with, it furthered the existence of the polis as being broader than the aristocracy, and expanded entry into politics for wealthy interests. The Athenian Constitution documents the institutional mechanism: four classes divided by production in medimnoi with the lowest class, the thetes given ‘nothing but a place in the Assembly and in the courts’9. The Solonian reforms where therefore tyrant-like in function without adopting the label.

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1.1 The Dark Ages, c. 1100 – 900 BC

Spengler’s account of the transition from Mycenaean to Hellenic culture highlights the difference between Mycenaean use of megalithic stone and the Dorian use of timber. For Spengler, this was a deliberate cultural rejection of stone in favour of more temporary materials. The later introduction of stone in Doric style, he writes, is an adaptation of timber tradition back into stone, with its columns being petrified posts and its triglyphs as fossilised beam ends1. Conventional historiography treats the same era as one of catastrophic loss, evidenced in the collapse of palace economies, the disappearance of writing, the decline of long-distance trade, and the dispersal of people into isolated settlements. Spengler’s account, while not denying that discontinuity, reframes its meaning as conscious refusal of what came before it. Early Iron Age Greeks were a new people animated by a conception of life that had no need for Mycenaean grandiosity2.

Scholarly literature relates to Spengler in complicated ways. Oliver Dickinson’s survey of the Aegean from Bronze Age to Iron Age argues that the transition wasn’t as catastrophic as previously thought. The characteristic features of Hellenic material culture, he contends, began in the Iron Age3. The relevant changes were instead gradual transformations rather than ruptures, many of which being traceable across the transitional centuries rather than appearing suddenly after a collapse4. Superficially, this lends Spengler’s perspective credence as both resist the event-driven model of catastrophe and recovery. This is a stance also noted by Snodgrass in an earlier work – that his evidence showed a consistent, if extremely slow, progression without a single ‘crest’ from which collapse had occurred. This is a formulation explicitly grounded in Thucydides’ own account of Greece before poleis emerged5. Additionally, Osborne surveyed the same evidence and observed that where sites were being reoccupied, it usually took on a new form, undermining narratives of restoration in favour of a new identity6.

Our best ancient source for the pre-polis landscape is from Thucydides. He describes in Book One early Greeks who ‘cared little for shifting their habitation’, migrating freely between places because the ‘necessities of daily sustenance could be supplied at one place as well as another’, and ‘neither built large cities nor attained to any other form of greatness’7. He identifies the absence of attachment to place as causally primary, as opposed to material poverty, and an inability to conceive of a clearly defined, permanent community worth defending. Spengler’s account of pre-culture is also a nomadic one, lacking in political or intellectual roots8, but by 900 BC, much of this movement, according to him, should have slowed and settled. The Dark Age was not an absence of culture but a long gestation of a new kind of spatial grammar which would crystalize when the Apollinian soul had gathered enough internal coherence to form settlement types according to its worldview.

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Abstract

This dissertation explores Oswald Spengler’s morphology of history from the Decline of the West as it applies to the history of the ancient Greek city-state across the three stages of history he identified: the Early Period (c. 1100 – 650 BC), the Late Period (c. 650 – 350 BC), and the Civilisation Period (c.350 – 31 BC). Spengler argued that each of his identified cultures possessed a distinctive ‘prime symbol’. In Ancient Greece’s case, ‘Apollinian culture’ was defined by the idea of the bounded, perfected body (soma) and the polis is the embodiment of this symbol in political and national identity terms. This dissertation tests this claim against specialist historiography in nine case-studies and asks how Spengler’s morphology interacts with scholarship today.

Chapter 1 explores the formation of the polis through the Dark Ages, the process of synoecism, and the social role of basileoi and oligarchies. Chapter 2 explores the internal and external dynamics of Poleis during the Late period, exploring Spengler’s definitions of Tyranny, Democracy, and his articulation of intercity relations. Chapter 3 addresses the Civilisation period: the transformation of polis into Hellenistic kingdoms, the “Second Tyrannis” of the Diadochi and Dionysius of Syracuse, and Spengler’s commentary on the Hellenistic cosmopolis.

This dissertation concludes that Spengler provides additional explanatory power for the development of Greek political culture where material scholarship reaches limitations, while meeting its own limits when it comes face to face with particular counter evidence that reveals issues with morphology as a whole in dealing with contradictory information, and in the conflation of power dynamics with the existence of a collective soul.

Contents

1 The Early Period, c. 1100 – 650 BC.

• 1.1 The Dark Ages, c. 1100 – 900 BC.

• 1.2 Synoecism and the Formation of the Polis c.800 – 650 BC.

• 1.3 The Basileoi and the Decline of Kingship, c. 900 – 700 BC.

• 1.4 Conclusion.

2 The Late Period, c. 650 – 350 BC.

• 2.1 The Meaning of Tyranny, c.650 – 500 BC.

• 2.2 The Meaning of Democracy, c.500 – 400 BC.

• 2.3 The Polis as a Unit of International Affairs, c.500 - 400 BC.

• 2.4 Conclusion.

3 The Civilisation Period, c. 350 – 31 BC.

• 3.1 The Polis in the age of the Hellenistic Kingdoms, c.338 – 100 BC.

• 3.2 The ‘Second Tyrannis’, c. 323 – 100 BC.

• 3.3 The Cosmopolis, c. 333 – 31 BC.

• 3.4 Conclusion.

4 Synthesis and Conclusion.

The three posts containing each chapter are my first paid-for content. To read it, consider subscribing for the month to support my work. More paid content is planned for the future.