Man or History?

Man or History? THE COMING CAESARS (384 pp.)-- Amaury de Riencourt -- Coward-McCann ($6).

In The Decline of the West Oswald Spengler announced with a certain gloomy satisfaction that "the Caesarism that is to succeed approaches with quiet, firm step." History was always goose-stepping its way through the centuries in Spengler's vision. Compared with his German mentor France's Amaury de Riencourt, 38, a freelance writer and lecturer who now lives in the U.S., is more amiable, less apocalyptic. Compared either with Spengler or other determinist philosophers of history-- Toynbee, Pareto, Marx--Author de Riencourt works on an intellectual shoestring.

He starts with the Spenglerian notion that a society is like an organic plant, with a seasonal life cycle--spring, summer, autumn, winter. To this he adds the Spenglerian distinction between culture and civilization, i.e., during its culture phase a people paints its masterpieces, and during its civilization phase a people builds the museums to house the masterpieces it can no longer paint. Cultures are creative, instinctive, combative, individualistic. Civilizations are practical, scientific, peace-and-unity-minded, conformist.

F.D.R. on the Lupercal. Author de Riencourt adopts these arbitrary terms to pose an equally arbitrary theorem: Greek culture was to Roman civilization what European culture is to the coming American civilization. U.S. bread and circuses --"Hollywood's sleek motion pictures, American newspapers and magazines, soft drinks, dentistry"--already dominate Europe. He cites a ream of historical parallels that do not prove the theory but endlessly restate it. American readers are used by now to the pat European charge of ubiquitous vulgarity, and will bear the tag of "The New Rome" peaceably. But they will bridle at the suggestion that they are about to embrace a Caesar. Author de Riencourt traces what he takes to be an imperial growth of presidential power from the age of Jackson to Franklin Roosevelt, who, he says, was symbolically offered the kingly crown that Caesar, on the Lupercal, "did thrice refuse." To a Cleveland crowd during the 1940 campaign, Roosevelt said that, when the next four years were over, "there will be another President," upon which the crowd started to shout "No! No!" Thus, says Author de Riencourt, "the first ghostly contours of Caesarism were appearing."

Having released his special demons of Caesarism, De Riencourt in a kind of guilty afterthought tries to pour the jinn back into the bottle and mix with the tonic of a higher historical synthesis: he lamely concludes that there are "ways and means of reviving our moribund Culture while retaining all the good and necessary features of Civilization."

New Cult. The book is perhaps most significant for what it suggests about current views of history. For centuries history was either a form of national propaganda or an antinomian catalogue, the kind described by Toynbee as "just one damned thing after another." The brilliant school that evolved from Vico to Hegel to Spengler to Toynbee was an immensely fruitful corrective. But, particularly in the hands of amateurs, it can lead to the kind of fatalistic oversimplification that Britain's gifted Philosopher-Historian Isaiah Berlin took apart in his pithy pamphlet, Historical Inevitability:

"For the omniscient being, who sees why nothing can be otherwise than as it is, the notions of responsibility or guilt, of right and wrong, are necessarily empty . . . There has grown up a quasi-sociological mythology which, in the guise of scientific concepts, has developed into a new animism. Such questions as 'Is War Inevitable?', or 'Is Civilization Doomed?' imply a belief in the occult presence of vast impersonal forces . . . which we have but little power to control. [This] is one of the great alibis, pleaded by those who cannot face the facts of human responsibility."

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