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2013-05-23 06:27 3784989 Anonymous (up.jpg 300x453 18kB)
I'm looking for books that talk about patterns and cycles of civilizations and how they rise and fall. The best book I've read on the subject has been pic related. Is there anyone who can hold a flame to Spenglers ominous prophecy? The only name I can think of would be Rene Guenon

4 min later 3785002 Anonymous
>2013 >still reading overly pessimistic grimdarkedgy pre WWI books

7 min later 3785008 Anonymous
>>>/pol/ >>>stormfront

9 min later 3785012 Anonymous
Not OP but I'm interested. /lit/ gets awfully butthurt about Spengler for some reason, so expect trolling and mentions on /pol/

9 min later 3785014 Anonymous
Toynbee big time commitment, though.

11 min later 3785016 Anonymous
The magnitude of anal devastation that occurs whenever traditionalist literature is mentioned here is quite amusing to me.

17 min later 3785023 Anonymous (up.jpg 392x500 53kB)
>yfw Spengler was the first person to assert that history is organic and cyclical and not a linear profession to utopia Its a pretty hard pill to swallow, but Spenglers predictions have been pretty spot on. Here's an amazing article for those interested http://nationalinterest.org/article /spenglers-ominous-prophecy-7878?pa ge=5

23 min later 3785032 Anonymous
The Lessons of History - Durant

24 min later 3785034 Anonymous
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tradit ionalist_School

31 min later 3785041 Anonymous
I'm a liberal with cognitive dissonance so this book doesn't appeal to me

36 min later 3785048 Anonymous
>kikes niggers shitskins muhhhhhhh civilization --/pol/

38 min later 3785049 Anonymous
>>3784989 so you are basically looking for pseudo-science? try David Icke and his reptilian theory

38 min later 3785052 Anonymous
Hegel's Philosophy of History, and also the Muqqadima of Ibn Khaldun from what I gathered. You'd probably enjoy Polybius.

39 min later 3785053 Anonymous
>>3785048 >>3785049 I thought you were more mature than this, /lit/. Or are you merely /pol/tards pretending to be leftists to discredit them?

40 min later 3785055 Anonymous
You should read Asimov's Foundation series. It's fiction, but he bases all on the fall of the roman empire and his own views on history. I've seen so many parallelisms between Spengler and the character Hari Seldon.

42 min later 3785059 Anonymous
>>3785053 I've instantly realized you are a moron with your asinine, ignorant pursuit. Nothing changed. Tried Icke yet? He fits perfectly your narrative.

46 min later 3785068 Anonymous
>>3784989 Evola, Evola, Evola Specifcally his "Revolt Against The Modern World" He's similar to Guenon but heavily influenced by Nietzsche and Spengler

47 min later 3785071 Anonymous
>>3785059 I don't think the OP is the one being ignorant here, mate.

48 min later 3785074 Anonymous (imagesCA7Y.jpg 275x183 9kB)
>>3785023 >Spenglers predictions have been pretty spot on >history is an actual thing with properties babbies first spoon-fed nonsense >b-but he died like long ago and wore a suit, he must be right

53 min later 3785081 Anonymous
>>3785074 >Implying that time is only a quantitative entity and not something that has qualitative properties

58 min later 3785091 Anonymous
>>3785068 This is what you want, but be warned he likes to seriously talk about Atlantis and other crazy shit

58 min later 3785092 Anonymous
>>3785081 >2013 >swallowing all the nonsense conservatards push down your throat lel you don't even need to be paid, too easy >dem black&white mugshots in suits and dramatic book titles s-so serious, s-so right

1 hours later 3785100 Anonymous
>>3785092 >Ad hominem's, Ad Hominem's everywhere Time to stop shit posting bud

1 hours later 3785102 Anonymous
>>3785091 yeah, but David Icke is somehow not appropriate Bcuz no black and white pix in a 800 dorra suit!!1 delusional babbies never change >>>/pol/

1 hours later 3785106 Anonymous
>>3785100 >typical /pol/tard that has no idea what an ad hominem is every /pol/ thread ever is the same

1 hours later 3785108 Anonymous
Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah & asabiyya Toynbee's Study of History Plato's Republic Spengler Giambattista Vico's Scienza Nuova Kinda Evola and other mystics/traditionalists Also might want to look into dialectical or >>3785023 First person I know of to posit a cyclical contingent theory of history was Plato, but it's waaay older than Spengler. >>3785052 Hegel is sort of the polar opposite view, that history is moving in one direction (though it can possibly "regress") toward something. That's teleology and possibly eschatology. There are lots of Hegelians and neo-Hegelians bumping around, like Marx and various 20th century authoritarians (e.g. Gentile), and hilarious retards like Francis Fukuyama.

1 hours later 3785109 Anonymous
>>3785002 >>3785008 >>3785048 >>3785049 >>3785059 >>3785074 >>3785092 >>3785102 >this anal pain If you don't like Spengler suggest an alternative, don't just spam because you don't like it.

1 hours later 3785110 Anonymous
>>3785109 It's 50% shitpost, 50% openly trolling via sageposting with "/pol/ pls go". /lit/ does this with every other thread. Just ignore it.

1 hours later 3785112 Anonymous
>>3785109 suggest an alternative to what? the premise of this thread is retarded there is zero difference between Icke and Sperger, the fact that you can't see it amuses me greatly

1 hours later 3785116 Anonymous (images.jpg 279x181 10kB)
>>3785110 >mfw left wing intellectuals can't handle right wing intellectuals

1 hours later 3785117 Anonymous
>>3785112 >I'm looking for books that talk about patterns and cycles of civilizations and how they rise and fall. That's the premise of the thread - not too controversial. He then went on to say that he liked Spengler, if you think that he is misguided suggest an alternative, what's so difficult to understand?

1 hours later 3785118 Anonymous
>>3785116 right wing intellectual is an oxymoron

1 hours later 3785121 Anonymous
>>3785117 do I really have to suggest Icke for the third time?

1 hours later 3785124 Blood Rainbow (85812[1].jpg 317x475 28kB)
it's not cyclical, but it is dialectical!

1 hours later 3785134 Anonymous
>>3785130 Did a man who looked like Spengler rape you as a child? You seem to have a personal vendetta against him.

1 hours later 3785145 Anonymous
>>3785121 Ignore Spengler then and answer : >I'm looking for books that talk about patterns and cycles of civilizations and how they rise and fall.

1 hours later 3785148 Anonymous
>>3785118 >butthurt Marxist detected. What is a 'right-winger' to you then?

1 hours later 3785155 Anonymous (quigley.jpg 309x475 85kB)
>From 1941 until 1969, he taught a two-semester course at Georgetown on the development of civilizations. According to the obituary in the Washington Star, many alumni of Georgetown's School of Foreign Service asserted that this was "the most influential course in their undergraduate careers".

1 hours later 3785156 Anonymous
>>3785130 The only prominent detractor of Spengler I can find is Adrono, do you have any actually proof that Spengler was the David Icke of his time?

1 hours later 3785159 Anonymous
>>3785156 *Adorno

1 hours later 3785162 Anonymous (imagesCAF8.jpg 180x280 12kB)
>>3785145 Hitler, Mussolini, they are experts on 'civilizations' and 'history', as qualified as Sperger and Icke. Though I still think Icke is the most authoritative. Reptilians beat kikes any time of the year. >>3785148 I am not even a leftie. I just refuse to believe babbies first stories bcuz mommy told me to trust long-dead gents in suits. Gullible fools. You had been spoon-fed ignorant hogwash, you swallow ambiguous buzzwords like "history" and "civliziation" which you internalized without even batting an eyelid. You lack any sort of skepticism or critical thinking, the map is your territory, you concede sincere curiosity and inquiry for convenience, re-assuring propaganda that fits the first and only narrative you've ever had and are going to have - because you are too lazy to form any independent thought and crude and primitive forms of signaling of authority are enough to make you compliant plebbies gonna pleb

1 hours later 3785165 Anonymous
>>3785109 Its funny the troll's butthurt reminds me of that one guy off of 12 angry men, the one who is strongly in favour of the 'guilty' charge because his son left him. Just wiki'd it; the character I'm thinking of is juror 3 played by Lee J. Cobb

1 hours later 3785168 Anonymous
>>3785162 >Dat rambling rant, I can just imagine the fury you must be going through while typing that

1 hours later 3785173 Anonymous
i always get heated when i masturbate ps. whats the status on kikes and niggers today? can't visit /pol/

1 hours later 3785175 Anonymous
>>3785109 The guy should be banned for spamming. He's at it constantly.

1 hours later 3785179 Anonymous
>>3785175 Stop replying to him. He'll samefag, but if no one replies, it will still be minimized.

1 hours later 3785180 Anonymous
>>3785173 >ps. whats the status on kikes and niggers today? They seem pretty upset, judging by this thread.

1 hours later 3785182 Anonymous
>>3785179 Also report him.

1 hours later 3785192 Anonymous
>>3785162 Do you honestly believe all of what you said holds true of Guenon; one of the most astute metaphysicians of the 20th century. He is the farthest thing from what you've just described but yet still holds true to a qualitative and cyclical theory of time

1 hours later 3785202 Anonymous
>>3785192 I'll save you the time: he hasn't read Guenon. Nor Spengler, for that matter. He just vaguely associates them with the right-wing for some reason, and this is apparently enough to trigger his bi-daily 'sperg fits.

1 hours later 3785207 Anonymous
>>3785016 When all of your philosophical statements are based on the assertion that they're objectivity true, just because. You can't possibly be taken seriously. I guess this is why 4chan loves traditionalists so much, there's a strong similarity in the patterns of argument.

1 hours later 3785214 Anonymous
>>3785207 go back to r/atheism, fedora.

2 hours later 3785221 Anonymous
It's pretty funny how leftists like act so superior to light-weight right-wingers like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, but when sold thinkers like Evola and Spengler are brought up, they're in damage control mode. Stay classy, left-wingers.

2 hours later 3785227 Anonymous
>>3785214 >can't get laid >better hate the west Traditionalist logic.

2 hours later 3785245 Anonymous
>>3785221 >It's pretty funny how leftists like act so superior to light-weight right-wingers like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, but when sold thinkers like Evola and Spengler are brought up, they're in damage control mode. This. Also, I would add Albert Sorel, Telesio Interlandi, Benito Mussolini, Henri Bergson, Ayn Rand, Virginio Gayda, Adolf Hitler, Berto Ricci. All the libtards got to say always boils down to incomprehensible and pathetic back-pedalling.

2 hours later 3785259 Anonymous
>>3785245 >Rand >Mussolini >Hitler Is that your attempt to discredit the 'right-wingers'?

2 hours later 3785265 Anonymous
>>3785259 What? Those aren't right-wing thinkers on society, history and civilization? Do you even read? Their works were much more popular than Spenglers, partially even inspired by him. Is this your attempt to discredit the 'right-wingers'?

2 hours later 3785278 Anonymous
>>3785265 popularity (quantity) =/ value (quality)

2 hours later 3785285 Anonymous
>>3785278 And what signifies the quality (value) of your judgement on this? Don't make me laugh.

2 hours later 3785292 Anonymous (veeshir-mussolini.jpg 350x363 16kB)
>>3785265 Do you think Obama should be considered a great liberal thinker because he influenced so many?

2 hours later 3785300 Anonymous
>>3785292 He never aspired to be a thinker. Unlike the intellectuals I mentioned. The characteristic they share is being in office at some point. The characteristic they don't share is being self-declared public intellectuals.

2 hours later 3785380 Anonymous
historyfag here, nobody takes Spengler seriously anymore, read the works of A. Toynbee and J. Tainter for global comparative civilizational history.

2 hours later 3785387 Anonymous
>>3785285 He's right, popularity can not be proof of quality.

3 hours later 3785398 Anonymous
>>3785002 > 1918 (Part 1), 1922 (Part 2) > Pre-WW1

3 hours later 3785423 Anonymous
>>3785380 Toynbee isn't really taken seriously. Most professors that I have in the humanities have read Spengler, some in original German. He is a worthy thinker, and his analysis of culture cannot be dismissed. He wasn't the first to propose cyclical history, and explicitly states in the book his influences through footnotes. If one focuses only on predicting the course of civilization with his book, one loses track of the point. The point is to outline how history is not necessarily a cause-effect abstraction, but a very original and patterned life force. It's the model, not the example, that's worth studying. His view on mathematics as the origin point of cultures and his analysis of western philosophy is especially worth reading.

3 hours later 3785424 Anonymous
>>3785130 > Spenger > Poltard inspiration What? People on /pol/ don't like from him since he denounces the idea of Europecentric history where Europe has always been the pinnacle of mankind: they deny everyone who claims otherwise. Muslism Golden Age? Well it wasn't that good and it was solely based on Greek technology so it doesn't count, they say. China never had it good, they say. Mongols were savages who never did anything great they say. Zheng Huan could have never colonised America, they say.

3 hours later 3785460 Anonymous
>>3785424 all of that is basically true though (if chinese had embraced exploration is an interesting thought however, but cultural innertia preempted it, china is all that mattered afterall).

3 hours later 3785475 Anonymous
>>3785460 Yeah except Muslim Golden age was a lot better than anything in Europe between 453 and 1453 and Mongols were really influential and basicly set up the European Renessaince by creating and reviving East-West communication spreading inventions like gunpowder to Europe.

3 hours later 3785481 Anonymous
>>3785162 >Long butthurt rant about how wrong everyone is >Never explaining how they are wrong >>>/pol/ Cmon, /lit/ is entry level trolling.

3 hours later 3785499 Anonymous
>>3785475 yes they helped preserve ancient wisdom, but the only reason there was a 'dark age' to begin with is because europe was buttfucked by nomads. even then the dark ages were not exactly that dark, the western churches also served as places of learning to preserve old knowledge (ps they took zero from the indians anyways). And any people can take stuff from one place and bring it to another.

4 hours later 3785513 Anonymous
>>3785499 Whatever you're trying to say, I hope you aren't implying that Muslim World was worse than Europe. Because it wasn't - It was better place to live, overall, around 700-1400. Culture flourished; different religions were allowed instead of just Christianity, there were numerous technological breakthroughs, cities were larger, people richer, peasants better.

4 hours later 3785532 Anonymous
>>3785513 yes it wasnt, what im saying is that their primacy was relative to the fact that everyone else in the area was laid low by invasions and cultural dilution.

4 hours later 3785576 Anonymous
>>3785532 The only ones who still call Middle Age the dark ages are butthurt Roman army officers and conceited Renaissance artists. European Middle Age was flourishing in many ways. Consider their art in times when they were hit but the Black Plague or crippled by multitudinous wars. People had though time, but there was no "cultural dilution" whatever that means. Material was lost and then rediscovered (thanks to invasions ironically) that's it.

4 hours later 3785614 Anonymous
>>3785380 >>3785423 Saying "historyfaghere, no one takes spengler/toynbee seriously anymore" is really strange, because it seems to be implying that scholarly consensus is anything other than a milquetoast heterogeneous liberal bourgeois soup, with a side of obnoxious Marxism. No professor in the fucking world is going to go against the mainstream methods of doing history these days, except the Marxists but no one cares about their gendered discourse of the hegemonic structures of 12th century beekeeping. No one is going to even entertain grand philosophical speculation about history, sure, but that's like saying natural philosophers (scientists) don't do metaphysics anymore, or that psychologists don't do highfalutin psychoanalysis anymore. Well no fucking shit, because modern scientists are glorified technicians who read and write at a third grade level, and modern psychologists are positivist pill dispensers. If you want to write two mediocre survey textbooks and a dozen journal articles on tiny tiny little circumscribed historical inquiries, and maybe teach another generation to do the same, you're a historian. You're also intellectually inert, and doing what someone (who 99% of postgrad historians have never read) called amassing a "heap of facts". >>3785513 This is an anachronistic and really flawed analysis. Dating your utopia starting in 700 is ignoring that Muslim control of non-Muslim populations was REALLY decentralized, disparate, and particular until well into or even after the Abbasids' decline, meaning that for a long time most societies would not have even noticed a difference. Especially the ones which saw nearly generational turnover in political authority. Also the 90% of the population that remained the rural basis of all civ in the region might have a different opinion on the boons you mentioned, if they noticed them at all. I recommend Hodgson's Venture of Islam, book 3 (vol. 2).

4 hours later 3785629 Anonymous
>>3785614 so as someone who appears to have an idea what they're talking about, what is your verdict on spengler and toynbee? what are their particular merits and flaws? are they accessible to someone without much prior reading in the philosophy of history?

5 hours later 3785727 Anonymous
>>3785629 I'm biased because philosophy of history is a personal hobby, and I personally like Spengler and Toynbee a lot. I think they're important in the sense that I think Freud is important. I know lots of psychology students who barely have any idea about Freud, because he's not clinical orthodoxy anymore, but then I don't know anyone really learned who disputes Freud's brilliance or the philosophical potential of his ideas. I think cyclical models of historical contingency have important ideas to impart to any historian, wrong or right. Even thinking about why they're stupid is valuable. Of course I don't expect to see any mainstream scholarly articles on whether Spengler's predictions are coming true, but there are still several different shades of dialectical materialists around and attempting serious historiography, not least of which the Marxists, so you never know what trends might rise and fall in scholarship. Their flaws are that they pretty much totalize all of human history into a convenient narrative. That's always dangerous. Plus, like Marxism, they tend to add riders and qualifiers to explain aberrations from predictions or data rather than being discounted. You can see the danger of a convenient/appealing narrative right there, in how its adherents will be biased in its defense, rather than being good impartial historians. Especially when most of these philosophies are ideologically charged, that can be dangerous. Everyone knows what widespread belief in social darwinism caused, and that's basically a cyclical model of rise and decline right there. Also of course all the data employed is dated as fuck by now, so you read for the broad strokes and with a grain of salt. In terms of accessibility, depends which ones you read. A modern history BA education is probably badly suited to reading and enjoying them, since their writers were generally classically educated, and more immersed in philosophy. More Livy's Rome, less survey textbook Rome.

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