The ‘Decline of the Occident’ – the loss of a dream? From the nineteenth to the twentieth century

The tension between a humanistic view of man and society and a more materialist vision of the world which had been felt from the fifteenth century onwards heightened in the second half of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth century. In particular, a way of thinking couched mainly in terms of the concept of progress, that in the eighteenth century had already started to reflect a rosy vision of the development of European culture and that was adopted by philosophers around the turn of the century, now seemed to acquire an empirical, scientific basis.