ABSTRACT
Paul Kennedy makes much of Europe’s peculiar geography in explaining why Europe eventually became the “center of the world,” politically speaking. Rivers, mountains, and forests divide the territories of Europe. Kennedy notes that a historian might understand his approach as “a broad and yet reasonably detailed survey” of great power politics, explained with reference to slow economic and technological changes. Oswald Spengler defined cultures by the “prime symbols” that represent their main project. Western society is “Faustian” because humanity has sold its soul and connection to the land for technical sophistication and industrial production. Spengler associates civilization with decline, since civilization represents the moment when the culture stops innovating and turns instead to expansion. In response to Spengler’s cyclical, pessimistic view, twentieth-century Canadian American historian William McNeill wrote The Rise of the West. In this 1962 work, McNeill argued that we should not see history as a series of cycles that different cultures progress through independently.
