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The STUDIA UNIVERSITATIS BABEŞ-BOLYAI issue article summary
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Abstract: Symbolic (often resentful) geographies, which are best reflected in historiography by the compared history of civilisations, have reappeared, in the last few years, on the scene of historical writing. After Huntington broke a relative silence with its Clash of Civilisations at the beginning of the 90’s, recent years have brought other works that resume the topics opened to debate in the first half of the 20th century by the works The Decline of the West – Oswald Spengler and A study of History – Arnold Toynbee. Unlike the book written by Niall Ferguson – Civilization: The West and the Rest, the one now had in the view, Why the West Rules – for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future, “directed” by historian and archaeologist Ian Morris, comes in opposition to the Spenglerian necrology (hope dies last!) only to some extent: Spengler announced, with the voice of a gravedigger, the decline of the Western civilisation. By not being a counter-discourse to Spengler’s thesis, as our “immersion” in Morris’s research will show, the British historian’s book eschews in a certain manner the perspective of globalisation (i.e. identifying the Occident with the globalising capitalism and therefore portending a triumph of the West – understood as the present industrial-consumerist society). On the contrary, the author’s geographical determinism further forces the cliché East vs. West. |
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