![]() ![]() ![]() He already knew that Arnold Toynbee, in A Study of History, contended that civilizations have their seasons - they rise, grow stagnant without sufficient challenges, eventually decay and fall. Having come of age in 1930s' New York, the young intellectual would have heard fervent Trotskyites on street corners proclaim that history advances through class struggle and through the conflict between evolving political and economic ideologies. ![]() Why did Rome fall? Was the Christian religion a means of preserving ancient culture? What forms of government and economic system are best for mankind? Democratic representation with capitalistic competition? Enlightened despotism? A meritocracy of the best and the brightest? A young Jewish intellectual, an admirer of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, suddenly finds himself musing about historical determinism, individual initiative and the ideal society. ![]()
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