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Civilisation as Morphology
The comparative study of civilisations reads a single course off many cases: each civilisation is born, grows, matures and declines, and the course is found by laying the cases side by side at corresponding stages. It is the reading of the unfolding sense called morphology, a type that runs once per instance. Quigley put “evolution” in his title, and Spengler’s Entwicklung was the German word for evolution in the developmental sense, the word of Haeckel’s Entwicklungslehre and of Schleicher; the other authors here speak of growth, life cycle and collapse.
Spengler’s morphology
Oswald Spengler named the method in the subtitle of Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918–22): Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte, outlines of a morphology of world history. He took it from Goethe’s study of living form. Each of his eight high Cultures is an organism with a fixed course, from springtime to the winter of Civilisation, and epochs at the same stage of different Cultures are “contemporaneous”, homologous whatever their dates. His word for the course is Entwicklung, development, which was also German’s word for evolution, and he set it against Darwin. He set Darwinism, with its “wholly un-Goethean formulas” of struggle and selection, among the ideals of a late age, and traced Darwin’s theory to political economy. His morphology rejected progress too; the West was not the summit of a single history but one Culture entering its old age.
Toynbee’s study
Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History (1934–61) kept the comparison and removed the fixed course. Civilisations pass through genesis, growth, breakdown and disintegration, but they grow by meeting challenges with creative responses, and they break down when their creative minorities fail, not when an allotted span runs out. The sequence of stages is common to the cases; whether and when a civilisation passes through them depends on how it responds.
Quigley’s evolution of civilisations
Carroll Quigley put the word in his title. The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis (1961) set out seven stages through which a civilisation passes: mixture, gestation, expansion, an age of conflict, universal empire, decay and invasion. A civilisation expands while its instrument of expansion, the arrangement that directs surplus into new investment, works; when the instrument hardens into an institution that serves its own members, expansion stops, and a civilisation survives only by reforming or circumventing it. The evolution of his title is the stage sequence of a single civilisation.
Collapse without a life cycle
Two later authors, Tainter and Diamond, kept the comparison of cases and dropped the organism. The archaeologist Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988) treated complexity as a problem-solving strategy whose returns diminish: each new layer of organisation costs more for less benefit, until a society can no longer meet a new challenge and collapses to a simpler level. He rejected explanations by an organic life course, and located the cause in the economics of complexity itself, with Western Rome, the Classic Maya and Chaco Canyon among his cases. Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005) went further from the life cycle: collapse depends on environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbours, the loss of trading partners and, above all, on how a society responds to them, so that its outcome is the product of decisions rather than a predetermined course.
Peter Turchin returned to the comparison of cases with quantitative methods. His secular cycles of integration and disintegration recur within a single state; his use of “evolution” belongs to the multilevel-selection line set out under Cultural evolution.
Nisbet’s critique
The sociologist Robert Nisbet’s Social Change and History (1969) argued that the organic metaphor of growth and decay, on which Spengler, Toynbee and Quigley draw, had been used to assert that social change is necessary and directional; his critique is set out with the arrow’s in Progress and direction. The cyclical historians who preceded the morphologies, Ibn Khaldun and Vico, belong to the recurrence that the unfolding readings are defined against, and are treated in The speculative tradition.
See also: Evolution (the subject landing) · Philosophy of history · The speculative tradition · Progress and direction · Spengler · Toynbee · Goethe · Turchin