From the NYRB
It is tempting to say that his book makes the perfect antidote both to the superheated American national debate and the certainty of Snyder’s dark narrative. Yet this should not obscure the quiet prophecy in Runciman’s own account. It can be traced to his innocent-sounding quip that repeated references to the 1930s are psychological tics of a political midlife crisis. The premise for his vision of our current situation is that democracy is a political form with a life span, a beginning and an end. We have not reached the end point, which is why talk of an immediate terminal crisis is exaggerated. But we must acknowledge that we are in late middle age.
This argument marks a remarkable slide from history into organicist metaphysics. And it is an ironic one. Runciman’s suggestion that political constitutions have a natural life cycle is reminiscent of Oswald Spengler, the author of The Decline of the West and the exemplary political and cultural writer of the Weimar Republic. Like Runciman, Spengler employed a natural philosophy to organize world history into a series of quasi-biological trajectories. He viewed the situation of the West as being close to the end of a natural cycle of civilizational ossification. For Runciman this process is most advanced in polities like Greece and Japan. They are not dead but caught, he argues, in a post-historic state, paralyzed by fiscal constraints and demographic decline.
At this point Runciman’s grand vision converges with that of Alexandre Kojève, another prophet of the end of history and the inspiration for Francis Fukuyama’s now notorious 1989 essay. Beyond biological metaphors, what these writers have in common is their intellectual and political posture. Rather than raging against the dying of the light, Runciman, like Spengler and Kojève, invites us to adopt a stance of disillusioned realism. If we can see the decline of democratic polities all around us and can diagnose the multiple causes of their eventual demise, that does not excuse us from the responsibility to make them work until the bitter end. This is Runciman’s way of saying that “there is no alternative” to liberal democracy.
I've always been more partial to a seasonal metaphor than to a lifespan metaphor. Both interpret the entropic mood of late modernity, at least in the North Atlantic societies, i.e., this sense that we are gradually reverting to the historic, barbaric norm because there's no compelling alternative, because Liberalism is no longer compelling. So we allow the worst among us to fill the vacuum. But there's a difference between thinking that Western Civilization is almost dead and that it's just going through Winter. Because always after Winter comes the Spring. In the meanwhile, we do what we can to maintain decency norms and the best practices of the modern liberal order.