Published in Anglican Theological Review 28(2), pages 67–76, Kauder’s article traces cyclical interpretations of history from classical political theory through Christian theology to modern comparative studies of civilization. Its central question concerns the foundations of historical recurrence: similarities among civilizations do not by themselves explain their development or establish its necessity. Kauder regards Vico as indispensable to a theory whose comparative evidence has outgrown its conceptual grounding.
The essence of the wave theory of history (also called the cycle, reflux, or recurrence theory) consists in three principles: First, the object of history is the different civilizations and not one mankind.
Circular development and similarities between cycles complete this definition. The genealogy is nevertheless discontinuous: thinkers repeatedly reconstruct cyclical explanations without fully understanding their predecessors. Plato, Aristotle, and Polybios describe recurrent governmental forms, while Joachim of Flora extends correspondence to entire ages. His succession of the realms of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost allows persons and events in different periods to occupy analogous positions.
Happenings in different ages are "contemporary," as Spengler has said.
Such correspondence anticipates comparative history, but Kauder resists interpreting Joachim as a conscious historian of civilizations. His purpose remains theological; the historical implications emerge retrospectively. Renaissance thinkers subsequently redirect attention toward classical political recurrence, with Machiavelli closely following Polybios.
Vico provides the article’s conceptual center by establishing history as a distinctive field of knowledge.
Vico is writing against Descartes, who had gained an increasing influence in Naples during Vico’s lifetime.
Against the Cartesian depreciation of historical knowledge, Vico argues that human beings can reconstruct the world they themselves have made. His “ideal history” distinguishes an enduring general structure from its empirical realizations. Recurrence encompasses language, law, religion, poetry, and political organization, rather than governmental forms alone. Kauder particularly values the sociological dimension: historical stages comprise structured societies transformed through struggles between dominant and subordinate groups. Providence operates through unintended consequences, allowing aristocratic repression to prepare the conditions for democracy.
Kauder does not accept this providential optimism without reservation. Writing in 1946, he questions whether experienced human cruelty can be reconciled with the plan of an absolutely benevolent and just being. Recurrence thus becomes inseparable from questions of agency and historical meaning. Enlightenment and nineteenth-century confidence in progress meanwhile obstructed acceptance of Vico’s system as a whole, even where individual insights circulated.
Spengler’s revival of cyclical history receives extended critical scrutiny. Kauder connects his pessimism with Germany’s defeat and his opposition to democracy, communism, and rational social improvement. Although Spengler compares civilizations, he does not adequately formulate their common sequence as an ideal history. Historical necessity instead rests on insufficiently demonstrated metaphysical claims: civilizational souls supposedly create through individuals, while a life-stream associated with blood binds separate actions into destiny. Unlike Hegel’s national spirits, Spengler’s civilizations lack an encompassing transcendent unity. His achievement is principally to revive interest in cyclical history, not to resolve its philosophical difficulties.
The concluding discussions distinguish Hoyland’s speculative revisions from Toynbee’s comparative advance. Hoyland invokes Platonic ideas and eros to give cultural achievements universal value, but his creative social “thrust” still personifies society without adequate explanation. Toynbee develops a new ideal history through comparison of twenty-one societies. Civilizations respond to hostile circumstances, undergo internal conflict, consolidate into universal states, and succumb to internal and external proletariats; universal churches transmit possibilities for new societies. Kauder values this comparative reconstruction more than its mystical explanation through good, evil, and redemption.
The conclusion returns to the imbalance between accumulated historical material and theoretical justification. Comparative abundance cannot establish civilizational agency, historical necessity, or providential meaning. Further development requires renewed engagement with Vico’s The New Science: its distinction between ideal structure and empirical cycles offers a basis for clarifying the relationship between human action and historical order.
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