He shows us Kennan's resemblance to Oswald Spengler and his pessimism; to Gibbon and his arguments for self-control and moderation; to Freud and his notions of the subconscious and of desire's ability to limit human reason.

Sander was also influenced by historian Oswald Spengler, whose book, "Decline of the West," hypothesized that all great civilizations begin as agrarian communities then gradually decline as they become more urbanized.

Tonsor focused on the thought of Hegel and Marx (whose Manifesto he described as "a great political poem about the mid-nineteenth century mind"), positivists August Comte and Herbert Spencer, and historians like Leopold von Ranke, Jacob Burckhardt, and Lord Acton, He arrived finally at such contemporary philosophers of culture and civilization as Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee.