The Great Dawson

Christopher Dawson’s name deserves to be far better known in this country than it is. He brings to the field of historical speculation (the study which he calls “metahistory” and which Spengler called “the morphology of history”) an understanding of the deep rhythms of human existence and a critical historiographic ability.

If the corpus of his work lacks the ambition and sweep of Spengler’s Decline of the West or Toynbee’s A Study of History, the balance of his judgment and the depth of his Catholic outlook give it a dimension which is lacking in them. He places historical problems in the context of a wider metaphysical understanding of man’s destiny, so that his method provides a point of perspective, a bit of terra firma, from which the dizzying phenomena of historical development may be considered without that descent into relativism which is the besetting vice both of Spengler and of Toynbee.

FS

About the Author

Frank S. Meyer

Frank S. Meyer was a senior editor of National Review.

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Christopher Dawson’s name deserves to be far better known in this country than it is. He brings to the field of historical speculation (the study which he calls “metahistory” and which Spengler called “the morphology of history”) an understanding of the deep rhythms of human existence and a critical historiographic ability.

If the corpus of his work lacks the ambition and sweep of Spengler’s Decline of the West or Toynbee’s A Study of History, the balance of his judgment and the depth of his Catholic outlook give it a dimension which is lacking in them. He places historical problems in the context of a wider metaphysical understanding of man’s destiny, so that his method provides a point of perspective, a bit of terra firma, from which the dizzying phenomena of historical development may be considered without that descent into relativism which is the besetting vice both of Spengler and of Toynbee.