Hello and welcome to this discussion of brand new book the prophets of doom with its author

Dr. Nemo Parvini very nice to finally meet you. Well thank you for having me

well cheers for asking because I really enjoyed this as I told you off air I breeze

through it in about four days is eminently readable and for myself and I think lots of

other people that will end up reading this this will be the first time we

encounter some of these writers particularly because you made a conscious effort to revive some of the theorists of cyclical history that have fallen out of favour.

And I think that's very important, and one of the reasons they've fallen out of favour, as you were saying, is because lots of them are wedded not only to a non-progressive idea of linear history things always improving which I mean just look around us it doesn't really feel that that's the case right now.

But also because they wed their theories of history on the emergence of a great man, a kind of

Caesar-like figure, and some of them were the forebears or contemporaries of some of the failed

Caesar figures of the 20th century and so history has deemed them the refuse of

the sin bin I think quite unfairly as you've shown. I mean one of the

interesting things about cyclical history is that it kind of comes in and out of

fashion depending on how things are going. So there's a period in the late

19th century just before will were one where people are starting to think

something's going wrong here they could feel it in the water and that's where you get people like

well lots of people reading Carlisle, Brooks Adams is wrote his book in 1895 and whenever people get that feeling that things aren't quite going in the right direction

people kind of rediscover the cyclical history.

So that was one little period where it came into vogue.

Then there was the actual First World War, and Spengler wrote The Klein of the West during that war and then in the

interwar period there was also this because there was the Great Depression. During the Great

Depression a lot of people were thinking along these lines. That's when Arnold Toynbee wrote his

monumental 12 volume study, a study of history.

...