declinism
Sign in to saveDeclinism is the belief that a society or institution is tending towards decline. Particularly, it is the predisposition, caused by cognitive biases such as rosy retrospection, to view the past more favourably and the future more negatively.
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- has cause
- rosy retrospection
- described by source
- The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
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Encyclopedic overview
9 sectionsContents
- History
- Cause
- Function
- Late 1800s
- American declinism
- European declinism
- Declinist literature
- See also
- References
Declinism is the belief that a society or institution is tending towards decline. Particularly, it is the predisposition, caused by cognitive biases such as rosy retrospection, to view the past more favourably and the future more negatively.
"The great summit of declinism" according to Adam Gopnik, "was established in 1918, in the book that gave decline its good name in publishing: the German historian Oswald Spengler's best-selling, thousand-page work The Decline of the West."
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “declinism” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.