Herman recaps the two-century-long tradition of criticism of Western civilization in this readable piece of intellectual history. He covers two historians most closely identified with predicting decline, Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, and also brings forth less famous prognosticators of the doom of the West. Most were, as Herman summarizes their works and ideas, concerned about racial degeneration: few have heard the name Gobineau, a mid-nineteenth-century reactionary, but knowledge of him and similar writers who felt they could identify an Aryan "race," and deplored its alleged vitiation, gives readers one source of Nazi ideas. Shifting gears, Herman devotes a long chapter to the career of W. E. B. DuBois, particularly his embrace of Marxism, apparently as an example of how intellectuals (subsequently, Sartre, Marcuse, and Foucault) used the twentieth century's most common theoretical apparatus for critiquing a decadent West. Ending with multiculturalist and environmentalist ideas and their promoters' somewhat unconscious echoing of nineteenth-century ideas, Herman provides an accessible survey for the serious nonacademic. -- Booklist