Hord And Spengler

John K. Hord's mostly unpublished work provides the theoretical basis for Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization whereas Oswald Spengler's The Decline Of The West provides the theoretical basis for James Blish's Cities In Flight.

Hord's relevance to the Technic History is explained in a SFWA Bulletin article by Anderson and is spelled out, without naming Hord, by Chunderban Desai in A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows and by Dominic Flandry in A Stone In Heaven.

In Cities In Flight, Volume II, A Life For The Stars, the New York City Fathers (computers) electrocram Chris DeFord with:

"Whole systems of world and interstellar history - Machiavelli, Plutarch, Thucydides, Gibbon, Marx, Pareto, Spengler, Sarton, Toynbee, Durant and a score of others -...."

-James Blish, A Life For The Stars IN Anderson, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), CHAPTER NINE, p. 208.

That sounds like Max Abrams tutoring Dominic Flandry, especially the reference to Machiavelli.

Cities In Flight has an:

AFTERWORD: THE EARTHMANIST CULTURE: CITIES IN FLIGHT as a Spenglerian History by Richard D. Mullen (pp. 597-605), followed by a Table on pp. 606-607.which shows Epochs like Hord's stages for Classical, Arabian, Western and Earthmanist Cultures. ("Earthmanist" approximates Anderson's "Technic.")