In a nutshell, Spengler’s thesis is that all human cultures have a life-cycle, from birth to death – a predetermined cycle that works itself out over 1000-1500 years. And, yes, his methodology is less standard history, and more something profoundly… odd, but it’s an interesting oddness, if nothing else. Spengler’s politics were old-school hard-right conservative, in the continental European sense, but he was no fan of Hitler’s National Socialism, which he did live to see. Today, it seems the only people who bother with the book are far-right dingbats, who use him to buttress their notion of a decadent West under siege from Islam and cultural enemies – a situation that is criminally unfair. The fact that he was an anti-democratic, anti-liberal reactionary with some weird mystical tendencies probably didn’t help either. But the latent pessimism – combined with some of the odder aspects of the book – put Spengler out of synch with later, more optimistic, social attitudes. As late as the 1950s, The Decline of the West was a favourite of Jack Kerouac and the Beat poets (Kerouac took the word fellaheen from Spengler). The Decline of the West was a best-seller in the 1920s, and one of the most widely discussed intellectual works of the inter-war era – there’s at least one academic article on Spenglerian influences in The Lord of the Rings. Think of him as a dystopian conservative version of Karl Marx, and you would not be far wrong, though there is a strange poetry to Spengler that one rarely sees in such meaty works (the German title literally translates as The Going Down of the Evening Lands). A uniquely pessimistic framework at that, one inspired by Goethe and Nietzsche, and one best remembered for Spengler’s view that grim determinism will bring an end to Western Civilisation. It is nothing less than a monumental attempt at fitting the sum of human learning and experience into a single historical framework.

His interests were spectacularly broad, and he is not afraid to show it – The Decline of the West is not a history book in any conventional sense, nor is it even a philosophical text (though that is a better fit). In recent years The Decline of the West has even become strangely topical, but we’ll get to that.Īs a background, Spengler was a German polymath, moonlighting as a school teacher. But it is unquestionably interesting – arguably a forgotten classic – so I have decided to review a work few now bother with. It’s not light reading, not at all, and the sheer size of the combined volumes makes it a proverbial door-stopper.

After a good fortnight’s reading, I have finished the two volume, unabridged, edition of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918-1923).

Spengler decline of the west