In 1920 Spengler produced Prussiandom and Socialism (Preußentum und Sozialismus), which argued for an organic, nationalist brand of non-Marxist socialism and authoritarianism. His other writings made little impact outside Germany. He wrote extensively throughout World War I and the interwar period, and supported German hegemony in Europe. Spengler’s civilization model postulates that any civilization is a superorganism with a limited and predictable lifespan. He is best known for his book The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes), published in 19, covering all of world history. Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler ( – ) was a German historian and philosopher of history whose interests included mathematics, science, and art. In Spengler’s depiction, Western Man is a proud but tragic figure because, while he strives and creates, he secretly knows the actual goal will never be reached. Spengler also presents the idea of Muslims, Jews and Christians, as well as their Persian and Semitic forebears, being Magian Mediterranean cultures of the antiquity such as Ancient Greece and Rome being Apollonian and the modern Westerners being Faustian.Īccording to Spengler, the Western world is ending and we are witnessing the last season-”winter time”-of the Faustian Civilization. The final stage of each culture is, in his word use, a “civilization”. He recognizes eight high cultures: Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Mesoamerican (Mayan/Aztec), Classical (Greek/Roman), Arabian, Western or “European-American.” Cultures have a lifespan of about a thousand years. According to Spengler, the meaningful units for history are not epochs but whole cultures which evolve as organisms. The book introduces itself as a “Copernican overturning” operating as a paradigm shift involving the rejection of the Eurocentric view of history, especially the division of history into the linear “ancient-medieval-modern” rubric. Spengler revised this volume in 1922 and published the second volume, subtitled Perspectives of World History, in 1923. The Decline of the West (German: Der Untergang des Abendlandes), or The Downfall of the Occident, is a two-volume work by Oswald Spengler, the first volume of which was published in the summer of 1918.
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