the decline of the west volume i oswald spengler

For a historian like Spengler, who studied the past, this was a particularly radical gesture, as it signaled the rejection of an entire disciplinary ethos.

In doing so, he employs the very terms that modernists used to position themselves in relation to their past. Īlthough he is typically regarded as a pessimistic, conservative, and even anti-modern thinker, I will propose that his historical framework takes on a peculiarly modernist tenor in its emphasis on historical relativism and his dramatic, self-proclaimed break with and rejection of the typical linear historical narrative.

Spengler’s defense of authoritarianism and hostility toward the “leveling” in mass society appealed to conservative revolutionaries in the Weimar Republic. In part, his book was so popular because it tapped into the pervasive feeling of decline that dominated the modern psyche, particularly after WWI. The book was successful outside of Germany as well, and by 1919, it had been translated into several languages. The publication of Decline of the West in 1918 met with resounding success in Germany it seemed to assuage the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles by rationalizing the German downfall as part of a larger world-historical process. Although he voted for Hitler in 1932, by the time of his death in 1936, his books were banned by the Nazis after he criticized their policies of anti-Semitism and publicly opposed their biological ideology. By 1911, Spengler foresaw war and hoped for an imperial future for Germany, which he feared might deteriorate like Rome after the Punic Wars.

As his editor Arthur Helps suggests, Spengler’s pessimism was inflected by his own frustrated professional ambitions and meager economic means. in 1904, after having initially failed his doctoral thesis on Heraclitus because of insufficient references. Oswald Spengler, the German historian and author of the seminal, two-volume work, Decline of the West or Der Untergang des Abendlandes, was born in 1880 to a conservative, petit bourgeois German family.

The decline of the west volume i oswald spengler