The decline of the West

Most of the negative comments concerning this most remarkable book are directed at the abridgement, not the book itself. I found nothing in the abridgement offensive or distorting. The introduction is terrible and does, in fact, betray a deep misunderstanding of Spengler. But I was able to read the abridgement with pleasure (in a day, too) and then go out and buy the two-volume hardcover edition later on. Now nearly ten years later I still find Spengler the most insightful historian that has ever written.

The reader from Albuquerque only reveals his own Faustian tendency of a "will to power" that Spengler detailed when he rejects the notion of a philosophy of history. It is natural, of course, that the premisses and conclusions of this book would be recieved with dismay in a time the emphasizes the individual will, but that's alright. I really don't think the Decline of the West was written with the intention of changing anything. It is a book for a minority who craves real historical understanding. If you think theory like this can jeopardize history, you've missed the key note of the entire work: destiny over causality.

This postmodern chronicle of the western world by early 20th century German historian and philosopher, Oswald Spengler, offers a lot for today's reader despite its flaws. It's an incredibly rich and complex analysis, attacking the causal factors of the development of western culture on many fronts simultaneously: historically, scientifically, artistically, architecturally, ecclesiastically, and so much more. This book is capable of describing many different aspects of western culture to many different readers, depending on who they happen to be and what their interest in western history is. I will only mention three aspects of Spengler's work in my review, since these aspects are what grabbed my attention, bearing in mind that the book contains much more than what I touch on here.

A. Spengler, a westerner himself, constructs detailed accounts in describing the historical development of western Europe. One of his main theses is a distinction between culture and civilization, which he derives from a credible, if difficult to falsify model for a universal cycle of human cultural growth, followed by decline into advanced civilization. For those familiar with biological theory, Spengler's model is essentially a growth curve. The familiar biological model is the lag phase, then the log phase, followed by the stationary phase, and ending in the death phase; which repeats itself virtually ad infinitum. In Spengler's model he labels these phases, respectively, after the seasons, beginning with spring and ending with winter. The spring-time of a people is a mythical phase, where settled economic life grows from a rural peasantry. This is followed by the summer, or cultural phase of strong and dynamic growth in all important aspects of a people; of economic, religious, martial, and other relevant human impulses. Then comes the fall, where dogma forms. Where adult-like reason takes root from the innocent cultural phase and puritan oversight of national religion and government begin to set hard like concrete. Finally, the winter of a people is when the national personality and traditions lose their effectiveness. Civilized and urbane money and economic issues tend to become preimminent over the cultural issues. Technology and irreligion become rampant. This cycle is not a modern phenomena, but repeats itself as seen in ancient Egyptian, Roman, and Aztec civilizations; and again, currently in America.

B. Spengler's style in elucidating a history of the west, and developing an hypothesis of universal and collective human behavior, is punctuated by the era in which he wrote: the early 20th century. Much of the historical analysis before and after this era lacks the materialist, psychoanalytical, and structural influence that typified thinking and literature when Spengler wrote. Published in 1926, The Decline of the West contains that biting air of criticism and structuralism so fecund in those times. This critical structural analysis gives Spengler's work a sharper contrast and greater depth of field than would likely have been possible for a writer from before or after Spengler's time. This is not to take away from Spengler's native insight and acuity, which was nevertheless, likely heightened by the charged literary atmosphere of early 20th century Germany.

C. The way Spengler psychoanalyzes the structure of history through art and architecture is almost wholey absent from the majority of standard historical analyses. Reading Spengler makes one aware of this common lack. This is one of the strong points of this book, since art and architecture express so much of what a culture is and why it thinks in the ways it does.

All in all, despite the typical fallacies of sex and race Spengler repeats, once could say this is a seminal work describing western development and thought which no student of history should leave unopened. An advantage of reading this book today instead of when it was originally released is the internet. If you lack truly comprehensive powers of recall regarding the art and architecture Spengler uses to analyze his subject cultures, then using the internet to pull up the various paintings, sculptures, and architectural examples is most helpful as an active part of reading this work; turning what could otherwise be a dry, boring read into something more alive that captures what the author is trying to convey. If possible, bring up the actual images of the art and architecture Spengler describes at the moment you're reading about it. This gave me a more graphic and focused perspective of the cultures he analyzes. Reading this book was like experiencing a kaleidoscope of mind candy.

Excellent work. Just a note on the other negative review on this item: It is regarding a Hungarian translation, which is not this edition. the store links reviews together and sometimes the review under a certain product is not actually for that product. This is one of those instances. Don't let it discourage you from a great read.

If Spengler had given his admirers a clearer idea of what to do near the end, more of us would have given him the five stars, but he did not, so let's add in what he missed: As the twentieth century dawned it became increasingly evident that technology would develop into an extraordinary phenomenon, a new dimension altogether, capable of taking us on to our next stage of evolution or of destroying us culturally or physically.
In the 1920s the Italian Futurist art movement founded by Filippo Marinetti represented efforts which avant garde thinkers around the globe were making to adjust to options as they emerged to contradict prevailing trends in a plodding Western civilization.
The Futurists declared in revolutionary manifestos their worship of speed, adventure, experiment and change. The movement also carried the seeds of its own destruction, for going to its logical extreme it met resistance as it assailed museums, history, rural values and past artistic achievement.
Many of these flamboyant personalities, aware of their failure to set pragmatic goals, sought other outlets for their talents.
Mussolini's fascism desired to weld the nation together through great public works programs, and people such as Marinetti helped to bring the Futurist movement into its front ranks.
Other national leaders, too, Roosevelt, Hitler, Stalin and Churchill, picked up the song of the technician and produced their own styles for mobilizing their peoples.
Reaching the multitudes by radio, still in its embryonic stage of impressionability potential, they all took on a deity-like aura.
The promises seems like miracles, but they were delivered in varying degrees according to national character, in the form of spectacular projects for constructing roads, automobiles, planes, airports, ships and docks. All this required a nation working in unison to bring these accomplishments into the lives of those who made them possible.
This was a plough-sword situation though; because weapons too had improved and multiplied dramatically, any war declared could reach the worker's family at home.
Increased national ability required greater resources, expansion led to collision and so on to World War 2.
Those who ignore history are always repeating it. Today the cultural centers from Hollywood to Moscow play the role of the Futurists. In Hollywood it is more obvious. Miles of colored celluloid depict the virtues of speed, adventure, experiment, change and violence.
The face of this neo-Futurism we are most familiar with is the narrow capitalist culture which dominates America and Western Europe. Yet America, to a great degree, is still an extension of Europe in a cultural sense, a society in a more advanced state of technical prosperity and cultural displacement; thus less European.
America's role in Europe has two effects at least. The positive one is that we are increasing our contact with the Homeland, returning to family members as the early explorers did with treasures from the New World. This comes in the form of expertise developed by access to frontier resources.
The other effect is negative. Bringing in a dominant techno-culture, which in Europe is accelerated by its own banks, an even lower level of European consciousness is promoted, and the strength of our heritage is sapped at the root.
Additionally, old nationalisms still serve to divide the loyalties of whites worldwide, as do local white ethnic divisions within nations; so both of these loyalties need to be realigned within greater European perspectives as the opportunities arise.
Work to spread the news about the extension of our patriotism, for it is the reality of kinship. The growing impulses of European cultural involvement in the United States are the catalyst you must personally use to abash today's obsolete forms of racial nationalism.
Thus we must affirm: obsolete Futurism and predatory nationalism must give way to a new synthesis of technology and cultural integrity within a European creed.

Firstly, after hearing much of this book by American Talk Show icon Michael Savage, I decided to read the book in its two volume version. Spengler uses his theories of culture vs. civilization, village vs. city, Nation and Language etc. to explain the future Decline of the West by studying the past. Although I wholely agree with Spengler's mockery of the pure Theory of Evolution and Darwinism as he has researched both the lack of science behind the theory but also the related cultural and "religious" affiliation of those promulgating its legitimacy. Where I disagree with Spengler, and for some reason historical Germany's embracement of dictatorial ideologies/movements: Islam. Spengler affords far too much, and factually unsound, affirmation for "Arabism" and Islam to his embracement of the, now accepted, myth of "Golden Age of Islam".

Spengler predicts the temporary decline of Communism, the growth of power structures; Financial/Industrialists and Monopolists, the Socialization and decline of the West via "culture" similar to the decline of Christian French civilization during the Reformation. Spengler's book, although more difficult reading, is highly important from a historical/philosophical perspective. A very good read however Spengler places way too much importance or blessings on to Arab or Islamic cultural development probably without the knowledge that the Arabs, Muhammadan largely adopted or stole their scientific, cultural, literature, architectural achievements from the numerous and more advanced civilizations it had "submitted" during Islam's Jihad expansionism. To this I must strongly recommend Ibn Warraq's works, Robert Spencer and most importantly "Early Modern Science" by Toby Huff ...

The subject of Spengler's most-accessible account of the decline of the "West" (read: "Modern 'Westernized' World") cannot be adequately understood in retrospect, for the decline he speaks of --almost prophetically--is one currently underway. By pretending to rise above that decline we make ourselves oblivious to our present predicament.

While much of what Spengler says is open to severe objection, his guiding intuitions are what our century has come to take for granted, as part and parcel of its cherished and unquestioned sense of certainty. It is only by taking Spengler most seriously that we can avoid fulfilling his prophecy.

In contemplating the modern waning of civilization, Spengler remains under the spell of German historicism, inviting a turn to "blood and soil" (Ch. 5) as the only resolution to the crisis of modern reason--a crisis precipitated by the self-alienating "abstraction" of man's will (Spirit) out of the world beyond it (Nature). The new return to "nature" turns out to be nothing falling short of the rise of an explosive, "fateful," collectivized will against all abstract universality. The future foreseen is one in which the nobility of a heroic imagination will triumph over democratic mediocrity and the machinery producing it. (Nothing is said, however, about the possibility that the revolt of the body against nominal abstractions will result in the use of "the machine" to fuel physical passions: is the alliance between abstractions and the machine any more lethal than that between the machine and carnality?).

As a thoughtful historicist, Spengler remained passionately aware of the crisis our "technological" age is afflicted by (much of what he writes may serve as an introduction to Heidegger's considerably more sophisticated writings). This volume is especially and delightfully instructive in magnifying the dramatic conflict between universal and particular, or between abstract speech and existence, while inviting the reader to embrace the "power" of existence as a Fate irrupting through the fiber of political life to purge it of its "intellectual" or "conceptual" accretions.

As a "world history," this second volume of "The Decline" is incomparably superior to much of the current literary production on the same subject, if for no other reason, at least due to its capacity to let "facts" make blatantly manifest the underlying intuitions or assumptions that continue guiding all "world history" projects into our day.

I hear so many people complaining that the classics are boring and outdated. They forget to put the book in the context in which it was written. The classics are great historical pieces, regardless of today's relivance. For example, the movie "Birth of a Nation" is considered today to be one of the most racist and biting movies of all time. It was made around 1910. It is still interesting to view it and see what was going on in the minds of the people who produced it. The same goes for Decline of the West.

There is no doubt about how Spengler defined the West: In terms of race. Not religion or democracy or capitalism or any other sort of philosophy. On the TV and magazines and such of the 21st century "The West" is variously defined in terms of liberalism, democracy, sexual expression, multi-culturalism, fee-market economics--anything except Spengler's definition.
In the early 1920s, before Hitler was heard from and after WW I, Spengler wrote a little article in which he stated his definition of The West, gave an appraisal of its then current health and gave a prescription for its survival. He said in this article that the German defeat in the Great War (WW I of course) was the first great step in the decline of the West via its subordination to the "colored world". Spengler stated that the SINGLE hope for the survival of the West was "The Prussian spirit, not only in Germany but in other countries as well." He went on to say that the "next war" would determine whether the West lived or died.
It is, looking back, as if Spengler wrote the history of WW II in advance, with the ending he seems to have expected but not wanted, omitted. It is interesting to ask the degree to which Roosevelt, Churchill and Hitler were aware of themselves playing out roles in Spengler's vision, with hopes of saving or destroying the West as Spengler defined it. It is tempting to think so. British and American war policy, the fire-bombing of Dresden as the best bit of evidence, seems specifically bent upon destroying Spengler's West. It seems, on the other hand, that Hitler's extreme rish-taking was driven by a vision that now was the time to save the West, which would be soon destroyed if not now preserved for the years to come. Spengler's race-based view of decline appears to be the rotting away of the "Transendental Aesthetic" to use Kant's term.
The presence of large numbers of non-Europeans in London and Amsterdam today seems to support Spengler's argument in the article I cited, but as an overall theory about the decline of Civilizations Toynbee's "Nemesis of Creativity" (control over creativity being in hands not supportive of the civilization)seems more generally appealing than Spengler's biological model. Perhaps they are both right. Or both wrong.

This review by Scott Sammons, Christina's husband, using her account.

There will surely be a better edited version someday. This is virtually indecipherable. I highly fault the publisher in this endeavor, and can see no reason to reward such sloppy publication efforts.

Decline of The West is a book squarely beyond the range of typical modern literary critique.
The fact that Dr.Spengler discovered a true existence of a living form in the history- and life-cycles of civilizations has been deliberately ignored by critics. The importance of this discovery for History as a science is on a level of Copernican helio-centric (Sun-at-the-Center) discovery in spatial sciences which inaugurated the modern advance of physical science. Yet it has not brought the official recognition that is its due.
Today, as it was 500 years ago in "The Middle Ages", the ruling spirit of the establishment feels threatened by the new revolutionary discovery and is trying to find ways to live with it without the consequences and implications of Dr.Spengler's discovery presented in this book. The Roman Catholic Church tried to spread ignorance of Copernicus as well, but will its modern-day equivalents be more successful in hiding the discovery?
It is up to the interested reader not to let this crime happen any longer.
Having in mind the huge scope and distance both in Time and Space that Dr.Spengler's book covers, the enormous energy and time spent by him in creating the material presented in this book becomes even more astonishing considering that the book is so deeply involved and touching upon the daily events of the times we live in.
Dr.Spengler in his work definitely belongs to the realm of the modern "TABOO," and precisely uncovers all the important facts and ideas, that our "accepted" intellectuals of the day DARE NOT touch upon, and prefer to avoid and misinterpret and misrepresent Dr.Spengler's thought and observations---for these are all too unnerving to them and too uncomfotably revealing about the character and direction of the times we live in.
Even though the Author has died many years ago, his insight and thought is squarely present in our every day problems, troubles and uncertainties.
Seldom will one find a philosopher, political scientist and a natural scientist-all in one and yet so penetrating in his thought and truly relevant and accurate to the daily life many years after his death.
Despite our civilization's boasting about the hitherto unheard-of levels of progress, creativity and prosperity unimaginable only a few dozen years ago, "Decline of the West" deals with the significance in them. The vision, understanding and practical forecasts of Dr.Spengler's scientific discipline of History encompass all of those and go beyond, at all times maintaining the "eagle's view from above" of life.
The 20th century is known for its false prophets and broken ideologies, yet amid all the storm and dust raised in the conflicts of this century, people have not noticed that all this time there existed a profound voice of calm unshaken in his beliefs and unmistaken, unshakeable in the strength of his experience and position, always proven right by facts beyond his control.
This is Dr.Spengler, and that makes him a lone example of a true scientist of politics.
This revelation then has to tell us something profoundly significant about the nature of our Western civilization's Information Age stage and the direction it is heading in, when a person from a 100 years ago can tell us so much more intimate and relevant things about the politics, science and life of people many years after his death, than the leading historians of the day can.
The average person's inability to tell truth from faleshood in the news goes beyond mere wealth of information phenomenon, and the popular Computer represents the vehicle of the Information Age, nothing more.
Today it is easy to be unaware of the profound and deep metaphysical roots underlying our advanced technical civilization's materialistic developments, yet Dr.Spengler in this work masterfully uncovers them.
That is why this book, Decline of The West is so important, and will help the modern reader understand much better, than through any other immediate means, the true scope, understanding and meaning of the age we live in and of the age our descendants will live in.
It is a true example of the intellectual nihilism of our times when works such as those of Dr.Spengler are deliberately passed by the intellectual elite keenly aware of its inability to deal with the disturbing insights of Dr.Spengler's mind, and consequently of its inability to rise to the rank of Spengler, prefering instead to sometimes select quotations from this great thinker in order to make themselves look bigger and wiser, --thinkers such as Hughes, Fischer and Connelly are among those.
To paraphrase Spengler, nobody can escape from History's all-encompassing reach, we humans only have a luxury of pretending that we can, and like a grotesque Ostrich we bury our heads into the daily mass-circulation media training our minds, making us increasingly less capable of exercising independent thought and judgement.
In the introduction, Spengler quotes his spiritual father, poet-philosopher Goethe with the description of confidence in life:"Inward form of significant life which unaware and unobserved inspires every thought and every action." That this description is no longer adequate for the life of Western Man provides a food for thought, since everything genuine in the way of feeling and thought is left open for unrestrained dissection and criticism by the standard-bearers of the modern intellectual inquisition which stifles any richness in the modes of thought in our universities, and has assumed the role of the judge, prosecutor and the jury in Media's daily virtual courtrooms, alias mass-circulation news. Hence the public truth of the moment holds sway.
The lack of inward form in our daily personal lives should not therefore come as a surprise since we are trained daily to seek programmable inspiration from the external world of the macrocosm, shunning away from our own inbred microcosm and the wealth of inspiration it could have provided us with, had we given it a chance.
At the very least "Decline of The West" enables the interested reader to form his or her own conclusion, which is something that Spengler's past critics could not afford to do.

Let us start by looking at Spengler's faults. First, he divided history into a few great civilizations none of which could be understood by someone who did not live in that civilization. This statement is a logical contradiction, since Spengler, by his own definition, could not know what someone in another civilization was thinking.

Second, he believed that civilizations not nations existed. But when did anyone fight for a civilization? What civilization has a capital city? a palace? a language? Nations die, because they exist. Western civilization will not die, because it does not really exist.

Spengler's greatest accomplishment was to show that history can be teleological--moving toward an end unlike other writers who see events as entelechical--ends in themselves.

He was also more specific in his predictions than was the Bible or Nostradamus. He foresaw the rise of private armies (Mussolini, Hitler, Mao). He said that by the middle of the twentieth century, the most powerful people in the world would be international bankers who would exercise control behind the scenes while preaching international liberalism (David Rockefeller). And he predicted the fall of communism in the Soviet Union by the end of the twentieth century and a return there to Christian fundamentalism. He was right except, based on demographic trends, the fundamentalism may, by mid-twenty-first century, be Muslim not Christian.

To benefit from Spengler, read the unabridged edition, take notes, and, after you finish, put your notes aside for a year before studying them.

Decline of The West is a book squarely beyond the range of typical modern literary critique.
The fact that Dr.Spengler discovered a true existence of a living form in the history- and life-cycles of civilizations has been deliberately ignored by critics. The importance of this discovery for History as a science is on a level of Copernican helio-centric (Sun-at-the-Center) discovery in spatial sciences which inaugurated the modern advance of physical science. Yet it has not brought the official recognition that is its due.
Today, as it was 500 years ago in "The Middle Ages", the ruling spirit of the establishment feels threatened by the new revolutionary discovery and is trying to find ways to live with it without the consequences and implications of Dr.Spengler's discovery presented in this book. The Roman Catholic Church tried to spread ignorance of Copernicus as well, but will its modern-day equivalents be more successful in hiding the discovery?
It is up to the interested reader not to let this crime happen any longer.
Having in mind the huge scope and distance both in Time and Space that Dr.Spengler's book covers, the enormous energy and time spent by him in creating the material presented in this book becomes even more astonishing considering that the book is so deeply involved and touching upon the daily events of the times we live in.
Dr.Spengler in his work definitely belongs to the realm of the modern "TABOO," and precisely uncovers all the important facts and ideas, that our "accepted" intellectuals of the day DARE NOT touch upon, and prefer to avoid and misinterpret and misrepresent Dr.Spengler's thought and observations---for these are all too unnerving to them and too uncomfotably revealing about the character and direction of the times we live in.
Even though the Author has died many years ago, his insight and thought is squarely present in our every day problems, troubles and uncertainties.
Seldom will one find a philosopher, political scientist and a natural scientist-all in one and yet so penetrating in his thought and truly relevant and accurate to the daily life many years after his death.
Despite our civilization's boasting about the hitherto unheard-of levels of progress, creativity and prosperity unimaginable only a few dozen years ago, "Decline of the West" deals with the significance in them. The vision, understanding and practical forecasts of Dr.Spengler's scientific discipline of History encompass all of those and go beyond, at all times maintaining the "eagle's view from above" of life.
The 20th century is known for its false prophets and broken ideologies, yet amid all the storm and dust raised in the conflicts of this century, people have not noticed that all this time there existed a profound voice of calm unshaken in his beliefs and unmistaken, unshakeable in the strength of his experience and position, always proven right by facts beyond his control.
This is Dr.Spengler, and that makes him a lone example of a true scientist of politics.
This revelation then has to tell us something profoundly significant about the nature of our Western civilization's Information Age stage and the direction it is heading in, when a person from a 100 years ago can tell us so much more intimate and relevant things about the politics, science and life of people many years after his death, than the leading historians of the day can.
The average person's inability to tell truth from faleshood in the news goes beyond mere wealth of information phenomenon, and the popular Computer represents the vehicle of the Information Age, nothing more.
Today it is easy to be unaware of the profound and deep metaphysical roots underlying our advanced technical civilization's materialistic developments, yet Dr.Spengler in this work masterfully uncovers them.
That is why this book, Decline of The West is so important, and will help the modern reader understand much better, than through any other immediate means, the true scope, understanding and meaning of the age we live in and of the age our descendants will live in.
It is a true example of the intellectual nihilism of our times when works such as those of Dr.Spengler are deliberately passed by the intellectual elite keenly aware of its inability to deal with the disturbing insights of Dr.Spengler's mind, and consequently of its inability to rise to the rank of Spengler, prefering instead to sometimes select quotations from this great thinker in order to make themselves look bigger and wiser, --thinkers such as Hughes, Fischer and Connelly are among those.
To paraphrase Spengler, nobody can escape from History's all-encompassing reach, we humans only have a luxury of pretending that we can, and like a grotesque Ostrich we bury our heads into the daily mass-circulation media training our minds, making us increasingly less capable of exercising independent thought and judgement.
In the introduction, Spengler quotes his spiritual father, poet-philosopher Goethe with the description of confidence in life:"Inward form of significant life which unaware and unobserved inspires every thought and every action." That this description is no longer adequate for the life of Western Man provides a food for thought, since everything genuine in the way of feeling and thought is left open for unrestrained dissection and criticism by the standard-bearers of the modern intellectual inquisition which stifles any richness in the modes of thought in our universities, and has assumed the role of the judge, prosecutor and the jury in Media's daily virtual courtrooms, alias mass-circulation news. Hence the public truth of the moment holds sway.
The lack of inward form in our daily personal lives should not therefore come as a surprise since we are trained daily to seek programmable inspiration from the external world of the macrocosm, shunning away from our own inbred microcosm and the wealth of inspiration it could have provided us with, had we given it a chance.
At the very least "Decline of The West" enables the interested reader to form his or her own conclusion, which is something that Spengler's past critics could not afford to do.

Quite simply the most important book of the twentieth century for several reasons:

1] Spengler offers a morphology of history as an organic conception that can used to understand all historical development with genuine insight.

2] Spengler's projection of coming trends (e.g. Militant Islam, environmental crisis, secularization of the elites, "second religiousness" of the folk, etc.) has enormous predictive value. His understanding of current events (from the perspective of 1917!) is more acute and useful than any present day commentator.

3] Without a doubt, Spengler is the most important National Bolshevik thinker.

4] "Oswald Spengler is the greatest mystic of the twentieth century." - Klemmens von Klemperer

I'm just reading this ingenious book in Hungarian translation, but I found very disturbing the complete lack of Hungarian interpretation of the Greek and French citations. I was curious, whether the English version is better from that point of view, or not. Sorry to say, it is even worse, as not only the unreadable Greek letters are misinterpreted completely, but simple English words too, which is a clear sign of the poor character-recognition work and its quality-control. That's a pity, but not incurable: before publishing it, the resulted text should be revised, comparing it with the original book. Quite a nice work: more than 1200 pages, but it worth to do it! Good work!

The whole of Spengler's conception not only implies a philosophy of history, but a philosophy of history gone mad. This conception is based in any case on an utter denial of the quality of will in man on which I myself place supreme emphasis. My own attitude is one of extreme unfriendliness to every possible philosophy of history, whether it be the older type found in a Saint Augustine or a Boussuet, which tends to make man a puppet of God, or the newer type which tends in all its varieties to make man a puppet of nature. The "Downfall of the West" seems to me a fairly complete repertory of the naturalistic fallacies of the nineteenth century; it is steeped throughout in the special brand of fatalism in which these fallacies culminate, and as a result of which the Occident is actually threatened with "downfall".
One is justified in dismissing Spengler as a charlatan, even though one is forced to admit a charlatan of genius. The immense sale of this book in this century is a depressing symptom.
From: Democracy and Leadership Irving Babbitt-1924

This is a great Book that will explain how Ideologies can be created to Justify Dictators like Mussolini , Hitler, and Others.
The book is a good compendium, but the reader must aware of his
totalitariam scope in the name of nacionalism , fascism , nazism , etc.
In the name of Ideoligies like this, Million of People have been
murdered.

The Customer from Toronto on May 8, 2000 must have swallowed a dictionary. I can't understand one word this guy says - blah blah blah. Why do people think like that let alone write. Dazzle 'em with the B.S. and oh yeah - lets make mere wind sound solid.

A poory written, racially charged work by a bitter, probably mentally ill schoolteacher that gives the illusion of having a "key" to historical development. In addition to the cycle of history thesis, he identifies eight civilizations and their birth to death cycle, Spengler points to a nation's "will" and race as the key to a "kultur's" success.

This is the sort of crank theory that held an appeal to National Socialists and amateur history buffs for whom decline mythology holds an attraction-- facts be damned.

Interesting as an historical footnote but dismissed by anyone with a serious foundation in history and historical analysis.