OSWALD SPENGLER (1880-1936) was a German historian and philosopher of history whose interests included mathematics, science, and art and their relation to his cyclical theory of history. He is regarded as a nationalist and an anti-democrat, and was a prominent member of the Conservative Revolution. His work won scant approval from professional scholars, who were scandalized by his unorthodox methods and contemptuous of his errors of fact.
Spengler's most famous book, THE DECLINE OF THE WEST (1918-22) , contended that the meaningful units for history are not epochs but whole cultures which evolve as organisms. Because most civilizations must pass through a life cycle, he argued, not only can the historian reconstruct the past but he can predict "the spiritual forms, duration, rhythm, meaning and product of the still unaccomplished stages of our Western history." He believed that the West had already passed through the creative stage of "culture" into that of reflection and material comfort ("civilization" proper, in his terminology) and that the future could only be a period of irreversible decline. Nor was there any prospect of reversing the process, for civilizations blossomed and decayed like natural organisms, and true rejuvenation was as impossible in the one case as the other. The book won him immediate acclaim from the general German public, perhaps because it seemingly rationalized the national humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles as part of larger world-historical processes.
In MAN AND TECHNICS (1931), Spengler warned against the dangers of technology and industrialism to culture, arguing that many of the West's great achievements would soon become spectacles for our descendants to marvel at, as we do with the pyramids of Egypt or the baths of Rome. He especially pointed to the tendency of Western technology to spread to hostile "Colored races" which would then use the weapons against the West. In Spengler's view, western culture would be destroyed from within by materialism, and destroyed by others through economic competition and warfare.
Although the Nazis welcomed Spengler's critique of liberalism in works such as THE HOUR OF DECISION (1934), he disagreed with their biological ideology and anti-Semitism. He considered himself a German nationalist but viewed the Nazis as too narrowly German, and not "occidental" enough to lead the fight against other peoples. The book warned of a coming world war in which western civilization risked being destroyed, and was widely distributed abroad before eventually being banned in Germany for its criticisms of National Socialism.
The following books are in PDF or ePUB format as noted:
* Decline of the West [2 vols.] (Knopf, 1980). C.F. Atkinson, trans. — PDF^
* Decline of the West [2 vols.] (Random Shack, 2016). D. Payne, ed. — ePUB
* Decline of the West [Abridged] (Oxford, 1991). H. Werner & A. Helps, eds. — PDF^
* Hour of Decision, The (Routledge, 2017). C.F. Atkinson, trans. — ePUB
* Letters, 1913-1936 (Allen & Unwin, 1966). A. Helps, ed. — PDF^
* Man and Technics (Knopf, 1932). C.F. Atkinson, trans. — PDF
* Man and Technics (Arktos, 2015). C.F. Atkinson and M. Putman, trans. — ePUB
* Prussian Socialism & Other Essays (Black House, 2018). K. Bolton, ed. — ePUB
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