The Decline of the West: Form and Actuality

Product Description
The first volume of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West is a classic milestone in the annals of historiography. However, it is not a history book in the traditional sense of recounting events in chronological order. Instead, it tries to explain the mechanisms that make different cultures tick. While classical culture had no concept of the past or future and was only fixated on the present, Western culture is focused on both the past as memory and the future as unconquered territory.
Like organisms that are born, mature and eventually die, cultures are the blossoming youth while civilizations usher in senility, decay and demise. When a culture becomes a civilization, decadence sets in and the ensuing downward spiral becomes a Faustian whirlwind of self-destruction. This is inevitable as we can see that each culture’s evolution has its parallels in other periods of human history.
The endgame for the West has already begun. It is in terminal decline, desperately trying to revive the dead forms and buried traditions that animated its Promethean spirit in its youthful heyday of exuberance. But in old age, it all seems preposterous, and hence in vain as the West has become tired of itself and unable to innovate in either the arts or philosophy. The West is on its way to the grave and what will see the light next must necessarily be something completely new and not just a corpse reanimated.
About the Author
Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) was one of the most significant and at the same time most controversial philosophers and historians of the 20th century. Already as a teenager, he filled entire notebooks with elaborate visions of two fictional empires, his sketches including administrative minutiae, descriptions of geographical features and economic statistics. Much later, through the publication of The Decline of the West, he became world-famous and the subject of intense debates and controversies. Thus the bachelor Spengler was financially independent at last and able to mingle with illustrious and influential figures from society. With his culture-specific approach regarding religion, art, science and tradition, he was a forerunner of modern sociobiology and evolutionary anthropology. He is also known as an anti-democratic political writer and considered part of the nationalist Conservative Revolution. However, he rejected National Socialism, especially the racial supremacism, and refused to collaborate with its regime.