The great doomsayer.

• Author: McInnes, Neil
• Position: Oswald Spengler's 'The Decline of the West'

Oswald Spengler Reconsidered

Books have their destinies, says the Latin tag, and they can vary as widely as those of human beings - from those that, in David Hume's heartfelt phrase, fall stillborn from the press but later stir to life as beacons of the mind, to those that are the wonder of a year before falling into oblivion.

It is often said that Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West met that second fate, but the truth is rather different. It was the wonder of the years 1918 to 1922 in Germany (and of 1926 in English-speaking countries), achieving sales so incongruously large in relation to its length and density that one is bound to question (as one does in the cases of Michel Foucault's Les Mots et les choses and Stephen Hawkings' A Brief History of Time) how many of those who bought the book actually read it. Subsequently, it ran into a barrage of destructive criticism from the guild of historians, while its author, giddy with fame, dabbled so grossly in right-wing politics that in due course he was granted two interviews with Chancellor Hitler. While it became unseemly in academic circles to cite the work, it continued to exert, if only by way of its rifle, an influence that must be admitted to be universal.

Today, looking back, The Decline of the West can be seen to stand at the gate whereby entered such pervasive intellectual fashions as postmodernist relativism, multiculturalism, and hostile suspicion of dead white European males. It inspired more than fashions, however. Spengler's Decline led directly to a new would-be science, the comparative sociology of civilizations, and it animated the twentieth century's avid passion for philosophies of history, which everyone affects to disdain but which, observed Raymond Aron, "nevertheless exercise an influence on the historical conscience of our day." Above all, it inspired a mood, a feeling, a pathos: that of living uneasily through the end of an old, tired, dying culture.

Yet by mid-century it had been written off. In the Encyclopedia of Philosophy W.H. Dray said it had enjoyed "instant but short-lived fame" in the 1920s, and if it was discussed again after the second war that was because of Arnold Toynbee's similar labors and not because of a belated recognition of Spengler's merits. Erich Heller maintained that Spengler "performed one of the most curious feats in the history of modern thought: in a remarkably short time he has achieved a kind of highly topical oblivion." After being "passionately debated" at the time of publication, "his work is by general consent utterly out of date." I shall show that this was, and still is, far from true.

Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) was an obscure nobody of prodigious erudition and romantic imagination. Born in the Harz mountains to modest circumstances, he took a doctorate at Halle in 1904 and was teaching mathematics in a Munich high school in 1911 when a small inheritance enabled him to retire to his study and work on his magnum opus. He never married; a sister kept house for him. He had fully planned his book when war began in 1914 and he composed it under trying wartime conditions; one sister committed suicide in 1917, another lost her husband at the front, and Spengler was often cold and hungry, writing by candlelight. His two-volume masterpiece came out in 1918 and 1922 and was an enormous success, selling 100,000 copies in a few years. Apart from misunderstandings engendered by the title, its appeal to Germans humiliated by defeat and wracked by revolution and inflation was the message that a similar fate awaited the arrogant victors, including that so-called "young" nation, America. Western culture was dying, and the way cultures die is by deteriorating into urbanized, machine-dominated civilizations, rent by warring states, anarchic democracies, until a Caesar rose to dominate them all. Cold comfort for Germans, but no one was promising better certainly not Weimar's feeble democracy.

There were even hints in the book of a thought Spengler went on to make explicit in a series of partisan tracts and pamphlets, namely that in this twilight era of uncultured civilization there could be a special role for Germany, provided she was no longer "the people of poets and thinkers" but became the land of engineers, industrialists, technicians - and ruthless, anti-democratic, socialist dictators. Culture was finished, passe; the last centuries of Western civilization were to be the time of ruthless realists. (Incidentally, that is the background to a notorious remark, wrongly attributed to Hermann Goering but which actually belongs to the character Thiemann in Hanns Johst's 1933 play Schlageter: "When I hear the word culture . . . I undo the safety-catch of my Browning.") As early as 1921 Spengler wrote, "We Germans will never bring forth another Goethe, but a Caesar, yes." The foundation stone of his extraordinary reputation as a prophet was laid.

Those later political pamphlets (which are acutely analyzed by Rolf Peter Sieferle in Die Konservative Revolution, Frankfurt, 1995) are said by some critics to reveal the secret meaning of The Decline, but if so that was not what fascinated so many readers, especially outside Germany. Spengler's political career was actually rather pathetic, as so often is the case when an unsophisticated scholar gets taken up by men of power. A Dutch researcher has lately discovered that, made famous by his big book, Spengler became adviser to a conspiratorial network of Ruhr industrialists and political and paramilitary activists in Berlin and Bavaria, and thus found himself on the fringes of a national-conservative plot to overthrow the Weimar Republic. He wisely retreated to his study, but despite being still ambivalent about Nazism, let himself be wheeled in several times to see Hitler. He decided Hitler was a Dummkopf who had nothing of the coming Caesar. He found the Nazis' racism stupid, their economic policies shortsighted, and their "socialism" far removed from the old-fashioned Prussian state-capitalism Spengler intended by that name. Although Ernst Junger tried to claim him for the movement, dedicating Der Arbeiter (1932) to him, the Nazis saw that he was too reactionary for them, and his big book was banned. So Spengler was caught in a crossfire: Theodor Adorno said, "In Germany he was ostracized as a pessimist and a reactionary. . . . Abroad he was considered one of those ideologically responsible for the relapse into barbarism."

Getting back to Spengler's one important work, it was (according to the tide he first proposed to his publisher) a "morphology of world history", that is, an account of the successive, meaningless, unconnected rises and falls that constitute what is improperly (because monistically) called the history of humanity. Such cyclical theories are as old as the Greeks and Romans, but what was original to Spengler was his suggestion about what it was that rose and fell: a culture. For him that meant an ideal or a style that characterized a whole group of societies over a long period, and which was expressed in or symbolized by everything they did, from music to mathematics, from economy to architecture. According to Spengler, there had been eight or nine such cultures in history, and the two he paid most attention to were the Apollonian, which arose in the heroic age of Greece and died in the Roman Empire, and the Faustian, which arose in Western Europe a thousand years before and was now in its declining stage.

That stage told the same tragic story in each case, and Spengler called it by a familiar German pejorative, "civilization" - the age of the big city, war, democracy, and finally, Caesarism. When it culminated, that culture was dead, and for a time men lived without history, until one day, one could not know when or where, a new soul or ideal would be born and find expression in a new culture. That culture would flower and flourish in its turn and then decline and die. The cultures were external to each other, neither influencing nor inheriting; in fact, they could not understand each other and their relations consisted of deliberate misunderstanding. So, of course, their succession had no cumulative sense, no meaning. This, then, was not a philosophy of history so much as a science of civilizations; not a positive science, though, because its method was intuition, feeling, and analogy.

Northrop Frye said that every single element of this construction ("one of the world's great Romantic poems") has been utterly refuted a dozen times, and yet that its leading ideas are "as much part of our mental outlook today as the electron or the dinosaur, and in that sense we are all Spenglerians." We can test that proposition by separating out the leading ideas from the profusion of learning, poesy, mysticism, and oracle that is The Decline of the West. They are two: the conviction that the West is doomed and that its sun is already setting; and the assertion that culture comes in totalities, monads that are not connected by any bridges that could escape cultural relativism.

Prophet of Doom

The doomsaying was what most readers got out of the book. Said Charles and Mary Beard, in The American Spirit (1942),

Whatever meaning the arbitrary and fanciful divisions into epochs may have carried in the author's brain, Spengler's judgment of history certainly conveyed to American readers the notion that...