Oswald Spengler

1880-1936 · German · Philosophy of History, Political Realism, Cultural Criticism, Philosophy of Technology

There is no people that remains majestic through the centuries.

By the time Oswald Spengler published The Decline of the West in 1918, he had spent years as a private scholar in Munich — no university post, no patron, living on a small inheritance — convinced that Western thought had missed the fundamental shape of history. Rejected by Berlin's major publishers, the book appeared in Vienna and made him famous overnight.

Topics Oswald Spengler addresses

• the Decline of the West
• comparative morphology of world history
• cyclical theory of high cultures
• the eight high cultures
• Faustian civilization
• Apollonian civilization
• Magian civilization
• the prime symbol
• Culture and Civilization
• pseudomorphosis
• destiny
• the world as history versus the world as nature
• the physiognomic method
• analogical thinking
• the logic of time
• anti-progressivism
• rejection of Eurocentrism
• the Copernican discovery in history
• megalopolis
• plutocracy
• the fourth estate
• Caesarism
• Prussian Socialism
• imperialism

Converse with Oswald Spengler on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Oswald Spengler's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.