The Decline Of The West – Oswald Spengler
Oswald Spengler was a German historian and philosopher best known for The Decline of the West, a book that set out the cyclical theory of the rise and fall of civilizations. He used to be a German patriot and leading competitor of the Weimar Republic, the interwar liberal democracy that predated the Nazis’ 3rd Reich. But Spengler believed the Nazis too narrow-minded for the sort of cultural rebirth that he felt necessary, and soon the disillusionment was returned as the Nazis banned his books.
Born Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler in 1880 to an often conservative petit-bourgeois family, he concentrated his life to a wide-ranging scholarship that encompassed inquiries in humanities and letters as well as mathematics and the sciences. But for all his interests, his life was spent uneventfully as a high school teacher, later living off his modest inheritance while taking odd jobs as a mentor or freelance writer for further revenue.
But because his inheritance was based mostly on overseas investments, the economic sanctions against Germany during World War I forced Spengler to live in real misery. Yet it was the Great War that assisted his book become an overnight sensation as its pessimism reflected the popular mood and helped rationalize the nations defeat and shame as an element of a broader historical process. Interestingly the book also sold very well outside Germany and enabled him enough income to reject an offer to become a philosophy lecturer at the University of Göttingen.
As discussed previously, Spengler was a product of his times and a thorough chauvinist, but he didn’t share the Nazis’ anti-Semitic ideology and found Hitler coarse and crude, even after a personal meeting in 1933. He even went so far as to quarrel in public with leading Nazis theorists of the time, speaking out against their pseudo-scientific concepts on biology and sociology.
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