Oswald Spengler Reconsidered (1997) - Part 1

Article by Neil McInnes. The National Interest, 1997.

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.