According to Spengler the West would have entered its pre death emergency at the beginning of the 21st century. He predicted that the Western capitalist democracies would become autocracies before their demise. He argued that the "Western civilization", which he essentially defined as the Romano-Germanic Western European sphere excluding the Slavic East of Europe was already in its late phase. According to him, a culture only becomes a civilization in its late phase. His core thesis was that culture-civilizations are like living organisms that go through several phases in their lifespan ending with their death. Oswald Spengler’s 191822 best-seller The Decline of the West mourned the engulfing of Kultur by the cosmopolitan anthill of Zivilisation and argued that only a dictatorship could arrest the decline. Asserting instead that each culture-civilization exists distinctly apart from each other. Spengler, who in many ways was a renegade intellectual of the German right not only rejected a Eurocentrist view of world history but the very concept of a "world history" as such. He draws from Spengler the moral for America that in the present age we must become hard-boiled and imperialistic as a means of self-preservation.Since Western decline is a much discussed topic these days, what do users here think about the predictions of perhaps the most famous predictor of Western decline from a century ago? Dakin has done a useful job of intelligent abridgment. Oswald Spengler The Decline of the West: Perspectives of World-History Hardcover Jby Oswald Spengler (Author) 43 ratings Book 2 of 2: The Decline of the West Kindle 10.99 Read with Our Free App Paperback from 60.05 1 Used from 60. But tor the vast majority even ot the educated classes who will never read Spengler from cover to cover Mr. One misses, ot course, some of the quality of any work if one does not read it through without abridgment. There is therefore a good case tor giving the American public a sort ot topical Spengler, the excerpts from his enormous work which bear most directly and most compellingly on the events and trends that are reflected in today’s headlines. Like Marx, Spengler is difficult reading, with his typically German combination ot erudition and prolixity. It is a more accurate forecast of the main features of the contemporary fascist state than Marx’s Capital is a prediction of what has actually been done in Marx’s name in Russia, although Spengler, unlike Marx, was more interested in interpreting history than in making it. It ranks with Marx’s Capital, with Darwin’s Origin of Species, with Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil.
OSWALD SPENGLER’* Decline of the West belongs in the limited shelf of books that have both anticipated and influenced the trend of human thought, the development of political and economic institutions, the general course of human history.
0 kommentar(er)
