Oswald Spengler

Oswald Spengler (1880 to 1936) was a German polymath whose interests ran across history, philosophy, mathematics, science and art. He is best known for the two-volume The Decline of the West, published in 1918 and 1922 and subtitled a morphology of history. Setting aside the division of the past into ancient, medieval and modern, he compared separate cultures and argued that each one, like a living organism, passes through youth, maturity and decline, ending in a rigid late phase he called civilization. He named Goethe and Nietzsche as the thinkers to whom he owed most. The book was widely discussed and received a mixed academic reception, and Max Weber called him a very ingenious and learned dilettante. Spengler was a German nationalist, a critic of republicanism and a prominent figure of the Weimar Conservative Revolution, yet he rejected the racialism of the Nazis and fell out of favour with their regime.