the decline of the west volume i oswald spengler

National traditions are not of high importance to the urbanite. In London, transient masses extract what they can financially, socially, and sensuously.

The “little Englander” receives particular abuse. He evokes the disdain our “liberal-elite” have for people who do not share their values and sensibility. We can detect a loose analogy between what he describes and the divisions in society today. Spengler's words will resonate with many who know London. From his purview, the West of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was at a stage evident in every culture to have ripened to its limit. Spengler attacks the ‘empty figment’ of one linear history for masking a story of cultures that each have a life cycle where their image, ideas, passion, life, and feeling become before an inevitable death. Spengler died of a heart attack on, in Munich, three weeks before his fifty-sixth birthday. 1918 saw the release of the first volume of The Decline and the second volume came in 1922. Spengler was exempt from military service in World War I due to having a weak heart. When his mother died in 1910, he lived on a modest inheritance as a private scholar. In 1904, three years after his father died, Spengler achieved his PhD at Halle. After excelling in Greek, Mathematics, and the Sciences at school, Spengler attended universities in Munich, Berlin, and Halle. His mother came from a line of ballet dancers. His father worked as a senior postal secretary, and this side of his family were traditionally mining engineers and metallurgical inspectors. Spengler was born in the Duchy of Brunswick in 1880 to Protestant parents.

Spengler suggests a broader view that does not revolve around any particular location or culture. He opposes his contemporaries for their Eurocentric historical approach. In The Decline of the West, (hereafter The Decline ) Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) criticises the historical research of his day and offers an organic and cyclical interpretation of world history that allows us to understand the past and see into the future.

The decline of the west volume i oswald spengler