The Decline of the West

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Brilliantly Entertaining ( Whether Right or Wrong seems Irelevant,) - Rated
This is a brilliant fascinating & rewarding read,enjoyable in the same sort of way as great drunken ranting nights out on the beer. Whether Spengler is right or wrong seems irrelevant,Like most writers he offers an angle from which to view life & history, There are millions of potential angles, every individual will have their own favourites, Spenglers is never dry and reviewers rarely forget to comment on the poetic or nietzschean prose. You could easily reject everything Spengler says and still come away feeling invigorated, You feel always in the presence of a brilliant mind, the language is rarely difficult or convoluted, There are occasional passages that the average reader will feel unqualified to judge or comment on through lack of familiarity with the history - but never to the same extent as reading (labouring through) Toynbee. If Jung had written a 'Psychological Types' for civilisations it might have been something like this. Thoroughly recommended.

Fascinating and thought-provoking - Rated
The Decline of the West is the magnum opus of Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), a German historian and philosopher. In it, Spengler rejects the idea that the future of the West (or indeed of any culture) is an open-ended advance from the primitive past to an ever more glorious and expansive future. Instead, cultures (including the West) experience an almost organic history of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter.

According to Spengler, the West moved out of its Summer period with the dawn of the nineteenth century, and into a Civilization phase. This phase is dominated by mega-cities, and money and atheism come into ascendance. And what lies in the future? Caesarism, and a long period of stagnation in the arts and sciences.

Now, the above summary is inevitably bound to be overly simplistic, even to the point of being misleading. The Decline of the West was originally published as two books, and it is a deep and erudite philosophical look at the history of the world, so any small summary is bound to be insufficient to do it justice.

Having heard this work referenced so many times, I decided to read it for myself. In fact, though it does present a deterministic view of history, it does not propose a West that is about to collapse and be swept into the dustbin of history (as some people want it to). In fact, this is a cogent, penetrating look at history, which certainly seems to accurately predict how the West has developed from the first book's initial publication in 1918.

Now, I must admit that like many scholarly books of the era, this one has a dense, thickly argued text that makes for some very heavy reading indeed. But, if you are willing to devote time to the reading of this book, and more time to digest what it has to say, you will be rewarded with one of the fascinating and thought-provoking look at the modern West. Are we at the End of History, or the end of the West? Read this book and find out.

A flawed gem - Rated
Despite its many and obvious flaws, Decline of the West is still a book to cherish, for the poetry of the prose as much as for the dazzling array of ideas served up here. I would love to be able to give this marvellous work a full five stars but I just do not think that, in full conscience, I could do so. The principal flaw, and the crucial one since it really undermines the whole work, is his over reliance on organic metaphors which lead to the whole work being overdetermined. It is palpably obvious that different civilisations have suffered different fates and though certain parallels can be drawn between them at this level they simply cannot be sustained. There is little room here for the accidental and contingent and the idea that a civilisation should die simply of old age, given that its basic substance, man, is perpetually self regenerating. Also he deals with civilisations with exceptional independence except where there interrelations have been especially disastrous as in Mexico.

The contrast between the modern West and classical antiquity can be highly instructive, Spengler is not the first to see analogies between the Atlantic and the Adriatic, but he takes it too far. One can perhaps see Adolf Hitler as the archetype of Caesarism and the current Pax Americana as the universal state of the Augustan age. Despite these superficial similarities the differences are still innumerable not least that America remains a republic, its incipient plutocracy still falls far short of dictatorship. His equation of Alexander with Napoleon is pure fantasy and where are the Classical equivalents of the Reformation and Renaissance? And ultimately how can a civilisation in such serious decline have been able to the greatest technological, economic and social, if not cultural, achievements in all of human history.

So how does it deserve four stars? Well even if its ultimate conclusions are fallacious many of his incidental observations and expositions are fascinating, especially those dealing with the pre-Islamic Middle East. The complicated yet hugely significant millennium that elapsed between Alexander the Great and Mohammed is so often ignored that to have it dealt with at all is highly refreshing. Spengler's analysis of these developments certainly ring a lot truer then do those of the supposed empiricist, Toynbee. When dealing with the past at all, as most of the book does, Spengler's prose is not only beautiful but sparkles with insight and intellectual verve. It is only when he turns prophet that he begins to lose tack a little, as is always the fate of the futurist.

Decline of the West is more a work of metaphysics then it is of history and if it does not belong directly to the school of German idealism then it is certainly heir to it, I was amazed that Hegel only gets one outside mention though Nietzsche fares considerably better. His principal tool of approach is that of culture which is approached metaphysically as its 'Soul'. The soul of the west is described by the neologism Faustian (Spengler now showing his debt to Goethe and the romantics, all in all this is an extremely German book) and has as its defining feature its emphasis on the infinite. This is contrasted with the souls of various different civilisations that have existed from time to time.

This is a rich approach and Spengler mines it for all its worth unearthing many treasures. This is the main business of the book and so much of it is so wonderful and so originally creative that it quite takes the breath away. His take on the Reformation particularly was quite stunningly perceptive.
For all that it ultimately fails to deliver Decline of the West remains an important text and one that provides the reader with a vastly improved mental framework for assessing the current trajectory of our great civilisation. Spengler does make one wonder as well why the West's post war social and economic achievements have so manifestly not been mirrored in the realm of culture and makes one wonder what the secularisation and extreme atomisation that has resulted from increased commercialisation means for the future of our social advancement. The truth is that a certain version of the west, the old Faustian souls perhaps that found refuge in Gothic Cathedrals, is in fact dying, stifled in a world that it has created but cannot find a place within. We live in a time of immense flux on a truly global scale as we try to refashion a global society, a hypercivilisation, out of the detritus of empire. We live in unparalleled times and what the outcome will be no one can possibly tell. Spengler remains an excellent guide to how we got to where we are and in helping make sense of the post modern culture that surrounds us. I just hope he's wrong about the centuries of impending warfare that's all.

The Philosopher - Rated
To be ignorant of Spengler is to remain ignorant.

Brilliant, moving, timeless, - Rated
The definitive work outlining what the "West" has to look forward to. However, this time, the "rebirth" may not bring forth a high civilization, but a primitive one, living in the aftermath of total warfare.

People living in the West, and particularly America, would do well to read this moving piece of literature. It might help dispell once and for all the casual attitude which assumes that "this" is infinite.