Oswald Spengler

Oswald Spengler 1880–1936 was a German historian whose Der Untergang des Abendlandes,"" (translated as Decline of the West) (1918-22) was a very influential study of the cyclical nature of western civilization that strengthened the pessimism of the 1920s. He argued that that every culture passes a life cycle from youth through maturity and old age to death. Western civlization has now entered the period of inevitable decline. Spengler's refusal to support Nazi theories of racial superiority led to his ostracism after the Nazis came to power in 1933.

His many striking aphorisms include:

• In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman.[ The Decline of the West, vol. 1, ch. 1, sct. 12]
• It is the Late city that first defies the land, contradicts Nature in the lines of its silhouette, denies all Nature. It wants to be something different from and higher than Nature. These high-pitched gables, these Baroque cupolas, spires, and pinnacles, neither are, nor desire to be, related with anything in Nature. And then begins the gigantic megalopolis, the city-as-world, which suffers nothing beside itself and sets about annihilating the country picture. (The Decline of the West, vol. 2, ch. 4, sect. 3)
• Long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country. [The Decline of the West, vol. 2, ch. 4, sct. 5 ]

Bibliograph

• Hughes, H. Stuart. "Oswald Spengler (1952).
• Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West (1918-22) vol 1 online; vol 2 online