The Decline of the West

Spengler’s main work, “The Decline of the West,” is one of the few books that retains the stubborn ability to spark unceasing debate and deep reflection. Within his concept of a particular life cycle of any culture, the author spoke—according to his view—of the inevitable dehumanization of European culture, the growing dominance of technicism that transforms it into a civilization that replaces creativity and development with sterility and rigidity. The book was enormously popular with the general public, yet the scholarly world greeted it, so to speak, “with open hostility”: historians rejected Spengler’s method and constantly accused him of distorting facts.

In the early 1920s, these books literally shocked world public opinion with their unconventional view of the patterns of humankind’s historical development, because the author denied not only the established concept of linear progress, but also Darwin’s evolutionary theory. According to Spengler, there is no single universal human culture and there cannot be one; the development of humankind takes place within local cultures, of which he identifies eight, plus the emerging Russian-Siberian culture. Spengler’s work has by no means lost its relevance, because the mentioned concepts still dominate the world.