Twilight in the Catskill, Sanford Robinson Gifford, credit wikipedia
The Spectre of Spengler
David Ashton on Der Untergang des Abendlandes
A death-sentence concentrates the mind wonderfully, to paraphrase a famous Tory lexicographer. People are born, flourish, weaken, and pass away, but so do nations and empires. Although the comparison is metaphorical, the phenomenon is real.
Surely the gradual crumbling of Great Britain from Lord Salisbury’s imperial zenith to Ed Miliband’s imbecile zero is undeniable. It fits into a general Euro-American deterioration, exacerbated by welfare-dependence, industrial unrest and defence-alliance disarray. Consequently, a revival of interest has arisen over questions of historical change, and in its successive commentators, from Plato and Polybius, through Ibn Khaldun and Giambattista Vico, to Paul Kennedy and Paul Cooper.
Overshadowing them all is Oswald Spengler, who died 89 years ago. The historian Niall Ferguson, thinking he was influenced by Wagner (actually Goethe), once asserted that his “turgid” prose was nowadays seldom read. But his giant ghost has again reappeared – to haunt the current geostrategic gloom of international trade turmoil and knife-edge security risks.
Many references to Spengler have lately appeared in print journalism, scholarly monographs, timely podcasts and specialist websites, from Professor David Engels to Professor Stephen R. L. Clark. His early historical studies and family photos have been publicised. The glib dismissal of his magisterial oeuvre as a “gargantuan horror-scope” ceases to amuse in the world he so accurately predicted.
Recent books include a richly researched, indispensable work by the Marxist scholar Dr Ben Lewis on his principled “Prussian” activism and mutual incompatibility with Hitler, who specifically denounced him in a public address on May Day 1935. The Decline & Fall of Civilisations is a considerable survey from the prolific and idiosyncratic “far right” Dr Kerry Bolton, who endorses Spengler’s suggestion of the next major Culture emerging from the Russian landscape. Especially noteworthy is his important place among Dr Neema Parvini’s Prophets of Doom, alongside Gobineau, Carlyle, Brooks Adams, Glubb Pasha, Evola, Sorokin, Toynbee, Turchin and Tainter. Ulrik Rasmussen’s Fall of Western Civilization: The Cycle of Supremacy also deserves close attention
Spengler began life near the Harz mountains and his heart finally failed in Munich when only 55. His masterwork on the downslide of occidental civilisation was conceived before and partly written during the first world war. Its so-called “cyclic” theme was preceded by the Slavophile Nikolai Danilevsky and was echoed, less substantially, by the Anglo-Saxons Flinders Petrie and Correa Moylan Walsh, but it made a dramatic impact and engendered serious debate in his defeated Fatherland.
The sinking-sun imagery powerfully evoked by its “Teutonic Title” was attenuated as Decline of the West in an excellent translation for English-speakers, whose more subdued response, admirably documented by John Carter Wood, in some cases recalls a notorious lordly dismissal of Gibbon’s narrative about the fall of Rome as just another scribbled tome. A contemporary classicist E. H. Goddard nonetheless ably supported its fundamental cross-cultural alignments with corresponding pull-out civilisation timetables.
I first encountered this book in the library of my 430-year-old grammar-school, which no longer exists. Its thick black spine made a welcome contrast to its Left Book Club amber-cover shelf-companions; and its fascinating contents likewise. My adolescent appetite was promptly reinforced by corroborative material in Geoffrey Barraclough’s History in a Changing World, Eric Bentley’s Cult of the Superman, Amaury de Riencourt’s Coming Caesars and Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd.
By an odd coincidence, the late Roger Scruton had a similar schoolboy epiphany, but factual errors restricte this brilliant conservative intellectual’s approval of Spengler’s “grim” prognosis. Given the arduous circumstances of its original composition, and the information then available for revision, however, occasional faults are forgivable; and several disputed aspects have since found defenders.
After initially greeting his magnum opus, the anti-Nazi novelist Thomas Mann afterwards recoiled as if handed a demonic grimoire. The Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg complained that its “morphological view” of destiny denied “race and personality”. Irving Babbitt described the singularly erudite and earnest polymath as a “charlatan of genius”. Martin Heidegger and Wyndham Lewis attacked him more thoughtfully, along with established historians. Aurel Kolnai ridiculed his “harsh Olympic coldness”, whereas Theodor Adorno granted the “destructive soothsayer” a nuanced appreciation.
Nevertheless, the book impressed the poets W. B. Yeats, David Jones and Robinson Jeffers, authors as different as D. H. Lawrence, Whittaker Chambers, Colin Wilson and Camille Paglia, the mythologist Joseph Campbell, the systems-theorist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, and surprisingly even the razor-witted Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Spengler wrote with the eye of an artist and the pen of a poet, producing beautiful passages of keen sensibility, exemplified by his account of infant Christianity:
“Tame and empty all the legends and holy adventures of Mithras, Attis and Osiris must have seemed [compared] to the still recent story of Jesus [whose utterances resembled] those of a child in the midst of an alien, aged, and sick world…. Like a quiet island of bliss was the life of these fishermen and craftsmen by the Lake of Gennesaret, while all around them glittered the Hellenistic towns with their theatres and temples, their refined western society, their Roman cohorts, their Greek philosophy…. The one religion in the history of the world in which the fate of a man of the immediate present has become the emblem and the central point of the whole creation”.
This delicate passage appears within a mammoth text, whose martial attitude elsewhere was ironically condemned by communists as brutal advocacy for the Junker aristocrats they sought to eradicate; “bloody struggle or extinction” (as Marx put it).
Spengler depicted the West as one of eight self-contained Hochkulturen, in addition to the Babylonian, Egyptian, Mesoamerican, Indian, Chinese, Magian, and Classical. Each possesses a distinctive ethos characterised by its cosmology, symbolism and architecture, yet all pass through comparable stages, like the inevitable transition from spring to winter, though without recurrence. We need not discuss pertinent definitions of “civilisation”, as previously covered by Samuel Huntington, Pitirim Sorokin and Naohiko Tonomura, except that Arnold Toynbee responded to the challenge with over 20 “mortal” examples, historians Philip Bagby and Caroll Quigley choosing fewer, and Nicholas Hagger listing 25.
Setting aside Spengler’s own “collective-soul determinism”, complex macro-societies often proceed through almost parallel patterns, such as solely waning average intelligence. The empirical examination of the multiple causes of their growth, decay and collapse is a legitimate and rewarding pursuit.
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto’s “environmental features”, Claire & Bill Russell’s “population cycles”, Jim Penman’s “behaviour biodynamics”, David Hackett Fischer’s “price revolutions”, and Heiner Rindermann’s “cognitive capital”, are among numerous contributions towards a fresh and fruitful development in objective social science, aided by comprehensive data-led websites like Peter Turchin’s valuable Cliodynamica and Seshat.
Several terminal phases have been linked to urban sprawl and congestion, and failing competence and character among the rulers of a largely hedonistic populace. Cluttered with material sewage, the “megalopolis” becomes vulnerable to farmland depletion, infections and addictions, depravity and disability, sectarian discord and organised crime, plus susceptibility to alien invasion. In 1927 the pacifist Aldous Huxley voiced the fear that industrialisation of numerically greater races could put us at their military mercy. By 1951, Shephard Clough expected envious outsiders to eventually attack Europe.
The validity of Spengler’s century-old foresight is easily overlooked precisely because of its present familiarity. The literary critic Northrop Frye said fifty years ago that what had been foretold was happening in detail “all around us”. Does not parliamentary democracy, for instance, operate by deception, bribery and “shameless flattery”, so that “election affairs” become “games staged as popular self-determination” to suit obscured wealthy interests? “People want to think only what they are supposed to think, and this they consider freedom.” Ideological convictions are dissolving into disposable fashions, except for an emergent “second religiousness”, possibly indicated by GenZ’s revival of Bible study, and potentially focused on the Holy City.
Entering the epoch of unheavenly inner-cities and global skyscraper competition, we find, exactly as he said, “primitive instincts” let loose in sexual relations, the “reappearance of the panem et circenses in the form of wage-disputes and football-grounds”, “incomprehension of tradition”, the “extinction of great art” and of “courtesy”, “betting and competitions” for excitement, “alcohol and vegetarianism” as prominent issues, and crucially the “childlessness and ‘race suicide’ of the rootless strata, a phenomenon not peculiar to ourselves but already observed – and of course not remedied – in Imperial Rome and Imperial China”.
The 1939-45 titanic “war of contending states”, which bypassed Spengler’s fateful warning to Germanic nationalists against “biological antisemitism” and a “Napoleonic adventure in Russia”, shifted the “imperium” from Berlin to Washington, thereby disarranging his anticipated sequence for conclusive contests between “blood” and “money”. Caesarism today is manifested not in fascist legions, but in the formlessness of American politics, despite ambiguity over machine-technics, financial-flux and armed-force deployment; Musk rather than Mussolini.
His phrase “the world as spoil” neatly applies to impending rare-earth search and supply-lane safety from the Arctic to the Black Sea, and beyond. The invention of “weapons yet unforeseen” has alarmingly accelerated, with continental territories “staked – India, China, Russia, Islam called out, new technics and tactics played and counter-played”. We can match his futurology against reflections by present-day writers like Thomas Frey, Bruno Macaes and Ian Morris, regarding particularly the tumultuous interactions of Putin, Trump, Xi and “great cosmopolitan foci of power”.
Shortly before his death, Spengler further envisaged a devastatingly concurrent underclass and colour conflict against what is labelled today as “embedded whiteness”; it would make no difference, he explained, if Bolshevism “ceased to dictate”, for “the work goes forward of itself”.
This danger arrived, a mere three decades later, from the US New Left “race, gender, class revolution”, subsequently exported as “critical theory” for a “long march”, or (more accurately) incremental infiltration, through western institutions, culminating, for example, in both DEI regulations and BLM rioting? Paris 1968, Brixton 1981, Madrid 2004 and Munich 2025 are pointers. The Network Contagion Research Institute reports a surge in approval of political violence, mainly among left-wing networkers. Effective protection against foreign-community intrusions and ethnic occupation-zones remains morally paralysed as uncharitable “racism”, despite an unabated mass-exodus of the multi-million “wretched of the earth”, aided by profiteering traffickers, in a “nomad century”.
Number-philosopher Philip J. Davis thought his fellow-mathematician from the Kaiserreich classrooms was correct to discern the advent of “theories of everything” in science, and possibly, in the outcome of mass-media and telecommunications, the control “like that of Faust” of human minds by a self-operating computer-system “wrapping the earth with an endless web of delicate forces, currents and tensions”.
Spengler’s refutation of universally inevitable linear “progress” has anyhow been largely vindicated by the evils of vacuous postmodernism, compulsory multiculturalism and suicidal wokeism.
Was he too imaginatively attached, however, to ancient and classical models to follow through his insight into the heroic exploration, energetic curiosity and infinite striving that typify our exceptional “Faustian” ethos? Maybe our railways will lie ultimately forgotten “as dead as the Roman wall” and monuments “ruined like Memphis”, but the last prolonged turn of the western wheel must entail extensive fulfilment as well as senescent exhaustion.
“Only the future,” observed his admirer Professor John Farrenkopf, “and not Spengler’s innumerable detractors, is in a position to authoritatively answer the question if mankind is nearing in apocalyptic fashion, whether through nuclear Armageddon, the synergistic interaction of international economic collapse and the explosive North-South conflict, or the intensification of the global ecological crisis, the much-discussed end of history.”
Nevertheless, could western science, which has split the atom and spliced the gene, reached the outer planets and penetrated the brain itself, under sagacious guidance, yet modify our caducity with robotics, ecological management and biological enhancement?
Meantime, we should respect the venerable advice of der Weissager to face up to facts, with fortitude and fidelity to our noblest values.
Oswald Spengler, credit Wikipedia
David Ashton is a frequent contributor to QR
Old Spengler got almost all of it right, unfortunately, but failed to expect the resurrection of the sleeping giant China which is undeniably moving towards intentional global and outer-space domination, but then he died in 1936, and recent analysts have also missed or ignored or played down many obvious signs at every conceivable level of geopolitics. What to do, other than succumb to the revenge of the Opium War aka fentanyl over-dosage?
Any thoughts, dear readers, before we surf the telly for the woke tripe or baby-game trash, until the DF5s from Beijing or the RS28s from its Moscow ally explode overhead?
Spengler was not an astrologer, though the well-known astrologer A. T. Mann valued his theory of history and whose horoscope is available online, but you won’t find too many events specifically identified as if he were some fortune-teller. So not only China, but Israel, Vietnam and Mars.
Professor Erich Heller in the 1950s said that Spengler’s prophecies had already come true, the history of the West since 1917 resembling the “work of children filling with lurid colours” a design he had “drawn in outlines” .
The communists’ attack on the “brutality” of Spengler, expressed notably by the ill-fated Bukharin, was certainly ironic in view of the millions they murdered or starved between 1917 and 1936 which was his period of historical commentary. As Lenin said, those who “reproach us for cruelty” have no understanding of elementary Marxism.
A few further points.
Yes, Spengler was gripped by similarities with the decline of the Roman Empire, on which see Nick Holmes, “The Fall of Rome: End of a Superpower” [2023] & Donald Kagan, “Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire” [1962]. Climate impact was a factor.
The state of party-“government” is well illustrated if you “follow the money” in US donations (the best politicians that it can buy), the chicanery in France and Germany to exclude popular patriots, and such titbits as the £2 million given to the Conservative Party by video-game tycoon Jeremy Elliott Jez San (whose father helped to bring immigrants to Britain) who has a £40m mansion in Los Angeles; “dinner with Mrs Badenoch and her husband Hamish, who works in the City” [Mail, April 26, p.22].
As for “embedded whiteness” (a discreet way of referring to the European race that created the European culture), the London Museum has urged staff to make it “genuinely anti-racist” (sic) [Mail, March 29 for the DIE details]. Robert Jenrick MP has broken the taboo by specifically attacking “anti-white racism”. On the larger issue, see Ricardo Duchesne’s “Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age” [2023].
PS. – Nigerian-born Lebanese WEF member Mr Bassim Haidar, who provides micro-loans to poor countries, has pledged £1m “for now” to help Farage who has “all it takes” to become PM and will not have a funding issue “going forward” [Sunday Telegraph, April 27, p.11]. Pipers & tunes?
On the larger issue, Spengler has been criticised, not only for initial inaccuracies some of which he corrected in a final revision, but for conveniently choosing his Cultures to fit the supposed parallels. The criticism has focussed on his separation of the Classical culture from the subsequent European development, the inclusion of Persians and Hebrews into the primarily Arabic “Magian” civilization, and the fudging of his self-contained development “theory” by “pseudo-morphosis”. There is an interesting comment on the latter point online by Simon Sheridan, who brings in Nazi “romanticism” and attempts a “psychoanalysis” of Spengler as an over-compensating weakling. This “biographical” approach is interesting in the case of “slebs” like the irrepressible Mrs Harry Windsor or valuable in explaining politicians like the crippled Joseph Goebbels, but historians and philosophers must be judged according to the value of their written output, not their childhood illnesses, skull shape or testosterone levels.
As well illustrated by books like Ignatius Clarke’s delightfully readable “Pattern of Expectation” [1979], many visionaries extrapolate contemporary phenomena into a future which can be very different (e.g. the giant analog clock and lethal spaceship in the movie “Things to Come”), but from the socio-cultural viewpoint Spengler has come close, even if he used the Roman and other “winters” for guidance.
Whether we shall all go up in smoke by 2030 fortunately was not in his chart.
The work of historians, philosophers and other writers can stimulated by personal traits and affected by experiences, obviously. Arnold Toynbee, for instance, told Ved Mehta that in WW1 he thought the tragic experience of one society, “such as mortal war,” could be similar to that in another chronologically spaced wide apart and make fruitful generalizations about human experience. He then said the whole enterprise had been precarious, written under “tremendous mental pressure”, illness, marital collapse, with mistakes made from tiredness. That still leaves the final product to be evaluated on its own merit
Nietzsche (one of Spengler’s two claimed – or admitted – mentors) said that most philosophers develop their systems from their own personal temperaments. This would not ipso facto invalidate all their individual contributions, not even Nietzsche’s.
A good minor example is the contribution of Neema Parvini whose writing (cited here) seems driven by a desire to challenge the 1945-2025 egalitarian consensus (Spengler’s “ethical socialism”?) by a “elitist” political philosophy (e.g. Pareto, Mosca & Michels who were “intellectuals” as much as Russell, Marcuse, Thomas Piketty, Timothy Morton, Stuart White, and Old Uncle Bong Joon-Ho an’ all).
He also relies more on Turchin than Spengler, but Turchin has revised his own views. The facts of history are always subject to revision from new evidence and fresh assessments, and so are “theories of history”.
Spengler did not claim to be a philosopher: “there is no truth, only facts”.
My lifelong interest in “theories of history” does not commit me to endorse any so labelled, from Hegel or Engels to Herbert Spencer or Ellsworth Huntington, let alone postulate some driving cosmic “life force”. What we are looking at are the changes in macro-societies, the multiple factors in “rise and decline”, similarities and differences. This is a major task for objective comprehensive sociological study.
So far as Spengler is concerned, the main question is whether the supposed parallels tabulated for the civilizations he chose identify and examine are valid and helpful tools in grasping the course of events. The features he discerned in our own situation are quite striking.
The book by the Nazi polemicist Johann Von Leers attacking Spengler with more vehemence than accuracy has now been summarised with chunks of quotation by an Indian sympathiser on an anti-Jewish website. It adds to the exculpation of the single-minded polymath from the smear that he contributed to The Holocaust.
The best way to understand Spengler is to read his own writings, though there are good summaries in e.g. William Dray’s “Perspectives on History”, John Baker’s “Race” & Will Durant’s “Adventures in Genius”. Ben Lewis and the Oswald Spengler Society provide useful bibliographies.
“The Independent” once published a letter where I drew attention to his expectation of electronic mass-media bombarding the “waking-consciousness of whole peoples and continents” with “catchwords, standpoints, scenes, feelings, so that every ego becomes a mere function of a monstrous intellectual Something” (February 15, 1998, online). No comment needed.