Prophet of Decline: Spengler on World History and Politics

Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) is best known for The Decline of the West, in which he propounded his pathbreaking philosophy of world history and penetrating diagnosis of the crisis of modernity. The monumental work launched a seminal attack on the idea of progress and supplanted the outmoded Eurocentric understanding of history. His provocative pessimism seems to be confirmed in retrospect by the twentieth-century horrors of economic depression, totalitarianism, genocide, the dawn of the nuclear age, and the emerging global environmental crisis. In Prophet of Decline, John Farrenkopf takes advantage of the perspective the new millennium provides to reassess this visionary thinker and his challenging ideas on history, politics, and modern civilization. Farrenkopf’s assessment ranges widely, covering Spengler’s ideas on democracy, capitalism, science and technology, cities, Western art, social change, and human exploitation of the environment. He also illuminates the implications of Spengler’s thought for contemplating from a fresh viewpoint the future of the United States, the leading power of the West. Farrenkopf proves that the conventional picture of Spengler as a consistently antidemocratic thinker is not only simplistic, but erroneous. Drawing upon Spengler’s private papers, he advances a bold new interpretation of the evolution of Spengler’s political thought, uncovering an early phase, in the years before Germany’s traumatic defeat in World War I during which Spengler was a conservative advocate of the quasi-democratization of the Second Reich. He examines Spengler’s relationship to German historicism, his place in the German traditions of cultural pessimism and Realpolitik, and his critical stance toward Nazism. Farrenkopf traces Spengler’s intellectual evolution through a chronological analysis of his works, demonstrating how he substantially revised his historical philosophy. The unending continuum of alternately rising and receding cultures he outlined in The Decline of the West was transformed in his twilight years into an arresting vision of world history as a line of development that soars upward, spiral-like, before culminating in a cataclysmic end to civilization. Prophet of Decline is highly relevant today as many ponder the direction in which humankind and our international community are moving and approach with concern the uncertain future amid globalization, hypercomplexity, and accelerating change. An interdisciplinary book about an interdisciplinary thinker, it is a substantial contribution to the literature of historical philosophy, political science, international relations, and German studies.