Der Untergang des Abendlandes

Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler (1880 - 1936) was a German historian and philosopher of history whose interests included mathematics, science, and art. He is best known for this, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West), first published in 1918 and 1922, covering all of world history. Spengler's civilization model postulates that any civilization is a superorganism with a limited and predictable lifespan. His book was a success among intellectuals worldwide as it predicted the disintegration of European and American civilization after a violent 'age of Caesarism,' arguing by detailed analogies with other civilizations. It deepened the post-World War I pessimism in Europe. German Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer explained that at the end of World War I, Spengler's very title was enough to inflame imaginations: 'At this time many, if not most of us, had realized that something was rotten in the state of our highly prized Western civilization. Spengler's book expressed in a sharp and trenchant way this general uneasiness.' Northrop Frye argued that while every element of Spengler's thesis has been refuted a dozen times, it is 'one of the world's great Romantic poems' and its leading ideas are 'as much part of our mental outlook today as the electron or the dinosaur, and in that sense we are all Spenglerians.'