OSWALD SPENGLER

If Eliot recorded Western decline as both victim and spectator, then Spengler, by contrast, documented it as a critic and opponent, his monumental The Decline of the West a savage indictment of Western decadence, as reflected, amongst other things, in the decline of Christian faith and seemingly inexorable rise of materialism. Only Germany, in Spengler's estimation, could save Western Europe from the jaws of a grisly fate at the hands of Marxist barbarism since, true to its great cultural traditions, Germany alone had the strength of will to combat disintegration in the name of cultural idealism.

Doubtless Hitler paid some attention to Spengler's thesis, though he didn't require its guidance to set Germany on such a world-saving path, and it is ironical that, when National Socialism finally came to power, Spengler was less than enthusiastic - indeed, almost hostile in his scepticism.... Although he didn't live long enough to see it full-blown, so to speak, and victorious over half of Europe, including decadent France, with the Soviet Union gravely on the defensive - an outcome that would surely have brought him firmly into the Nazi fold, no longer in any doubt as to its anti-communist bent.

Even more than his above-mentioned magnus opus, The Hour of Decision takes up the challenge of German idealism, going into the causes and curses of city decadence, the evils of Marxism, racial degeneration, European materialism, etc., with a zeal reminiscent of Mein Kampf, and it would be unduly academic to contend that Spengler and National Socialism were completely unconnected, or that books like this didn't have a seminal influence on Germany's fate, an influence scarcely to be expected in the decadent West; though parallel influences, as, for example, in the works of Benedetto Croce and Ortega y Gasset, were of course at large in Italy and Spain.

As to the central thesis of Spengler's principal work, concerning the rise and fall of successive independent civilizations and the distinction within any given civilization between what he calls 'Culture' and 'Civilization' (roughly corresponding to a religious phase and a secular phase), there can be no doubt of its relative truth, which I long ago recognized and subsequently used as a springboard to my own philosophy of history ... before I came to a wider overall evolutionary perspective stretching from alpha to omega.

For a time I revered Spengler almost as much as I had previously revered Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and if his work has never been too popular in the decadent West, it is for the good reason that he told the truth about it and must now endure the neglect, if not obloquy, that a victorious and ongoing decadence entails. Of all great German thinkers, he is the one who most suffers from abridgement, and, unfortunately for him, abridgement of The Decline of the West has long been the rule rather than the exception!