Oswald Spengler

Oswald Spengler was the German historian-philosopher whose two-volume The Decline of the West — published in 1918 as the guns of the First World War fell silent — became the most controversial and widely read work of cultural philosophy in the twentieth century. Spengler argued that civilisations are not progressive but cyclical: each is a living organism that passes through birth, growth, and inevitable decline.

Drawing on Goethe's morphology, Spengler identified eight major world cultures — each with its own distinctive "soul" expressed in its art, mathematics, science, and politics. He rejected the Enlightenment idea of a single universal history and argued that each culture's truths are incommensurable with others. Though widely dismissed by academic historians, his influence on conservative thought, cultural criticism, and twentieth-century political imagination was enormous and is difficult to overstate.