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Shiv Parihar

What We Can Learn from Oswald Spengler

Cultural decay is a problem. Authoritarianism isn’t the answer.


Oswald Spengler in 1930 (Credit: Engelsberg Ideas)


Perhaps no 20th-century thinker has had their reputation decline as precipitously as German academic Oswald Spengler. Spengler’s magnum opus, The Decline of the West, posited a view of history centered on culture and predicted that the civilizations of Europe, then at their apogee in ruling the world, would enter a period of decline. This decline, according to Spengler, would culminate in the demise of their democracies at the hands of demagogues. These demagogues would sacrifice “truth and justice to might and race.” The inevitable outcome of these demagogues, according to Spengler, would be the complete fall of grand civilizations and the reduction of their populace to one “dumb and enduring.” 


Spengler’s view of history likens civilizations to organisms, which are subject to “youth, growth, maturity, and decay.” Rejecting the biological racism popular in his day, Spengler placed culture above all and used the Greco-Roman world and Aztecs as examples of civilizations that reached great peaks before inevitably collapsing under the weight of their own hubris. Indeed, Spengler broke with many of his contemporaries, often in ways that modern critics of his work overlook, such as criticizing elements of European imperialism.


To be clear, Spengler has his shortcomings—his dismissal of liberalism is shortsighted and improper, his historical writings often veer into what can only be classified as the academic equivalent of astrology, and his judgment of cultures was often contextually illiterate. Spengler was, no doubt, a racist by modern measures, endorsing European dominance of world affairs, even if he categorically rejected his era’s notions of racism and eugenics, for which his works were banned by the Nazi government. Spengler today is often dismissed for the role that he and his fellow intellectuals of Germany’s interwar “Conservative Revolution” played, to their chagrin, in setting the nation’s intellectual stage for Nazism. Yet, ignoring Spengler unfairly relegates a momentous thinker to the sidelines. 


One need not subscribe to Spengler’s faith in the demise of civilizational greatness to appreciate his firm rejection of utopian thinking from Hitler’s “thousand year Reich” to the post-revolutionary world envisioned by Marxists—or to recognize the prescience of his predictions today. Spengler was, of course, no liberal, blaming the decline of civilizations on “the parasitical city dweller, traditionless…religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman.” Nonetheless, scattered through his dense works are analyses almost perfectly tailored for a world facing demagogic threats from left and right, and his work received praise from his left-leaning contemporaries such as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. 


Moreover, one can accept Spengler’s view of civilizational decline while rejecting his fatalism about democracy. The British historian Arnold Toynbee recognized Spengler’s fears in his twelve-volume A Study of History, writing that “civilizations die by suicide, not by murder.” Yet, Toynbee rejected Spengler’s revulsion towards liberal democracy and capitalism. Likewise, James Burnham, in his 1964 Suicide of the West, championed both democracy and a Spenglerian social critique, pointing to the loss of social mores and the growing “managerial state” as the culprits for institutional decay. 


The United States Constitution may represent the most thorough synthesis of liberal democracy and pessimism about social decline. A century and a half before Spengler, the framers of the Constitution shared concerns that demagogues would compromise democracy by manipulating public opinion. Indeed, many Founders anticipated or even embraced such proto-Spenglerian concerns directly. John Adams wrote that “democracy never lasts long…it soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.” Yet, like other founders, Adams maintained that democracy was a necessary condition for “true liberty.” Fears of democracy’s survival were allayed by the belief that the republic would be kept in check by the body politic’s civic virtue, which Adams called “the only foundation of republics.” 


To the founders, virtue was a necessary condition for democracy, and they saw moral decline as symptomatic of civilizational decline. Spengler’s diagnosis of the ills of a free society ring true, but we can learn from the Founders’ rejection of anti-democratic prescriptions as a cure far worse than the disease. The authors of the Constitution answered the arguments for autocracy by recognizing that the decline of any civilization is not set in stone. Civilizations survive–and thrive–as long as they safeguard the virtues that sustain liberty.

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