Oswald Spengler on why political orders decay

Vienna, 1918: the book that arrived before the defeat

Der Untergang des Abendlandes appeared in Vienna in 1918, published by Braumüller, while German armies were still standing on French soil. The armistice came on 11 November. By the end of that winter the Kaiser was in the Netherlands, and a book announcing the exhaustion of the West looked less like a prophecy than like a receipt. Spengler had the luck of arriving early: volume one, Gestalt und Wirklichkeit (Form and Actuality), was in the shops before the defeat it seemed to explain.

By 1922 the republic was three years old and the mark was sliding. The second volume, Welthistorische Perspektiven (Perspectives of World History), came from C. H. Beck in Munich that year. In between he published Preussentum und Sozialismus (1919), a pamphlet arguing that socialism is Prussian discipline and that parliaments are an English import. He was born on 29 May 1880. He never held a university chair, and the book is written at professors instead of for them, which is part of why it sold and part of why it was taken apart.

"Cultures are organisms, and world-history is their collective biography." Oswald Spengler, 1918

Cultures as organisms, and eight of them

The move Spengler calls Copernican is the demolition of a shelf. Ancient, medieval, modern: he treats that scheme as a provincial habit, a way of arranging world history around the recent doings of western Europe. In its place he puts eight or so high Cultures (Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian, Chinese, Classical, Magian or Arabian, Mexican, Western), each with its own beginning, maturity and death, none of them a stage on the road to any other. "Cultures are organisms, and world-history is their collective biography," he writes in the first volume. Each gets roughly a thousand years.

What holds a Culture together is an Ursymbol, a prime symbol: one intuition of space that turns up in everything the Culture makes. The Classical or Apollinian soul takes the bounded body as real. You can see it in the free-standing nude, in Euclid's geometry of measurable magnitudes, in a mathematics with no use for infinity, in a politics that cannot see past the city wall. The Faustian soul of the West takes infinite space: the Gothic vault, the calculus of limits, deep perspective, the long-range gun, double-entry bookkeeping, the urge to plant a flag on anything unreachable. The Magian soul of the Arabian world takes the cavern, a world roofed over by a settled fate. In each case the symbol comes first and everything the Culture builds follows from it.

Two words carry the argument. Kultur is the living phase, in which the symbol keeps producing new form. Zivilisation is what follows: the same body, still working, no longer inventing. Spengler's formulation is flat. "Every Culture has its own Civilization," he writes in the first volume, and he means the end state, the destiny, with no prize attached. Rome is his standard case, an engineering people who inherited a Greek soul and built roads, law, water supply, and nothing the Athens of 440 BC would have called art.

The mechanism: country, city, world-city, fellaheen

Take the organic talk out and a sequence remains that you can hold against a case. The countryside builds the form. The form ripens in a few cities, those cities become Weltstädte, world-cities, which drain the provinces of people and meaning, and the population of the world-city loses its hold on soil, dialect and inherited belief. Spengler's name for what is left at the end is fellaheen, the Arabic word for Egyptian peasants, used here for people who go on living after their history has stopped. "In place of a world, there is a city," he writes in the second volume. Everything else follows from the address.

Four markers make the diagnosis usable. Form: is the art generating new grammar, or recombining old grammar with better technique? Money: is politics conducted through capital and the press instead of through inherited standing? Thought: has philosophy swapped metaphysics for ethics, scepticism and practical advice? Numbers: is the world-city reproducing itself? Spengler holds that a late population stops wanting children. The childless city marriage, in his account, is a symptom and not a preference. He puts the West's winter at about 1800.

The last stage is political, and it's what made his name portable. Caesarism is his term for the point at which constitutional forms stay in place and stop doing any work. Elections, chambers, newspapers, all still running, all of them instruments in the hands of whoever holds the money and then of whoever holds the troops. Rome went on electing consuls under Augustus. After that comes a second religiousness, belief returning among people too tired to make a new belief, which he separates sharply from the first religion of a Culture's spring. No barbarian is required. That is the interesting part of the model, and the reason it keeps surfacing in arguments about why civilisations fall: the clock runs from the inside, and the invaders arrive at a house already empty.

Where it breaks: Neurath, Musil and the trouble with analogy

Otto Neurath got in early. His Anti-Spengler, published in Munich in 1921, treats the whole performance as metaphysics dressed up as science. By 1922 the counter-literature was big enough that Manfred Schröter could fill a book with replies to it, Der Streit um Spengler. Errors of detail, though, are cheap. A second edition corrects a date and leaves the thesis where it was.

The objection I think is fatal belongs to Robert Musil. His essay of 1921 has a title that does half the work: Geist und Erfahrung: Anmerkungen für Leser, welche dem Untergang des Abendlandes entronnen sind, Mind and Experience: Notes for Readers Who Have Escaped the Decline of the West. Musil's charge is about method. Spengler establishes identity by resemblance, and resemblance is free: take any two things, find an adjective they share, and you have a morphological kinship. Spengler is candid about it. "The means whereby to understand living forms is Analogy," he writes in the first volume. Analogy names a likeness. It supplies no mechanism, which is why the model can't say why the span should be a thousand years instead of four hundred.

Spengler also built himself an escape hatch. When a Culture visibly fails to run to schedule, he reaches for historische Pseudomorphose, historical pseudomorphosis: a young Culture forced to grow inside the hardened forms of an older one. That is his account of Russia after Peter the Great. Ingenious, and unfalsifiable. The counterexample turns into a special case of the rule. Once every anomaly has a name of its own, the theory has stopped taking risks. That is worse than being wrong.

Then there's the politics, which won't file under context. Spengler was a leading figure of what the Weimar right called the Conservative Revolution, anti-democratic by conviction and contemptuous of the republic he lived in. He was no Nazi, and said so at cost. Jahre der Entscheidung (1933) criticised the new regime's racial biology and its economics clearly enough to be understood. The party press went after him that autumn, and after 1934 his name largely disappeared from German public life. His vocabulary carried on without him. Volker Weiß, in Die autoritäre Revolte (2017), tracks how thoroughly the European New Right has made Untergang its founding citation. The English phrase decline of the West now arrives with that freight attached.

What survives once you drop the calendar

Drop the thousand-year clock and something usable is left: the idea that a political order can keep every institution intact and lose the power to generate new form. The clock is the disposable part. That distinction can be argued about with evidence, which Spengler's dating cannot. Britain in 1913 had a parliament, a navy, a legal system and a literature in good working order. Ask whether any of it was producing new political form and the question gets sharp.

Arnold Toynbee took the comparative unit and threw the fate away, filling twelve volumes of A Study of History from 1934 with civilisations that could answer a challenge and sometimes did. Ortega y Gasset picked up the world-city crowd in La rebelión de las masas (1930) and named it the hombre-masa, mass-man, without conceding that anything was foreordained. Both were arguing with Spengler. Neither kept his calendar.

Read the book with Musil's essay beside it. The analogies dazzle for forty pages. Then you notice that each one is doing the work an argument should be doing, and that no fact you could bring to the table would change the verdict. Spengler died on 8 May 1936, three weeks short of fifty-six, with the West's Caesars still, on his own timetable, some way off.