Oswald Spengler never came to America. The reclusive German historian did receive an invitation to speak at an American philosophical convention in 1926, soon after his Decline of the West had first appeared in English translation, but Spengler demurred, sensing that the disorienting impressions of the American metropolis would threaten his concentration on his writing. Nor did he accept requests to contribute pieces to American media outlets like The Nation or The New York Times, whose Berlin correspondent solicited an essay on “The Decline and Fall of America.” In any case, Spengler shared the anti-American prejudice of many of his German contemporaries, and it is safe to assume that he would have disparaged us as a rootless “population of trappers on the hunt for the dollar,” as he did in his final published work.
In Germany, Spengler has always been read as a political figure, as the most popular exponent of the interwar current of anti-liberal ideology that eventually became known as “the conservative revolution.” In his works of historical prophecy, Spengler foretold the seizure of political power by authoritarian strongmen, while in his political writings, such as the bombastic Prussianism and Socialism, he was the nation’s loudest advocate of that transition, even if he then became its most daring critic once it took place. His reputation was restored in the Federal Republic as an ambiguous figure in German intellectual history: an unmatched prose stylist whose philosophy of history brought the genre to its conclusion, but whose putsch-happy political essays stoked the flames of National Socialism—a movement that eventually wanted nothing to do with him.
In the United States, by contrast, Spengler was never buried and disinterred as a proto-fascist curiosity. His ideas have retained their freshness here like nowhere else, perhaps because they have never played a destructive role in our public sphere. Just as Spengler’s German reputation began to recede during the Weimar Republic’s years of stability, the 1926/1928 translations of his two-volume magnum opus were greeted with rapturous essay reviews in every leading American newspaper and periodical. Then, over the following decade, as Germany began experimenting with Spengler’s notion of a “German Caesar,” American scholars began to consult Spengler’s historical writings for guidance. In 1938, the cultural critic Lewis Mumford kicked off a series of essays in The New Republic on theoretical masterworks of the century with an encomium of Decline. The same year, Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler recommended a reevaluation of Spengler’s prophecies in his commencement address, and the historian Charles Beard cautiously defended Spengler’s historical predictions in Life magazine.
“His ideas have retained their freshness here like nowhere else.”
Decline was also a touchstone for interwar and midcentury American writers. Spengler’s themes, coinages, and sometimes even his name weave throughout the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, and Henry Miller. His influence on American political theory is likewise enormous, extending from C. L. R. James and Malcolm X to Samuel Huntington and Henry Kissinger, whose 1950 undergraduate study of Spengler is the source of Harvard’s current word limit on senior theses. Bestselling titles like James Burnham’s Suicide of the West and Pat Buchanan’s Death of the West unmistakably draw upon the force of Spengler’s famous slogan. As the literary critic Northrop Frye wrote in the 1970s, “We are all Spenglerians.”
Given the impact of Spengler’s writings on American culture, one should expect to find critical editions of his works in English and significant scholarly interest. However, there are only three monograph-length examinations of Spengler in English, and the majority of Spengler’s essays, letters, and posthumously published works remain unavailable to English-speaking monoglots. Remarkably, no one has undertaken a new translation of Decline over the past hundred years.
Despite all this, it is easy to find affordable copies of Spengler’s major works, for in recent years the market is saturated with facsimiles of the original translations by underground publishers of the dissident right. What is more, a full century after Spengler’s work first appeared in English, consumers now have the strange luxury of choosing between three translations of Prussianism and Socialism—Spengler’s only major work not published in English during his lifetime—with editorial remarks by notable white nationalists, far-right influencers, and affiliates of the Anglophone neo-Nazi underworld. If Decline was long the possession of America’s educated elite in their lamentations of cultural disintegration, Spengler’s newest champions belong to the semiliterate universe of swastika-wielding internet provocateurs who are bewitched by the prospect of an American Caesar. How did this transformation happen, and what does it mean?
The Heraclitean idée maîtresse of Spengler’s philosophy is that cultural systems are in constant motion in their drive from nascence to senescence. What is productive at one stage in this process will be destructive at another, and only what is productive is true. Since, as Spengler argues, the age of a culture’s soul is discernible on its surface, we can apply Spengler’s method to the man himself, tracking the history of “Spengler” as a cultural phenomenon in the Western world in order to determine our present location in the course of world history.
The earliest readers of Spengler, both in Germany and the United States, knew that the author’s contribution to modern thought was not that of a critic of decadence—the word is not in his vocabulary—nor a theorist of authoritarian governance, which goes unmentioned in the widely debated first volume of his work. Instead, he was read as a methodologist of the human sciences, which is how he understood himself. He felt that the interpretive sciences of his time were afflicted by systematizing impulses, borrowed from physics, that failed to grasp culture’s dynamism, or what he called its “morphology,” its organic developmental logic. He wanted to substitute an orientation toward “fate”—the operative term of his philosophy—for the modern preoccupation with mechanistic causality.
This intention is detailed in the first section of the book to reach American readers: a hundred pages of dense introductory material, in a beautiful, now obscure early translation by the poet and critic Kenneth Burke. The following 900 pages of Decline offer a series of demonstrations of the fruit of morphology across scholarly disciplines: mathematics, art history, psychology, natural science, urbanism, political theory, and economics.
A vision subtends these thousand pages of shimmering prose. Spengler sees eight “cultures” (we call them “world civilizations”) that have blossomed and withered away over the past five millennia with the aimlessness of flowers in the field. They “sprouted” in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, India, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Mexico, and Northern Europe; Spengler predicted that a ninth culture might emerge in Russia after the disintegration of our own. Each of these cultures arose from the inchoate stirrings of an ahistorical people under chance conditions before subjecting its living members to one thousand years of maturation: from a springtime of religious wonder through a summer of adolescent rebellion before reaching the pinnacle of its majestic beauty in an autumn of enlightenment that precedes an indefinitely long winter of cancerous intellectuality, sclerotic institutions, and megalopolitan masses. This final phase was what Spengler called “civilization.”
“A vision subtends these thousand pages of shimmering prose.”
These cultures are windowless monads; they each have their own way of looking at the world and do not understand each other. Any semblance of understanding must be understood as a productive misunderstanding (as in the idea of a “renaissance” of ancient culture on the Italian peninsula in the 15th century), or “pseudomorphosis,” a dissimilarity of inner substance masked by a congruence of outer form.
The mutual incomprehensibility of cultures has nothing to do with genetic or “racial” characteristics. Spengler scorned the German obsession with skull shapes and skin pigmentation, which he saw as a systematizing perversion of 19th-century zoology. Anyone with basic human faculties can participate in European-American culture, which Spengler termed “Faustian.” A culture is defined by its “form of intuition,” the manner in which its inhabitants perceive space, and the stylistic differences between the eight great cultures—the religious rites, the political pageantry, the architectural motifs, the pattern-work—can be traced back to subtle dissimilarities of depth perception, not racial predisposition.
Spengler’s pluralism was once the most debated aspect of his philosophy, both in Germany and the United States. He challenged the conventional, linear division of world history into ancient, medieval, and modern with the identification of three discontinuous cultural cycles he called “Apollonian,” “Magian,” and “Faustian.” In this way, he subverted the idea of European cultural superiority along with the assumption that classical and Christian ideals were constitutive of contemporary institutions. A cultural relativist par excellence, Spengler wrote admiringly of the achievements of all of the eight great cultures, with some of his most emotional remarks appearing in his meditations on the annihilation of Mesoamerican culture—“a highly intellectual and distinguished society to which the West could not show one single parallel”—by a “handful of bandits,” the conquistadors. This basic attitude directly influenced the discipline of cultural anthropology in the United States in the 1930s, and when Spengler made his way onto American university syllabi in the following decades, it was as a philosophical counterpart to Ruth Benedict and Edward Sapir.
The tragic dimension of Spengler’s vision received less scholarly support. The long arc of a culture’s development, he argued, is an attempt to subdue the frightening perception of space through the constitution of a formal language. The birth of a culture is indicated by geometrically rudimentary architectural forms—Egyptian pyramids, Doric columns, Romanesque cathedrals—that shoot up from the soil and confront their builders as enigmatic outbursts of a nascent structure of creativity that has not yet learned to codify itself in technique. The history of culture is the conscious manifestation of what was once automatic; the architect, the composer, and the artist arrive on the scene in summer and exercise their mastery over blind drives. Then, in a culture’s autumnal era, its mature adulthood, the impulse to master nature learns to master itself and the formal challenges presented by the particularities of a form of intuition are resolved, facilitating a self-consciously brief reconciliation of man and nature. This moment, he claims, gave rise to the “bright intellectuality, cheerful urbanity, and the sorrow of bidding adieu” that one can find in the vibrant colors of the Periclean Acropolis, the Moorish arabesques of the Umayyad Caliphate, and the oil paintings of Francesco Guardi.
But the mind is restless and will not cease to assert its power over its environment and itself, leading to the terminal phase of “civilization,” which sets in around the ninth century of a culture’s maturation—the French Revolution marks the turning point in the West. At this point, the rootless inhabitants of the burgeoning global cities begin to see their own cultural creations—settled notions of caste, aristocratic social conventions, and relics of religious customs—as problems, at odds with the rational mind in its attempt to find itself at home in the world of forms that it has designed itself. And so, the mind deconstructs these institutions into aggregates of particles. Philosophy becomes materialistic, social theory becomes atomistic and egalitarian, and a corrosive atheism sweeps away what remains of the superhuman forces that once bound individuals together in a community. The senile mind chisels away at its own cultural foundations and inadvertently destroys itself.
With this bewilderment toward culture as an end in itself, men become reluctant to defend their nation at war, suspicious of all forms of arbitrary power, and ultimately susceptible to the reign of the few with blood in their veins—the Caesars who direct the last act of civilization. Caesars are cultivated “men of race,” but they do not have an ennobling effect on the population, who become manipulable particles in their sandbox of experimentation. These urban masses eventually succumb to a “second religiosity”—which in the West will be a tepid Gothic mysticism—that injects meaning into the age of a “second Vikingism” filled with vandals and tyrants who plunder the decaying cities and rape their helpless inhabitants. The grandchildren of a “cultural people” then become what Spengler and his contemporaries called “Fellaheen peoples,” alluding to the post-cultural descendants of the Ancient Egyptians—nomadic peasants subjected to a revolving door of foreign cultural powers until the end of human history.
The descent into utter destitution is still centuries ahead of us in Spengler’s timeline. He was more interested in the phenomena of the “climacterium,” the period of creative enervation and accelerated sterility that he believed would run from 1800 until the end of the twentieth century. The most quotable passages of Spengler’s work dramatize the texture of everyday life in this early phase of Faustian civilization. These passages offered a template for that sardonic tradition of American cultural criticism that runs from the midcentury screeds of Dwight Macdonald to the latest jeremiads of The New Criterion.
The rationalization of a culture is facilitated by the commercial ethos of the city, where impersonal monetary transactions corrode traditional relations of dependency. Building on a German tradition of economic sociology, Spengler associates the growth of the market, which reconfigures qualitative uniqueness as quantitative homogeneity, with the supremacy of the understanding, which subsumes sensuous particularity under an abstract concept. Civilization is thus the progressive elimination of particularity in urban life, relationships, art, and politics by a “meatless and gaunt” intellectuality born of money. The logic of the medieval city, oriented around the church, is replaced by “the chessboard form, the symbol of soullessness”; the diversity of languages and dialects is superseded by “homeless, rootless languages” spoken by merchants for the sake of global trade; the public sphere is dominated by “intellectual nomads,” “bookmen who believe that they can replace reality with logic, the power of facts with abstract justice,” or better, “men with heads full of disputatiousness and revenge for their wasted lives.”
After the formal problems of aesthetics are resolved in the last decades of culture, commercial art triumphs. Sometimes it arouses the senses, sometimes it is merely decorative, but it is invariably commodified garbage. “We find more intelligence, taste, character, and competence in the general meeting of some joint stock company or among the engineers of the best industrial factories than in the whole of painting and music in modern Europe,” Spengler wrote during the World War I. He described the art of his time as “fake music full of artificial noises produced by a mass of instruments, mendacious painting full of idiotic and exotic advertising gimmicks, fake architecture that ‘invents’ a new style every ten years pulled from the trove of forms of past millennia.” He anticipated the cultural theory of postmodernism: as civilized man loses his sense of historical continuity, his art too is marked by “a collapse into empty, inherited forms,” which at first cannot be dated to the nearest decade, and then even to the nearest century.
“Literature is the dominant expressive medium of early Faustian civilization.”
Literature is the dominant expressive medium of early Faustian civilization, but its function is journalistic: to illuminate and thereby deconstruct the dead weight of tradition. The archetypal character of this “megalopolitan literature” is Henrik Ibsen’s female protagonist. “Instead of children, she has psychic conflicts, and marriage turns into a task in which what matters most is that the partners understand each other.” Men no longer see women as the prospective mother of their children, but as business associates with whom they can resolve their spiritual quandaries. Sexual reproduction transitions from a matter of instinct to a subject of cost-benefit analysis.
Newspapers and journals, which are thoroughly dictated by moneyed interests, celebrate all of this as “progress.” Readers become tools of corporate power, but, in a “satire of intellectual freedom,” individuals do not notice this and mistake their ideological manipulation for the independent formation of ideas. “No animal tamer has his pack more under his power” than the press magnates, Spengler observed. “Unleash the people as a mass of readers and it will storm through streets and throw itself upon any designated target, shouting threats and breaking windows. One nod to the press staff and they will quietly go home.” The age of mass media also brings with it its own epistemology: Truth is “that which one constantly reads and hears,” and so the plurality of truths—which in a parliamentary democracy corresponds with the number of political parties—heightens the skepticism of civilized man, erodes the substance of his ideological commitments, and paves the way for a post-truth epoch of second religiosity.
Spengler did not believe that civilization was all just kitsch, wokeness, girlbosses, and fake news. These sorts of things, he thought, would thrive among the masses for centuries, but would not prevent the rise of men who “turn to technology instead of poetry, the navy instead of painting, politics instead of epistemology.” The Caesars of the Faustian West will arise from the ranks of these disillusioned “men of race” and will seize political power once the depravity of the bicentennial “anarchic intermezzo” called liberalism becomes too intolerable. They will do this not through elections—which are bought by corporations—but with “the primitive methods of bloody violence.”
In an influential work of scholarship on Spengler and his intellectual milieu published in the 1980s, the historian Jeffrey Herf coined the term “reactionary modernism” for this fusion of authoritarianism with technological enthusiasm in Weimar Germany. But Spengler was unusual even among the conservative revolutionaries of his time. His politics must be understood as a singular hybrid of learned historical prediction, chauvinistic arrogance, and wishful thinking.
On the one hand, Spengler was an exponent of the cyclical theory of history developed by the ancients and then rehabilitated by a subterranean current of modern thinkers. This tradition identifies a movement from peaceable savagery through a period of culture that degrades, via its own immanent logic, into what the Neapolitan polymath Giambattista Vico called the “barbarism of reflection.” Although this conforms with Spengler’s basic vision, he did not want to be read as a pessimist. He was strangely excited about Faustian civilization’s impending decline, and about its telecommunications, high-speed railways, skyscrapers, and militaries. In an essay written while he was at work on the second volume of Decline, he suggested that “The Completion of the West” might be a better title. This sense of historical optimism is colored by an eschatological conception of “universal history,” which sees the arc of human development as a linear progression from blood dependencies and conflict to an ultimate realm of self-conscious freedom—call it absolute spirit, communism, or civilization.
Around the beginning of World War I, a number of academics and journalists called it “socialism,” and they embraced it as a distinctly German idea. Refashioning the Hegelian-Marxist philosophy of history, these writers conceived the conflict between England and Germany in world-historical terms as a clash between the anarchic, disintegrative age of parliamentary democracy and its “sublation” in an authoritarian state tinged with German virtues: organization and submission to authority. They thus contrasted the “Ideas of 1914”—Germany’s popular war ideology and historical self-understanding—with the “Ideas of 1789,” the enlightening and liberalizing acid of the French Revolution that was responsible for Zivilization—the word was a slur—and all its discontents. The Ideas of 1914 have little in common with what we ordinarily call socialism today, but they should not be dismissed as wartime propaganda. They built upon a long national tradition of historical thinking, elaborating a communitarian social theory that combines a voluntary subordination to the state with the free cultivation of the individual personality. This was a serious and legitimate alternative to the liberal adulation of free enterprise and involuntary subordination to the marketplace.
Spengler’s “Prussian Socialism” (or “ethical socialism,” as he calls it in Decline) is another name for this. It is a preliminary stage of authoritarianism, a breeding ground for the German Caesars to come. He contrasts it with the “economic socialism” of Marx, which he chastises, not quite convincingly, as an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon, an intensification of capitalism’s individualistic ethos that results in welfare queens instead of honest workers. He wanted his 1919 pamphlet on Prussianism and Socialism to be studied by young conservative socialists who were nostalgic for the Social Democratic Party (SPD) under the leadership of August Bebel and appalled by the embrace of parliamentary democracy among leaders of the November Revolution. This early essay could be retitled “Reflections on the Revolution in Germany.” It is a crotchety indictment of liberal intellectuals drunk on imported Anglo-French philosophies who had squandered Germany’s world-historical mission at the end of the war by supporting a democratic movement that ultimately led to the Weimar Republic.
“Spengler’s political writings urge their readers to take control of their fate.”
Unlike Decline, which withholds evaluative judgments in favor of matter-of-fact narration of a fate that will transpire “with the individual or against him,” Spengler’s political writings urge their readers to take control of their fate and consider the alternatives if they do not. For example, in the second volume of Decline, Spengler describes the conflict between “the leading powers of a dictatorial money economy and the purely political will of the Caesars” as “the final battle between economics and politics in which the latter reconquers its realm.” These are successive phases of world history, and the victory of “blood” over money is the only possibility; money corrodes the soul in such a way that its defense attorneys become helpless against the brute power of Caesars. In Prussianism, by contrast, Spengler suggests that things might turn out otherwise. “Caesarism is our fate,” he writes, “just as much as it was the fate of the Romans, the Chinese, and every other mature civilization. But billionaires or generals, bankers or bureaucrats of the highest order—that is the eternal question.” Considering that Spengler elsewhere defines Caesarism as “the triumph of the politics of violence over money,” his few passing references to “billionaire Caesarism” are difficult to comprehend. If they are not just intended to arouse fear of Anglo-American hegemony in readers, then they refer to an internally contradictory formation.
After the Cold War, American readers of Decline—who were now no longer literary critics but journalists and international relations realists—read Spengler through the lens of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis. They argued that Spengler did not realize or else underestimated the possibility that his Caesarist epoch could turn out to be a liberal-democratic imperium of billionaires and bankers. This is the marquee claim of John Farrenkopf’s Prophet of Decline (2001)—the best work of Spengler scholarship available in English—and has been echoed by journalists like Robert Merry, onetime editor of The National Interest. “Oswald Spengler’s vision of global history and of the West’s fate generates little resonance in today’s world except insofar as it is updated to account for the rise of America in the era that began in 1945,” Merry writes. “He refused to accept that America could thwart his country’s rise as the West’s last nation and global hegemon.” Readers like Merry and Farrenkopf felt the need to “revise” Spengler such that Caesarism is compatible with a neoliberal globalism spearheaded by the United States. That is very far from Spengler’s idea.
A century after the first English translation of Decline, Spengler’s outline of Caesarism as a revolt against a global monetary regime by conservative martyrs of Western culture is coming into focus, while notions of a liberal-democratic end of history strike us as myopic fantasies of the 1990s. This is especially intriguing when one considers that Spengler imagined Caesarism as a twenty-first century phenomenon. He finally addresses us from his grave. Do we hear him?
A decade ago, it would have been difficult to find a hard copy of any of Spengler’s works in English outside of college-town bookstores that buy up the estates of dead professors. Today, readers have options. One can purchase a facsimile of the original English edition of Decline (which is now in the public domain) from Arktos, the premier publisher of the European New Right; Legend Books, whose catalog consists of Spengler’s translated writings and several pieces of “non-woke conservative children’s literature”; and Rogue Scholar Press, which is run by a social media troll who asserts, among other things, that “every sane German is praying for the second coming of Adolf Hitler.” Prussianism is available with Legend Books in a new translation by Arktos editor Constantin von Hoffmeister; Imperium Press, a publisher perhaps best known for its “Great Men Series” that includes primers on Robert E. Lee, Hernán Cortés, and Attila the Hun; and Black House Publishing, the publishing outlet for the New Zealand-based white nationalist Kerry Bolton, who wrote the introduction to the volume. “For the Right,” Bolton begins his remarks, “one might disagree with Oswald Spengler, but one cannot ignore him. Of course, for the Left and orthodox academia, the simplistic option is to ignore him.” Curiously, the text of Prussianism that follows this introduction is an unattributed theft of a 1968 translation of Spengler undertaken by a German professor at Amherst College.
Most of Spengler’s newest acolytes believe that the international revolt against the neoliberal order is a promising early symptom of Spengler’s vision of Caesarism. Hoffmeister, whose translations have done much to advance the recent American interest in Spengler, imagines Donald Trump—author of The Art of the Deal—as the world-historical hero who will subvert the transactional ethos of modernity with a politics of bloody violence. The cover of Hoffmeister’s 2024 piece of election propaganda, Esoteric Trumpism (an allusion to an occultist movement “Esoteric Hitlerism”), depicts a cartoonish Trump sporting purple-tinted aviator sunglasses and a freshly conditioned, brilliant gold toupee, standing before a sepia-washed reproduction of Thomas Cole’s iconic painting of the sack of Rome. “In the cultural winter of the West,” Hoffmeister writes, “Trump emerges not merely as a political figure, but as a manifestation of the Faustian spirit seeking to rejuvenate the civilization it once propelled to great heights.” His election promises a “resurrection of a nation’s spirit ... setting the stage for a potential rebirth.”
But there is no rejuvenation, resurrection, or rebirth in Decline; nothing can be made great again. The lesson of Spengler’s philosophy of history is that “we must reckon with the cold hard facts of a late life.” That is a horrible lesson. No one in his right mind—and Spengler was not in his right mind—would want to live in the two-century epoch that Spengler identified with the rise of Caesarism, which in his definition is marked by the “increasingly primitive character of political forms” and the “inner destruction of nations into a formless population whose consolidation into an empire gradually assumes a primitive and despotic character.” As Spengler saw things, Caesarism accelerates a descent into barbarism that “differs only in inessential details from the events of savage life in the forest.”
“Nothing can be made great again.”
It is the form of the recent revival that is worth examining, not the editorial remarks by white nationalists who have figured out how to make a buck off Spengler’s reputation. Any chronically online, illiterate shitposter can circulate Spengler memes and declare himself a Caesarist—and there is a community of young men out there who do such things—just as any elite college student can describe himself as a police abolitionist. Words can be distracting. A Spenglerian interpretation of contemporary culture would reveal these self-ascriptions as compensatory gestures by masses who cannot accept their own historical inconsequentiality. It would recognize the proliferation of hard copies of Decline of the West and AI-generated (or plundered) translations of Prussianism as cheap consumer trash—artifacts to be filed next to Che Guevara t-shirts and the recent music of Kanye West in the encyclopedia of Faustian political kitsch. Spengler would not have even bothered to distinguish between these left- and right-coded popular cultural memes. He would have seen these competing vernaculars as two ugly masks shrouding the selfsame vacant soul, just as he dismissed both the pacifist preachers and the antisemitic right of his time under the single heading of journalism-poisoned vulgar masses. If Caesarism, as Spengler outlined it, ever comes to pass, it will be because someone finds the culture of memes and clickbait spiritually poisonous and unbearable.
It is hard to imagine that this will ever happen. Spengler’s conception of the coming Caesar combines traits that are rarely found in any one individual in the modern world. He is supposed to be conscientious and noble, a man of raw instincts, allergic to logical abstractions, but also misanthropic, averse to natural law, megalomaniacal, inhumane, ruthless. He will somehow carry the torch of civilization and erect the last monuments of the Faustian West while exercising total dominion over a global population to which he is indifferent. Most importantly, he should have a dose of barbaric sensuousness coursing through his veins, connecting him to the wild origins of culture and predisposing him to be repulsed by the sophisticated stupidity of civilized life.
That is one reason why Spengler assumed that our Caesar would come from Germany, a nation that once saw its belated association with modern industrial society and lack of experience in democratic forms as virtues. But that Germany no longer exists. Who today possesses instincts that have not been sapped by civilization’s enervating logic? Perhaps no one. In any event, this does not preclude the possibility that we will find another way back to savage life in the forest.