The Decline of the West: The Complete Edition

All cultures in their beginning are aristocratic, dominated by the heroic estates of the warrior noble and priest. The maturation of a culture is a process of intellectualization, urbanization, social leveling, and the growing domination of money. In this process the creative essence of the culture is progressively lost until the culture, now become shallow, gives way to a soulless megalopolitan "civilization." In the West this transformation occurred in the 19th century. Democracy, behind which hides the dictatorship of money, then opens the path to Caesarism and the dissolution of the culture into total formlessness. Democracy, parliamentarism, egalitarianism, proletarian socialism, pacifism, humanitarianism, and attempts at "world improvement" and social reform, Spengler concluded, were all symptoms of a decadent civilization.

Spengler contended that because most civilizations must pass through a life cycle, not only can the historian reconstruct the past but he can predict “the spiritual forms, duration, rhythm, meaning and product of the still unaccomplished stages of our Western history.” Unlike Arnold Toynbee, who later held that cultures are usually “apparented” to older cultures, Spengler contended that the spirit of a culture can never be transferred to another culture. He believed that the West had already passed through the creative stage of “culture” into that of reflection and material comfort (“civilization” proper, in his terminology) and that the future could only be a period of irreversible decline.

far better to con-

struct an aero-engine than a new theory of apperception that is not wanted.