The Decline of the West (vol. I)

The first volume of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West is a milestone in historiography. It is not a standard history book. Instead, it tries to explain the mechanisms that make different cultures tick. While classical culture had no concept of the past or future and was only fixated on the present, Western culture is focused on the past as memory and the future as unconquered territory.

Like organisms that are born, mature and die, cultures are the blossoming youth while civilizations usher in senility, decay and demise. When a culture becomes a civilization, decadence sets in and the ensuing downward spiral becomes an inevitable whirlwind of self-destruction.

The Faustian West is in terminal decline, desperately trying to revive the dead forms and traditions that animated its Promethean spirit in its exuberant heyday. It is all in vain as the West has become tired of itself and unable to innovate in either the arts or philosophy. The West is on its way to the grave and what will see the light next must be something completely new and not just a corpse reanimated.

See also volume II.