The Decline of the West

Oxford University Press, USA, 1991. Paperback. Good. Since its first publication in two volumes between 1918-1923, The Decline o f the West has ranked as one of the most widely read and most talked about books of our time. In all its various editions, it has sold nearly 100,000 copies. A twentieth-century Cassandra, Oswald Spengler thoroughly probed th e origin and "fate" of our civilization, and the result can be (and has bee n) read as a prophesy of the Nazi regime. His challenging views have led to harsh criticism over the years, but the knowledge and eloquence that went into his sweeping study of Western culture have kept The Decline of the Wes t alive. As the face of Germany and Europe as a whole continues to change e ach day, The Decline of the West cannot be ignored. The abridgment, prepared by the German scholar Helmut Werner, with the bles sing of the Spengler estate, consists of selections from the original (tran slated into English by Charles Francis Atkinson) linked by explanatory pass ages which have been put into English by Arthur Helps. H. Stuart Hughes has written a new introduction for this edition. In this engrossing and highly controversial philosophy of history, Spengler describes how we have entered into a centuries-long "world-historical" pha se comparable to late antiquity. Guided by the philosophies of Goethe and N ietzsche, he rejects linear progression, and instead presents a world view based on the cyclical rise and decline of civilizations. He argues that a c ulture blossoms from the soil of a definable landscape and dies when it has exhausted all of its possibilities. Despite Spengler's reputation today as an extreme pessimist, The Decline of the West remai.