Decline of the West, Vol 1: Form and Actuality

It must be left to critics to say whether it was Destiny or Incident — using these words in the author’s sense — that Spengler’s “Untergang des Abendlandes” appeared in July, 1918, that is, at the very turning point of the four years’ World War. It was conceived, the author tells us, before 1914 and fully worked out by 1917. So far as he is concerned, then, the impulse to create it arose from a view of our civilization not as the late war left it, but (as he says expressly) as the coming war would find it. But inevitably the public impulse to read it arose in and from post-war conditions, and thus it happened that this severe and difficult philosophy of history found a market that has justified the printing of 90,000 copies. Its very title was so apposite to the moment as to predispose the higher intellectuals to regard it as a work of the moment — the more so as the author was a simple Oberlehrer and unknown to the world of authoritative learning. A well-formatted version based on the Alfred A. Knopf, 1926 edition, translated by Charles Francis Atkinson.