The Decline of the West. Essays on the Morphology of World History. Volume 1. Image and Reality

This is the main work of the German philosopher and historian Oswald Spengler (1880—1936) published between 1918 and 1922. It was not reissued in Russian for a long time, as it was considered to be written under the influence of the purely reactionary ideas of F. Nietzsche. Within the framework of his concept of a certain life cycle of any culture, the author spoke of the inevitable, in his opinion, dehumanization of European culture, of the growing dominance of technicism, «transforming it into civilization» by replacing creativity and development with sterility and ossification...