The Decline of the West. Essays on the Morphology of World History

The figure of Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) stands out in the history of German and world thought. Spengler attempted to rethink the widely accepted views on the evolutionary development of humanity by opposing the linear description of history as an endless unstoppable progress. Instead, he proposed the concept of cyclical development, according to which new cultures arise, experience a period of flourishing, and then go through stages of decline and death. Each such cycle lasts about a thousand years, and each culture possesses distinctive characteristics that define the thinking and actions of people. The very title of the work contains a thesis that is substantiated in the book — at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries, according to Spengler, the culture of the Western world had entered a period of decline. The first volume of the book was published in 1918, bringing the author significant fame and sparking heated discussions. This work had a significant impact on sociologists Arnold Joseph Toynbee, Pitirim Sorokin, and José Ortega y Gasset.