Talk:Oswald Spengler
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Hello,
thanks to the author for giving us quite a good introduction to the life and ideas of Oswald Spengler.
As for the later influences of his thinking, Samuel Huntingtons "CoC" is indeed a plausible candidate. But what about Francis Fukuyama? His "End of History" may also have drawn in Spengler for inspiration.
I wonder if anybody has ever had the audacity to outrightly ask Huntington or Fukuyama whether they have read Spengler's "Decline of the West" and, if so, whether they themselves feel it had any influence on their thinking?
Burkhardt Brinkmann (Germany)
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Hello Burkhardt. I have read Fukuyama, though not Huntington unfortunately. I don't suppose either would think themselves influenced by Spengler, whom the "academy" dismissed long ago, in English speaking countries at least.
There is a nice paper about Spengler's ideas by a contemporary blogger who I admire, John J.Reilly of New Jersey:
"The World After Modernity"; alternative title "Spengler's Future"
http://www.johnreilly.info/twam.htm
I first read Spengler (in the English translation) about 25 years ago. I used to believe him completely, but lately I have had a few doubts. I will condense my ideas as best I can:-
For Spengler, Western culture began around AD 900 (plus or minus a century or so), as is shown by the table here:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spengler's_civilization_model
This date of AD 900 always seemed odd to me, but it was a long while till I understood why Spengler had chosen it. After all, most would agree, the beginnings of Western culture lay in the invasion of the Western Roman Empire by Germanic tribes in the 5th century AD ("Völkerwanderung"). And in the centuries following, Western institutions took shape, such as the Western monastic orders (Benedictine rule, c. AD 529*), and feudal law, developed under the Frankish Merovingians c. AD 500-800.
- This and other information is from "The Penguin Atlas of World History", 1974, translated from dtv-Atlas zur Weltgeschichte, Hermann Kinder and Werner Hilgemann, 1964.
But -- and here is my point -- Spengler's starting time for Western culture, approximately the two centuries AD 800-1000, was when Western culture began in Germany. It was a sort of package deal: Christianity itself, monasteries, bishoprics, the feudal system and feudal law. These things were adopted by the Germans (the main movers being, I presume, the chiefs of the formerly heathen and barbarian tribes), because of the prestige of Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor; but also, perhaps, because the tribal chiefs saw a better future as feudal barons?
Eventually Charlemagne's line failed and the Germans took emperors of their own (Otto the Great, crowned AD 962).
I am trying to show that Spengler's view was somewhat coloured by his German loyalties. Spengler puts Germany at the centre of Western culture, to the point of dismissing the Italian Renaissance as a mere "pseudomorphism" -- a futile imitation of the forms of a dead culture, the Classical. For Spengler, the peak of Western culture was the Baroque era (perhaps 1650-1750), and especially its great musicians, such as Bach. Now Bach was a very great composer, but I have this question: did he not work in a form (classical music in general) that was, as far as I know, devised entirely in Italy, during this same Renaissance?
Another example: Spengler would have us believe that Kant was the Western Plato, and stood at a similar autumnal summing-up phase of his culture. But I do question whether Kant's influence has been as great as Plato's. How many people, even educated ones, could explain what Kant actually said, and what he had meant to them?
Again: Napoleon is supposed to be the Western Alexander, and to stand at the end of "Culture" and the beginning of "Civilisation". And yet, the political developments surrounding them seem quite opposite: the Macedonians brought the Greek city-states under royal tyranny, whereas the French revolution led to the end of absolutism in Europe.
The legacy of Napoleon as an individual seems less, on the whole, than that of Alexander, but there is one place that Napoleon did thoroughly conquer and remake irrevocably: Germany!
I do admire Spengler, and I think there is something really grand and inspiring in his vision in all its ramifications of artistic perception. (I hope it is clear I also admire German scholarship and culture in general, and I am trying not to be nationalistic).
However: Spengler does not seem a very analytical thinker, lacking self-criticism, and inclined to arbitrary dicta. For instance, he sets out the "group of the higher cultures" (Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian, Chinese; Classical, "Magian", Central American and Western). But if these were the "higher cultures", perhaps there have been others that were less high (the Celtic, for example?) -- but of these Spengler has nothing to say.
I think one has to admit, our Western culture is a more various and multi-stranded affair than Spengler made out. And what is more, I think one could argue for elements of repetition, or new cultural beginnings on substantially the same territory. (This may also be true of China, as it seems hard to believe its whole history since about AD 200 has been mere "fellahdom", though I don't know enough to argue that case in detail. Also the "Magian" (Eastern Christianity plus mediaeval Judaism plus Islam) is very hard to fit into Spengler's time scheme; its universal state (Ottoman Turkey) comes far too late).
If I was going to re-write Spengler (a task completely beyond me) I would separate Western history into two distinct cycles, both different from the one he proposed:
1. Western-Mediaeval
2. Western-Modern
The "spring", "summer" and "autumn" of Western-Mediaeval would be the commonly accepted Early, High and Late Middle Ages (about AD 500-900, 900-1300 and 1300-1500). We live in the deep winter of this culture, its main remaining influence being through religion. To me, Spengler's famous words about the "Second Religiousness"...
at http://www.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/spengler/spengler20.html
...apply better as history -- of Protestantism, especially the hellfire fundamentalist type -- than as prophecy.
But we also live, maybe, in the autumn of Western-Modern, that had its springtime flowering in the "scientific revolution" of the 17th century.
As a final speculation: suppose this Western-Modern culture is only now approaching Spengler's decisive transition (from Culture to Civilisation). In such a transition, the political form -- in our case the nation state -- is dissolved and replaced by formless, contending, multinational dominions, until at last one triumphs and sets up universal empire (but not, I fancy, for hundreds of years yet). Will the more imminent transition take us from "Western" to "Westernism" -- that is, Western culture carried on, after a fashion, but torn from its roots so to speak, and by distinctly non-Western personnel, such as the East Asians?
Patrick Miles, England, November 2005.
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Huntington cites specifically "The Decline of the West" a lot of times throughout "The Clash of Civilizations". Huntington himself wants to avoid the "ptolemaic system" of history, to adopt a cyclical vision of history, along with Vico and Spengler.
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Hello Burkhardt, vielen Dank for your reply.
Vico I believe was quite an influence on Spengler, though not acknowledged by him (either Geyl or Collingwood made this point). "Corso e ricorso", turning and returning, is Vico's famous phrase -- meaning that a culture advances to a certain point, and then retraces its steps. Vico is introduced by Edmund Wilson in "To the Finland Station".
I don't understand what Huntington can mean by the "Ptolemaic system". After all, that is a term which belongs to astronomy, as opposed to history. Spengler's view of history is often characterised as "cyclical". However in my opinion Spengler's theory was not really cyclical. He saw cultures like trees in a forest: each would grow on its own ground, flourish and then die, but it had no regular ancestor or descendant.
Huntington's original "Clash of Civilisations" paper is here
http://courses.washington.edu/siscall/Assigned%20Readings/Huntingtonclashcivs.pdf
Best regards, Patrick Miles, England June 2006
I am quite new to Wikipedia, and wondered how reliable it was, I went to an entry that was relatively obscure in which I was well relatively versed in. The information in this article is not perfect. However, the big ideas are there and there is a debate. I am quite pleased!
- Oswald Spengler is "relatively obscure"? How sad. I haven't read him yet, and admittedly he has several very unpleasant notions, but he was a major force in the twentieth-century. Any encyclopedia worth anything should have an article on him this good or better. Obscure, to my mind, is like Otto Eisenschiml.--T. Anthony 11:23, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
I agree with some of Patrick Miles' points, but I disagree with the idea that Spengler's view of Bach is somehow intellectually inconsistent. Spengler concedes, "With Baroque the leadership in music passes to Italy. But at the same time architecture ceases to be the ruling art and there is formed a group of Faustian special-arts in which oil-painting occupies the central place." To Spengler, Baroque was the true heir to Gothic rather than simply a reaction to it and signifies the triumph of the proudly Faustian over the Faustian pseudo-Classical. Spengler believes this cultural victory had been achieved by Luther, the last great Gothic who "liberated the Faustian personality." The fact that Bach was a Lutheran was not of minor significance, not to the direction of his music and almost certainly not to Spengler. And going back to the point Miles made about about how Spengler's theory seems more like the notion of a civilization as a dying tree than truly "cyclical," (of course, one could say that he sees the next culture as another tree growing out of the decayed compost of that dead tree), he offers more insight on his view of Latin-speaking nations when he writes, "That which flowed into the lands of southern Europe under the diverse names of Goths, Lombards, and Vandals was undoubtedly a race in itself" because races that migrate are shaped by the landscapes they migrate to. He also believes that "Race, in the end, is stronger than languages" and that a race and/or culture transforms the meaning of the languages and systems it inherits. To Spengler, the Italians were a Faustian race with Classical pretentions, which created its own distinctly Faustian version of the Classical style and mindset to counter the Gothic style and mindset. The only way in which they were really a product of Ancient Rome is that the growth of their culture was influenced by the landscape shaped in part by the Roman Civilization, not because they were actually the same people as the Classical Romans. This is precisely why he challenged the notion that the "Medieval West" was distinct from the "Modern West." In this view, Napolean signified the beginning of the real "Modern West" or the transition of the West from "Culture" to "Civilization." As for whether Napolean qualifies as the Faustian Alexander, he was not as brilliant or successful a conquerer as Alexander, but he spilled enough blood to make up for it in terms of historical impact (sort of a bad omen of what the Faustian Caesar would be like). Miles is correct that Decline of the West does not properly explain where the Ottoman Empire fits in, but in the The Hour of Decision Spengler writes that the "Turkish-Mongolian races appeared first as mercenaries and then as masters" of the Magian world just as the Tuetonic peoples did in the Classical world (actually in both cases they were subjegated or enslaved before they were mercenaries, but that fits into the prediction Spengler makes in The Hour of Decision of a coming "Colored World Revolution" against the Faustian world). Now, for the record I have great respect for Italian culture and I am a fan of Vivaldi as well as Bach, but nevertheless I think Spengler makes brilliant polemic arguments about Italy and the Renaissance which call the validity of the "Medieval-Modern" dichtonomy into serious question. So I must strongly disagree with Patrick Miles on that, although I agree that Spengler's vision is so unapologetically biased that it puts many readers off. But post-WWII historians often underrate or denigrate the historical importance of the Germans who would infamously follow the blood-soaked route that they did in the 20th Century, which makes Spengler's brilliant ideas more obscure than they should be but also helps to fufill his dark prophesies. I agree that "our Western culture is a more various and multi-stranded affair than Spengler made out," but his assessment of the West's underrated Germanic roots is brilliant and he was basically correct in predicting that Western culture would soon fall into decline after the age of Western world power ended.Shield2 00:07, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
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[edit] The Hour of Decision was more than "slightly" critical of the Nazis
In it, Spengler writes, "But in speaking of race, it is not intended in the sense in which it is the fashion among anti-Semites in Europe and America to use it today: Darwinistically, materially. Race purity is a grotesque word in view of the fact that for centuries all stocks and species have been mixed, and that warlike - that is, healthy - generations with a future before them have from time immemorialalways welcomed a stranger into the family if he had 'race,' to whatever race it was he belonged. Those who talk too much about race no longer have it in them. What is needed is not a pure race, but a strong one, which has a nation within it." I'd say that's a pretty sharp criticism of Nazi ideology. He also makes many jabs at Hitler and the Nazis that are nor explained outright but fairly obvious. It is true that he was not insulting or blatant about it, but the The Hour of Decision was quite critical of the Nazis from a right-wing perspective.Shield2 06:23, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
[edit] further minor observation
Indeed, and this is just my opinion, but I agree with the above post. Some of the Nazi propaganda has what to many today sounds like a populist conservative slant, particularly the vulgar quasi-populist anti-intellectualism. This does not change the fact that to many right-wing intellectuals in German circa 1930, Hitler looked like a clown or a madman. A reactionary conservative in Germany at that time would be much more interested in restoring the Kaiser and the aristocracy, and with bringing back the good old days of a powerful Catholic Church that had a finger in every pie. To someone with this perspective, and I think Spengler had this point of view, Hitler was at best a phony, at worst a lunatic indistinguisable from the Spartacists and the Bolsheviks.
Yes, many German right-wingers who admired the old German Empire created by Bismarck saw Hitler and the Nazis as unscrupulous and classless thugs. Initially many of them reluctantly supported his rise to power because they felt the Nazis were the lesser of two evils compared to the possible Bolshevik alternative. Spengler fell into that category, but in The Hour of Decision, he questions whether even that is the case. At one point he laments a streak of unrealistic and dangerous idealism that runs deeply in the character of his countrymen, then remarks, "To this petty and essentially German mode of thought belong almost all the political ideals and Utopias that have sprouted from the bog of the Weimar State: the International, Communist, Pacifist, Ultramontane, Federal, 'Aryan' visions of sacrum imperium, Soviet State, or Third Empire, as the case might be." Shield2 07:37, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
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13 Mar 2007 - from P.W.Miles (some later editing)
Hello Shield2. Your replies are brilliant. Thank you, they have given me much to ponder on. As I tried to say before, I am hardly qualified to interpret Spengler, but then, who is?
Here are some responses to your thoughts.
Spengler concedes, "With Baroque the leadership in music passes to Italy. But at the same time architecture ceases to be the ruling art and there is formed a group of Faustian special-arts in which oil-painting occupies the central place." To Spengler, Baroque was the true heir to Gothic rather than simply a reaction to it and signifies the triumph of the proudly Faustian over the Faustian pseudo-Classical. Spengler believes this cultural victory had been achieved by Luther, the last great Gothic who "liberated the Faustian personality.
I am not sure how to reply -- to me Baroque is a sort of twirly-whirly style found in Catholic churches of the 17th century -- Bernini was its great sculptor -- but the name is also attached to the profoundest Western music, such as Bach's. Architecture was a famed art of the Italian renaissance, resulting in St Peter's cathedral in Rome, and Palladio who still has an influence in England. Most important to me is that oil painting had been established, in Italy, long before any events Spengler can be referring to, by masters of the 14th century such as Giotto. Besides painting and perspective, the Italian Renaissance was a ferment of ideas which left us great progress in mathematics (e.g. solutions of the cubic and quartic), double entry bookkeeping, the great forms of classical music, and (a bit later) the physics of Galileo. Spengler's dismissal of it seems simply perverse! That said, your point that the Italians are really Germans (Goths and Lombards) in classical disguise is interesting
..the point Miles made about about how Spengler's theory seems more like the notion of a civilization as a dying tree than truly "cyclical," (of course, one could say that he sees the next culture as another tree growing out of the decayed compost of that dead tree)
I don't think Spengler saw a cyclical succession of any kind, except possibly in pseudomorphic repetitions or reenactments, such as the Chinese dynasties or the Renaissance. I tried to argue that this is too limited, but we must respect the author.
...insight on his view of Latin-speaking nations when he writes, "That which flowed into the lands of southern Europe under the diverse names of Goths, Lombards, and Vandals was undoubtedly a race in itself" because races that migrate are shaped by the landscapes they migrate to.
I have tried to find the quotation online, but I couldn't. It is very interesting whether it is from "Decline of the West" itself, or from one of the later works such as Prussianism and Socialism or The Hour of Decision. In my view Spengler started out as an anti-Darwinist, a sort of cultural Lamarckian. However in his later years, in the 1920s, he was drawn more to German nationalism and stressed ever more the "race" aspect of the German migrations and their consequences.
Decline of the West does not properly explain where the Ottoman Empire fits in, but in the The Hour of Decision Spengler writes that the "Turkish-Mongolian races appeared first as mercenaries and then as masters" of the Magian world just as the Teutonic peoples did in the Classical world (actually in both cases they were subjugated or enslaved before they were mercenaries...
True. But according to Spengler, events after the transition to Civilisation are contingent, depending only on external factors. So one cannot make analogies, at least not predictive ones. (I would like to elaborate and substantiate this but it would take a PhD or two to do it!).
his assessment of the West's underrated Germanic roots is brilliant and he was basically correct in predicting that Western culture would soon fall into decline after the age of Western world power ended
Again, I believe Spengler started as an anti-Darwinian, but ended as German Nationalist. There was some common "German" character of Western culture, e.g. the Anglo-Saxon St Boniface preaching to the the Frisians in their own language, or the setting of Beowulf in Denmark. However as a continuing badge of identity (comparable to the selfconsciousness of the ancient Greeks as Hellenes), Germanness seems to me to have faded out by the eleventh century or so
The Hour of Decision was more than "slightly" critical of the Nazis In it, Spengler writes, "But in speaking of race, it is not intended in the sense in which it is the fashion among anti-Semites in Europe and America to use it today: Darwinistically, materially. Race purity is a grotesque word in view of the fact that for centuries all stocks and species have been mixed, and that warlike - that is, healthy - generations with a future before them have from time immemorialalways welcomed a stranger into the family if he had 'race,' to whatever race it was he belonged. Those who talk too much about race no longer have it in them. What is needed is not a pure race, but a strong one, which has a nation within it." I'd say that's a pretty sharp criticism of Nazi ideology. He also makes many jabs at Hitler and the Nazis that are nor explained outright but fairly obvious. It is true that he was not insulting or blatant about it, but the The Hour of Decision was quite critical of the Nazis from a right-wing perspective
I think I put that quote on Flork, or some such (as myself, Patrick Miles)
I think Spengler had this point of view, Hitler was at best a phony, at worst a lunatic indistinguisable from the Spartacists and the Bolsheviks.
But he was a friend of the "socialist" Nazi, Gregor Strasser. And fulsomely supported the seizure of power: " the national revolution of 1933 was a mighty phenomenon and will remain such in the eyes of the future by reason of the elemental, super-personal force with which it came and the spiritual discipline with which it was carried through" (Hour of Decision, introduction). I still think Spengler's legacy can be rescued from appropriation by the far right, and the anti-Semites, much for the reasons you set out three paragraphs above
German right-wingers who admired the old German Empire created by Bismarck saw Hitler and the Nazis as unscrupulous and classless thugs. Initially many of them reluctantly supported his rise to power because they felt the Nazis were the lesser of two evils compared to the possible Bolshevik alternative... A reactionary conservative in Germany at that time would be much more interested in restoring the Kaiser and the aristocracy, and with bringing back the good old days of a powerful Catholic Church that had a finger in every pie.
The "old German Empire" was new! Even Wilhelm I (its first Kaiser in 1871 or so) objected to being crowned its emperor, having a hereditary if theoretical loyalty to the Hapsburgs. This is well explained in Edward Crankshaw's biography of Bismarck. Regarding the Catholics, Germany (to this day) is about half and half Catholic and Protestant. Bismarck waged the so-called "Kulturkampf" against the Bavarian Catholics and their control of the schools in particular.
Anyway thanks again.
Thank you also Burkhardt for starting the discussion.
PS. I need to get hold of DOTW again, before continuing with this! Will check out for a while
The quote I presented about Italians was from The Decline of the West, not one of his later works. It is true that Spengler did not explicitly voice his German nationalism until after the 1919 armistice and did not become active in politics until after Decline was published, but he was always a Germanophile with a Teutonic view of Western culture. On a personal note, his beloved sister's suicide that same year probably contributed to his increasingly bitter tone. But even before that, he believed that Italians and other Latin-influenced Western Europeans were really Teutons who had inherited, appropriated and remade Classical culture in their own image. That is one of the main themes in Decline, and also how the Faustian Culture remade "Magian" religions in its own image. He did not deny that the Renaissance produced great achievements, but from the standpoint of his cyclical theory it was not the rebirth of Western Civiization but a part of the Faustian Culture of which Gothic marked the birth. You are right about the German Empire, and thanks for pointing that out. By "old German Empire" I meant from the perspective of people like Spengler in the Weimar Era longing for the days of Bismark's Empire. I wasn't the one who wrote the first paragraph about him being a reactionary who distrusted the Nazis, but I agree with it except for the part which associated him with Catholicism. Spengler was not a Catholic reactionary, he was a "Prussianist." And in some ways he was going beyond Bismark, back to Frederick the Great. By American or English standards he would be considered a man of the "far right," but judging him by the standards of his country in his particular time in history, Spengler was merely right of center. He did advocate a national revolution to overthrow the Weimar Republic and establish a right-wing authoritarian government in its place, but what's far right in some places and eras is center right in others. Spengler himself contrasted Germany's authoritarian traditions with England's more libertarian tradtions in Prussianism and Socialism. Even in Prussianism and Socialism what he was advocating was something like enlightened despotism rather than outright tyranny, and at one point he writes that some form of consensus should be implemented "the German way." Also, from a purely philosophical standpoint I don't think his unique anti-Darwinian views on race ever changed from what they were in The Decline of the West, but they took a more hardened nationalistic tone in his later work. He had always mentioned the importance of Germanic migration, but his theory was that a people progressively loses its "strong race" as it advances from Culture to Civilization to Empire and finally into ruin. While he did believe that the Germanic barbarians once had very "strong race" which gave birth to Faustian Culture, he believed this was a thing of the past and that the "colored races" had the advantage of stronger barbarism than the Late Urban Faustians, just as their anscestors had over the Late Urban Romans. His later work is still anti-Darwinian and continues the cyclical theory he laid out in The Decline of the West, but with less observations about cultural achievements and more talk of "colored races." In Decline he did predict an inevitable clash between competing peoples and civilizations following Western Man's shift from Civilization to Caesarism, but he was not as distasteful (by today's standards) about it as he was in his later work. Even as his work took the direction it did he was still capable of remarkable insight, but I think one of the main reasons his reputation suffered is because in such a desperate time his ideas sometimes fell on less delicate ears. By the time he voiced his disillusionment with direction of the nationalist revolution he had once advocated, it was too late. I think that's the main reason many people dislike him and overlook how brilliant he was.
Finally, you are right that he was not one of the rabid anti-Semites who were all too common in his day. He ridiculed their ideas in The Decline of the West and again in The Hour of Decision. Even in the instances where he described Judaism and Western Culture as mutual antagonists or discussed the Jewish influences on Bolshevism, he went out of his way to put these issues in perspective and to be as tasteful as possible so as not to sound like a common Jew-baiter. Shield2 11:00, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
To make another point about his views on Italy and the Renaissance, you may be right that focusing on the Germanic migrations there reeks of the type of Darwinian racialism Spengler claimed to abhor, but for one factor. He believed human history is war history, so to say that Germanic blood was a driving factor in Italian culture would simply mean Germanic ancestry if claimed by most German nationalists of his time, but claimed by Spengler it would be referring more to blood spilled by Germanic peoples (theirs and that of the Romans). He rejected the absurd claims by people like Houston Stewart Chamberlain that the Greeks, Romans, and just about everyone else who contributed to human civilization was of Teutonic descent. But to say that Italian culture was heavily indebted to the wars between the late Romans and the Barbarians is not innaccurate. By Spengler's view of history that is when Italian Renaissance culture would have been "becoming," and by the actual time of the Renaissance it already "had become." Of course his assessment of the Renaissance was clearly biased, but he made some excellent points. I don't even think all Italians would disagree with the notion of Italian culture being a marriage of Roman and Barbarian culture, although they wouldn't be pleased with Spengler's portrayal of the latter as the "man of the house." Shield2 20:32, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Patton source
I removed this from the main article:
- George S. Patton, who prided himself on having studied German culture and philosophy "all my life,"[1] expressed many historical, cultural, and philosophical views which bore an unmistakable resemblence to those of Spengler.[2]
We need to find a source that actually makes the explicit connection between the two.—Perceval 18:12, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
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Patrick Miles 20:39, 21 March 2007 (UTC) Patrick Miles 20:31, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
Hello again Shield2. I said I would stand back for a while but once again, you have come up with intriguing ideas so I owe you a reply. NB I have just got myself registered on Wiki after a slight glitch with this page, I'm still not sure how all of it works. Regardless...
He believed human history is war history... (from your last).
For sure! But the idea is repellent to most history readers and writers of today. This seems a characteristic expression of it, from "Prussianism and Socialism" section 17:
http://home.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/spengler/prussianism.html
World history is the history of states; the history of states is the history of wars... War is the eternal pattern of higher human existence, and countries exist for war’s sake...
An inseparable element of any political pattern is, however, the people that has created this pattern, that bears it in its blood, that alone is capable of embodying it... Each culture and each single people within a culture arranges its affairs and fulfills its destiny according to patterns that are congenital and essentially immutable.
Thus, Spengler recognises "political patterns" -- I think "political forms" would equally translate this -- and argues they are made by war. However I don't think he ever tried to list the actual political forms of the different cultures (correct me if I am wrong). Some obvious (to me) political forms, with the approximate dates of their most flourishing existence, are
Greek city state (to 338 BC, battle of Chaeronea)
Mediaeval feudalism (500 - 1500 AD)
Modern nation state (after 1500 AD)
And who could deny that these forms were fashioned by and for war? What is more, they each were forms for conducting war with other political units of the same kind and belonging to the same culture. Greek city fought Greek city, mediaeval kings and barons fought each other, modern nations (until the twentieth century) spent most of their organised energy warring and preparing for war with other nations.
Spengler in P&S argues for a differentiation of political forms within the Western culture, singling out the Prussian and Spanish monarchies and the English parliamentary form. Biased and absurd as his account of England may seem, the essay as a whole seems a pioneering effort.
The English historian AJP Taylor during the Second World War wrote an equally biased book (from the opposite direction) called "The Course of German History". In this he focuses on the Reich as the German political form since the early days of the Holy Roman Empire.
I am trying to back up something I said in my first piece here
suppose this Western-Modern culture is only now approaching Spengler's decisive transition (from Culture to Civilisation). In such a transition, the political form -- in our case the nation state -- is dissolved and replaced by formless, contending, multinational dominions...
Support (of a kind) is found in P&S
War is the eternal pattern of higher human existence, and countries exist for war’s sake; they are signs of readiness for war. And even if a tired and blood-drained humanity desired to do away with war, like the citizens of the Classical world during its final centuries, like the Indians and Chinese of today, it would merely exchange its role of war-wager for that of the object about and with which others would wage war. Even if a Faustian universal harmony could be attained, masterful types on the order of late Roman, late Chinese, or late Egyptian Caesars would battle each other for this Empire for the possession of it, if its final form were capitalistic; or for the highest rank in it, if it should become socialistic.
Repugnant as Spengler's thought may appear set against present day internationalist efforts and aspirations for world peace and unity, I have a feeling he tells us something of the future.
I suppose the debate is endless. Neither Spengler himself nor any successor seems to have got to grips with all the implications of his ideas. But thank you again for your latest reply.
Yes, Spengler is the antithesis of what he called the "world-improver" type. When you understand his notion of eternal war, his metaphysics make more sense than critics would like to admit. Another misconception is that his "Caesarism" prediction is necessarily a totalitarian dictatorship. In Prussianism and Socialism, he writes, "The Viking has become a free-tradesman; the Teutonic knight is now an administrative official. There can be no reconciliation. Each of these principles is proclaimed by a German people, Faustian men par excellence. Neither can accept a restriction of its will, and neither can be satisfied until the whole world has succumbed to its particular idea. This being the case, war will be waged until one side gains final victory. Is world economy to be worldwide exploitation, or worldwide organization? Are the Caesars of the coming empire to be billionaires or universal administrators?" And note that he also includes Americans as Englishmen in this case. Also, exactly before the section you quote, he writes, "Ideas that have become blood demand blood." From the Spenglerian perspective, the international mess today is proof that internationalism starts wars just as surely as nationalism, a case of old-fashioned war as a result of "world-improvers" who never learn. But if you really want to get into Spengler's mode of thought, the transition to Faustian Caesarism we are seeing today would probably be the "has-become," the result of an idealistic culture bred by the Allied victory in World War II and America's triumph in the Cold War. He also predicted a period of contending states, in which the Faustian states, then the different civilizations would struggle for would domination.Shield2 04:53, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Spengler's civilization model
Hi all. I came across the Spengler's civilization model article while doing some disambiguation work and noted that it really provided no context at all. I wrote a very short blurb of an intro but I was hoping someone here could expand a bit on it, not to mention maybe adding a few citations too. Thanks! —Elipongo (Talk contribs) 17:56, 28 May 2008 (UTC)
