Talk:The Decline of the West

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Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (January 2007)

Did the person who wrote this essay ever read Decline of the West, or did they just get a summary of it in their college coursework?

Despite how they've been labeled, Spengler's views are extraordinarily liberal, by modern standards, and do not vary greatly from multi-culturalist orthodoxy. His book was banned by the Reich and disdained by National Socialism because of its anti-national-socialist and anti-racial worldview.

This kind of article is what makes Wikipedia a joke in all serious intellectual circles ...

My work on Spengler's book is dreadfully incomplete. I approached his book from an international relations POV, and so my summaries present only that side of his writing. I've given short shrift to his racial ideas, and more detailed comparative cultural studies (art, math, etc). Also, I've skipped over the individual characteristics of each Culture Spengler examines, presenting only bits of the general theory. Finally, my reading was too selective for me to lay down his general schema of stages for rise & decline. If anybody has read this book, or taken a class on it, I would very much appreciate your contributions. (Also: I have tried to keep the capitalization that Spengler uses for his concepts of Culture, Civilization, History, etc; I don't know if it should remain, but it's not accidental on my part). —thames 02:36, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Also: the German wikipedia article (see the interwiki link) has a good overview. Anyone who knows German, or who wants to use machine translation could harvest a lot of useful information to improve this article. —thames 04:30, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Sections of the article could definitely do with work, and as such should get the sect-stub template. But the article as a whole is far too massive and comprehensive to be considered a stub article. Grutness|hello? 01:12, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)

  • This article definitely reads like it was written by "anybody [who] taken a class on it", instead of someone who actually has actually read the book. Its terrible -- just plain terrible. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.226.64.200 (talk) 03:26, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Please define these important terms

"The book includes the idea of the Muslims being Magian, Greeks being Apollonian, and the Westerners being Faustian ..."

  • Magian links to Magus, which provides no definition or explanation of the term in a Spenglerian context.
  • Apollonian links to The Birth of Tragedy, with main article on this topic at Apollonian and Dionysian, neither of which provides more than the barest definition or explanation of the term.
  • Faustian links to the disamb page Faustian, which is probably somewhat confusing unless you already have some idea what Spengler is talking about, and which links to Faust, Goethe's Faust, and Faust Part One -- again, none of which are helpful to the newcomer to Spengler's ideas.

We should define these terms in The Decline of the West, and should probably include quick mentions in the other articles: e.g, "In The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler used the term "Magian", meaning ...". -- Writtenonsand 18:06, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

Writtenonsand, you're a 100% correc that these terms need to be properly defined. I have the book, but I'm in the middle of finals and can't get around to it for a while.—Perceval 01:56, 7 May 2007 (UTC)