Rating: 
Summary: Groovy
Review: I loved Spengler's last three albums, and this book which reviews his drug-crazed tour through Weimar Germany--wearing nothing but a grass skirt and with the word "Liebchen" painted on his bald head--is entertaining and uproarious. Who knew?
Rating: 
Summary: Technics and Europeanization
Review: If Spengler had given his admirers a clearer idea of what to do near the end, more of us would have given him the five stars, but he did not, so let's add in what he missed: As the twentieth century dawned it became increasingly evident that technology would develop into an extraordinary phenomenon, a new dimension altogether, capable of taking us on to our next stage of evolution or of destroying us culturally or physically.In the 1920s the Italian Futurist art movement founded by Filippo Marinetti represented efforts which avant garde thinkers around the globe were making to adjust to options as they emerged to contradict prevailing trends in a plodding Western civilization. The Futurists declared in revolutionary manifestos their worship of speed, adventure, experiment and change. The movement also carried the seeds of its own destruction, for going to its logical extreme it met resistance as it assailed museums, history, rural values and past artistic achievement. Many of these flamboyant personalities, aware of their failure to set pragmatic goals, sought other outlets for their talents. Mussolini's fascism desired to weld the nation together through great public works programs, and people such as Marinetti helped to bring the Futurist movement into its front ranks. Other national leaders, too, Roosevelt, Hitler, Stalin and Churchill, picked up the song of the technician and produced their own styles for mobilizing their peoples. Reaching the multitudes by radio, still in its embryonic stage of impressionability potential, they all took on a deity-like aura. The promises seems like miracles, but they were delivered in varying degrees according to national character, in the form of spectacular projects for constructing roads, automobiles, planes, airports, ships and docks. All this required a nation working in unison to bring these accomplishments into the lives of those who made them possible. This was a plough-sword situation though; because weapons too had improved and multiplied dramatically, any war declared could reach the worker's family at home. Increased national ability required greater resources, expansion led to collision and so on to World War 2. Those who ignore history are always repeating it. Today the cultural centers from Hollywood to Moscow play the role of the Futurists. In Hollywood it is more obvious. Miles of colored celluloid depict the virtues of speed, adventure, experiment, change and violence. The face of this neo-Futurism we are most familiar with is the narrow capitalist culture which dominates America and Western Europe. Yet America, to a great degree, is still an extension of Europe in a cultural sense, a society in a more advanced state of technical prosperity and cultural displacement; thus less European. America's role in Europe has two effects at least. The positive one is that we are increasing our contact with the Homeland, returning to family members as the early explorers did with treasures from the New World. This comes in the form of expertise developed by access to frontier resources. The other effect is negative. Bringing in a dominant techno-culture, which in Europe is accelerated by its own banks, an even lower level of European consciousness is promoted, and the strength of our heritage is sapped at the root. Additionally, old nationalisms still serve to divide the loyalties of whites worldwide, as do local white ethnic divisions within nations; so both of these loyalties need to be realigned within greater European perspectives as the opportunities arise. Work to spread the news about the extension of our patriotism, for it is the reality of kinship. The growing impulses of European cultural involvement in the United States are the catalyst you must personally use to abash today's obsolete forms of racial nationalism. Thus we must affirm: obsolete Futurism and predatory nationalism must give way to a new synthesis of technology and cultural integrity within a European creed.
Rating:
Summary: Essential reading
Review: Like Arthur Schopenhauer in his WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION, Oswald Spengler, in THE DECLINE OF THE WEST, had one great, bipartite idea: (a) that all civilizations are analogous to biological organisms in the sense that they all go through their births, youths, maturities, old ages and deaths; and that, therefore, (b) the respective characteristics of their various stages may be forseen -- even prophesized. Fair enough. The main discordancy here is, that whereas Schopenhauer's great two-volume opus, to anyone who would take the time to read him, proves him to have been a masterly, if long-winded, literary craftsman, Spengler in his two-volume work is quite frankly a muddled thinker and an inept writer. No, let me take that back. Spengler is an unbelievably TERRIBLE WRITER, incapable of making the slightest point without a lengthy digression, which almost always is thrown in to show off his (undeniable) erudition, but which, unfortunately, usually proves nothing whatsoever except what a boring and pedantic fool he was. To be blunt, DECLINE OF THE WEST is a work which, though historically important, is, at the end of the day, pretty much tedious, laughable and repetitive, repetitive, repetitive, repetitive. So, if you happen to be one of those people hell-bent on trudging through this unbelievably amateurish tome, I would wholeheartedly suggest that you look into a deft abridgement. Otherwise, I would sincerely hope, for your sake, that you have a better way of spending your time.
Rating: 
Summary: Amateurish and Unreadable
Review: Like Arthur Schopenhauer in his WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION, Oswald Spengler, in THE DECLINE OF THE WEST, had one great, bipartite idea: (a) that all civilizations are analogous to biological organisms in the sense that they all go through their births, youths, maturities, old ages and deaths; and that, therefore, (b) the respective characteristics of their various stages may be forseen -- even prophesized. Fair enough. The main discordancy here is, that whereas Schopenhauer's great two-volume opus, to anyone who would take the time to read him, proves him to have been a masterly, if long-winded, literary craftsman, Spengler in his two-volume work is quite frankly a muddled thinker and an inept writer. No, let me take that back. Spengler is an unbelievably TERRIBLE WRITER, incapable of making the slightest point without a lengthy digression, which almost always is thrown in to show off his (undeniable) erudition, but which, unfortunately, usually proves nothing whatsoever except what a boring and pedantic fool he was. To be blunt, DECLINE OF THE WEST is a work which, though historically important, is, at the end of the day, pretty much tedious, laughable and repetitive, repetitive, repetitive, repetitive. So, if you happen to be one of those people hell-bent on trudging through this unbelievably amateurish tome, I would wholeheartedly suggest that you look into a deft abridgement. Otherwise, I would sincerely hope, for your sake, that you have a better way of spending your time.
Rating:
Summary: All that matters is that Spengler is right
Review: Much has been written about whether Spengler was a good man or a bad man, whether his is a good philosophy or a bad philosophy, all that matters is that his theory of world history is correct. Spengler does not identify a problem and then set forth what people must do to avoid the problem. In fact, the whole point of his theory is that Cultures are born, flourish and die in a predictable pattern. There is no more anything we can do to avoid the 'problem' than there is to increase a man's lifespan to 200 years. One example, which I think has clearly been borne out by current events: in the aftermath of WWI, where armies with troops numbering in the millions were often too small, Spengler predicted that armies of our time would number in the hundreds of thousands, and that these small, war-keen armies were meant to be used. Everything that is happening in the world today, from American response to 9/11, to pornography, to the professionalization of sports, to families not eating dinner together, is elucidated by Spengler's theory. If you want to understand the present, more importantly, if you want to understand the terrible internal problems the US will encounter in the next ten years, then you must understand the Decline of the West. It is a dense, serious, and demanding book. It is not a fun read, but it is necessary. The best analogy is a scene from The Matrix: Morpheus offers Neo two pills. The red pill will reveal the world as it truly is, which very few people actually see. The blue pill will take Neo back where he was, still fooled by the Matrix, oblivious to reality. The Decline of the West is the red pill.
Rating:
Summary: All that matters is that Spengler is right
Review: Much has been written about whether Spengler was a good man or a bad man, whether his is a good philosophy or a bad philosophy, all that matters is that his theory of world history is correct. Spengler does not identify a problem and then set forth what people must do to avoid the problem. In fact, the whole point of his theory is that Cultures are born, flourish and die in a predictable pattern. There is no more anything we can do to avoid the 'problem' than there is to increase a man's lifespan to 200 years. One example, which I think has clearly been borne out by current events: in the aftermath of WWI, where armies with troops numbering in the millions were often too small, Spengler predicted that armies of our time would number in the hundreds of thousands, and that these small, war-keen armies were meant to be used. Everything that is happening in the world today, from American response to 9/11, to pornography, to the professionalization of sports, to families not eating dinner together, is elucidated by Spengler's theory. If you want to understand the present, more importantly, if you want to understand the terrible internal problems the US will encounter in the next ten years, then you must understand the Decline of the West. It is a dense, serious, and demanding book. It is not a fun read, but it is necessary. The best analogy is a scene from The Matrix: Morpheus offers Neo two pills. The red pill will reveal the world as it truly is, which very few people actually see. The blue pill will take Neo back where he was, still fooled by the Matrix, oblivious to reality. The Decline of the West is the red pill.
Rating:
Summary: impressive
Review: No brief phrase will summarize this book or my feelings about it. I simply wanted to rate it. Enjoy this impressive work.
Rating:
Summary: Hypnotic Prose (Written on the Wall?)
Review: Oswald Spengler was a schoolteacher of immense intellect. The book is filled with observations and insights into virtually every known civilization in the sweep of human history. The study and reflection behind the work no doubt contributed to the magisterial tone, confident in the self-evident truths that it conveys.
Spengler codifies the progress and decline of civilizations in search of archtypes and characteristic forms of expression. His classification of civilizational forms, i.e., Magian, Faustian, etc., then is used to show how cultures within each type, at differing stages of development, react to and upon each other.
His discussion of Magian civilization is perhaps the most compelling. He traces its origin to Zoroaster and the apoclyptic Hebrew prophets of the early First Millenium, B.C. The concepts common to all forms of Magian life are discussed: the architectural expression of worship as a "world-cave," seen in the use of the dome and the contrast of light and shadow, illustrate the vivifying force of the battle between Dark and Light, and the coming firey end of the world. This discussion is all the more compelling with the rise of militant Islam, dormant and in retreat before secular modernism when Spengler wrote.
Prophetic statements are rarer than prophetic insights, in that Spengler makes few outright predictions, instead giving trend analysis. The reader may keep turning pages, looking in vain for the elusive prediction of our future, the feeling of which mounts with each vingette illustrating the Law of Civilization and Decay (to borrow Charles Adams' title). Of the few that he finds, one is that, as the first millenium of the Christian era belonged to Peterine cultire ("Faustian" civilization rising) and the second to Pauline/Protestant civilization, the next millenium would bring a flourishing of Johnnine faith, in the Eastern mode.
While Adams and Adam Ferguson said much of this before, this is the better work. If Spengler is right, capital replaces faith, and Caesar follows capital. If the Age of Capital is closing, will the dominant type of the Western future be Caesar?
-Lloyd A. Conway
Rating: 
Summary: the decline of coherence
Review: Part of the problem, for me, is in the rigidity of the thesis, for Spengler maintains that cultures are like other organisms: they are born, flourish, decline, and die--and this is inevitable. Well, where do you go after stating such a premise? He goes into a lengthy first chapter on mathematics, which only by the barest of ideas links up to the development of his thesis. He then takes off in other directions, and soon the reader knows for certain that Spengler was to be taken at his word in the Introduction: he's out to present a philosophy, not a history of civilization. And present it he does, no matter how distant the connections and associations his intuition insists on bringing into the discussion. It's not that they don't connect, but that (per the intuitive's inherent weakness) many only connect in ways that don't really matter and could have been left out of even this, an abridged edition of the original work. The latter part of the book revives the reader who gets that far, but it's a lot of work for the gold one finds there. Perhaps Spengler makes his central point best by the very fragmentation and disconnection so evident in his prose.
Rating:
Summary: the decline of coherence
Review: Part of the problem, for me, is in the rigidity of the thesis, for Spengler maintains that cultures are like other organisms: they are born, flourish, decline, and die--and this is inevitable. Well, where do you go after stating such a premise? He goes into a lengthy first chapter on mathematics, which only by the barest of ideas links up to the development of his thesis. He then takes off in other directions, and soon the reader knows for certain that Spengler was to be taken at his word in the Introduction: he's out to present a philosophy, not a history of civilization. And present it he does, no matter how distant the connections and associations his intuition insists on bringing into the discussion. It's not that they don't connect, but that (per the intuitive's inherent weakness) many only connect in ways that don't really matter and could have been left out of even this, an abridged edition of the original work. The latter part of the book revives the reader who gets that far, but it's a lot of work for the gold one finds there. Perhaps Spengler makes his central point best by the very fragmentation and disconnection so evident in his prose.
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