Rating: 
Summary: brilliant...
Review: Spengler wanted the Decline of the West to put to rest all the empty old speculations and be the herald of a new phase of historical criticism and philosophy. Unfortunately, and despite the book's popularity, the Decline of the West has made little impact on academic thought, which remains, at root, as shallow as it was a century ago. Even if the range of interest has widened. The author points out early on that the physicist is able to mentally detach himself from his world as easily as if he did not exist in it. But it occurs to no one that the very same approach is possible (or at least nearly possible) with history. They have their personal and cultural preconceptions to guard, and therefore, today, they obstinately insist on filtering the last 5,000 years of cultural history through the lens of their own socio-political milieu, which they imagine to be on the crest of all past achievement, but which is no such thing. Spengler doesn't just consider history politically, socially, technologically, or in terms of religion, but rather ALL are considered together. Art history and economics have equal relevance to him. So if you're an agenda-oriented type looking for an easy book to subserve your own interests, don't bother with the Decline of the West. And if you ARE an agenda-oriented type and claim to admire this book, then you haven't read it properly.
Rating: 
Summary: A few contrasts & comparisons
Review: Spengler's classic tome about the fate of civilizations was very influential and widely read in his day, and his influence is still being felt today. His ideas are probably the best known in this area, but it's interesting to contrast and compare Spengler's idea with those of two other historians who have had similarly deterministic ideas about the rise and fall of civilizations. Toynbee came up with the idea of "challenge and response." A civilization is confronted with certain challenges and problems during its development. If it succeeds in surmounting them, it grows and becomes more powerful; if it fails, as it must eventually at some point, it's culture declines and ultimately dies off. Similary, John Suart Mill came up with the idea of positive and negative periods in history. It's been 20 years since I read Mill, but the quote where he aptly describes his idea went something like the following. I think I have it more or less correct: "During the positive period, mankind adopts with firm conviction some positive creed, claiming justification for all its actions proceeding from it, and possessing more or less of the truth and adaptation to the needs of humanity; when a period follows of negation and dissolution, wherein mankind loses all its old beliefs, of a general or authoritative character, except the belief that the old ones are false." What I find most interesting about Spenger's book, and about Toynbee's and Mill's theories, is the idea that there must ultimately be some sort of theoretical history that can explain the broad sweep of entire civilizations, that their waning and waxing can be attributed to some regular, lawful process. I am sceptical that this is the case, at least in so far as a general, all-inclusive explanation can be found, although I think there is a good deal of truth in the ideas of all three men. From my reading of history, the conditions and circumstances of each civilization and what ultimately led to its rise and fall, seem special or unique to that particular historical context, and probably wouldn't have worked out the same at a different time and place. Of course, all civilizations must maintain a strong military and economy, otherwise they are simply overrun by their enemies. Providing that, however, it seems to me that it comes down to the fact that there is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come. Great societies--such as those of ancient Egypt, Golden-Age Athens, Early Renaissance Italy, or modern America, are built because people are galvanized by the ideas they embody and by the opportunities they create. The energy, dynamism, and enthusiasm this creates is what makes their rise to power possible and is what makes them great. When this is no longer the case, the formerly great society goes into decline. Of course, such societies are often conquered from without at some point, but they were probably already declining internally for a some time before that happened--as when Rome was sacked twice during the 4th century AD--first by the Ostrogoths and then by the Visogoths. Anyway, just my two cents--and perhaps not so different from what the three above writers themselves have had to say about it.
Rating: 
Summary: Blah Blah Blah
Review: The Customer from Toronto on May 8, 2000 must have swallowed a dictionary. I can't understand one word this guy says - blah blah blah. Why do people think like that let alone write. Dazzle 'em with the B.S. and oh yeah - lets make mere wind sound solid.
Rating:
Summary: describes universal type, and striking insights throughout
Review: The Decline of the West is mainly known for Spengler's striking insights on diverse subjects that are everywhere in the book. It is also enlightening in it's overall metaphor of organic growth and decline of cultures and civilizations (what the book is mainly known for, but not its only virtue). Also he is very enlightening in his ability to describe universal type - within various subjects - and bring many things into perspective... If you already know basic, universal world history to any extent then Spengler's book - more so, I think, than other famous philosophies of history (Augustine's City of God, Hegel's History lectures, etc...) - can hit like a revelation. It's one of those books, though, that many people learn alot from but find it hard to recommend or - if they're famous or have reputations (academic, etc.) to consider - talk about publicly because people get such different things out of it. This is not an acecdote about liberal or conservative, but I remember reading once that Henry Kissinger gave an edition of Decline of the West to Richard Nixon as a gift. As I was saying, because the book has such large stereotypes attached to it neither of those two very public men would want to talk about the book publicly, but it is read - and is a must read to some degree - by most everybody who is really interested in getting an understanding of history...a subject very central to overall understanding of almost everything...
Rating:
Summary: Civilization equals decadence?
Review: The Decline of the West", first published in 1917, is the major contribution of the German Oswald Spengler to Western thought. And what a contribution it was!!! First of all, the work, which this edition is an abridged version, is tainted by accusations of being pro nazi and amiable to fascism in general and to Mussolini in particular , something that tormented the author all trough his reclusive life. But, polemics apart, "The Decline of the West" is a major opus, indeed a masterwork, with a dense text full of a very Spenglerianian terminology and new concepts, which added lustre to the difficult task the translator faced and settled in the best possible way. After reading the first pages, the reader realizes that he is facing the work of a man of genius, of a man endowed with a polymath knowledge and with appetite for solving the puzzles of Western History, which he revisited and intended to set to a new course. His thinker of choice is Goethe, to whom he acknowledges the foundations of his thinking, being Goethe, in Spengler's view, the first and the only one who, despite not being a philosopher in the strict sense of the world, truly understood, via the mechanism of analogies, how the Western world ascended to its present condition and would eventually fall, in the way it happened earlier with the Classic antiquity of Greece & Rome. The myth to be atacked is that Civilization is a step forward in the development of the human race, being Civilization a word that, in Oswald Spengler's view is synonimous with decadence or rather absence of Culture. The idea that the Western world is a development of things happened in classical antiquity is, again in Spengler's views, fallacious, because the Classical Antiquity vanished altogether in the collapse of the Roman Empire and our Western World began circa 1.000 A.D. One of the important tools to be reckoned with is analogies and it is used all the time to illustrate similarities in the rise and fall of earlier cultures and ours, which is to collapse after the exhaustion provoked by the money devotion present in our Western World. As it happened earlier in this final stage, some signs are important to be noticed, being the creation of so-called megopolis, or big cities, one of them, along with the surging of a quasi mythical personnage (Napoleon, Julius Cesar, Alexander, etc...) who was to be welcome by the peoples as a leader. Exactly here lies the intersection with the figures of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. It is up to the reader to judge by his own parameters if this interconnection is only ideal or was something transported into the real life of nazi German or Italian fascism. Without any exageration, I should say that this is the type of book that jump-starts you in many fields of knowledge and, specially of interest, is , in my opinion, the exgese the author does of the Theory of Mathemathics as a way of explaining the different Cultural environments of Ancient Greece, Egypt and Arabian regions. Despite this being an abridged version, I think that the present edition preserved in the best possible way the thinking and polemic points of view of the author.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, moving, timeless,
Review: The definitive work outlining what the "West" has to look forward to. However, this time, the "rebirth" may not bring forth a high civilization, but a primitive one, living in the aftermath of total warfare. People living in the West, and particularly America, would do well to read this moving piece of literature. It might help dispell once and for all the casual attitude which assumes that "this" is infinite.
Rating:
Summary: the only good history book I've ever read
Review: The reader from Albuquerque only reveals his own Faustian tendency of a "will to power" that Spengler detailed when he rejects the notion of a philosophy of history. It is natural, of course, that the premisses and conclusions of this book would be recieved with dismay in a time the emphasizes the individual will, but that's alright. I really don't think the Decline of the West was written with the intention of changing anything. It is a book for a minority who craves real historical understanding. If you think theory like this can jeopardize history, you've missed the key note of the entire work: destiny over causality.
Rating:
Summary: I am hostile to the notion of the philosophy of history.
Review: The whole of Spengler's conception not only implies a philosophy of history, but a philosophy of history gone mad. This conception is based in any case on an utter denial of the quality of will in man on which I myself place supreme emphasis. My own attitude is one of extreme unfriendliness to every possible philosophy of history, whether it be the older type found in a Saint Augustine or a Boussuet, which tends to make man a puppet of God, or the newer type which tends in all its varieties to make man a puppet of nature. The "Downfall of the West" seems to me a fairly complete repertory of the naturalistic fallacies of the nineteenth century; it is steeped throughout in the special brand of fatalism in which these fallacies culminate, and as a result of which the Occident is actually threatened with "downfall". One is justified in dismissing Spengler as a charlatan, even though one is forced to admit a charlatan of genius. The immense sale of this book in this century is a depressing symptom. From: Democracy and Leadership Irving Babbitt-1924
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting contrast with our time
Review: There is no doubt about how Spengler defined the West: In terms of race. Not religion or democracy or capitalism or any other sort of philosophy. On the TV and magazines and such of the 21st century "The West" is variously defined in terms of liberalism, democracy, sexual expression, multi-culturalism, fee-market economics--anything except Spengler's definition. In the early 1920s, before Hitler was heard from and after WW I, Spengler wrote a little article in which he stated his definition of The West, gave an appraisal of its then current health and gave a prescription for its survival. He said in this article that the German defeat in the Great War (WW I of course) was the first great step in the decline of the West via its subordination to the "colored world". Spengler stated that the SINGLE hope for the survival of the West was "The Prussian spirit, not only in Germany but in other countries as well." He went on to say that the "next war" would determine whether the West lived or died. It is, looking back, as if Spengler wrote the history of WW II in advance, with the ending he seems to have expected but not wanted, omitted. It is interesting to ask the degree to which Roosevelt, Churchill and Hitler were aware of themselves playing out roles in Spengler's vision, with hopes of saving or destroying the West as Spengler defined it. It is tempting to think so. British and American war policy, the fire-bombing of Dresden as the best bit of evidence, seems specifically bent upon destroying Spengler's West. It seems, on the other hand, that Hitler's extreme rish-taking was driven by a vision that now was the time to save the West, which would be soon destroyed if not now preserved for the years to come. Spengler's race-based view of decline appears to be the rotting away of the "Transendental Aesthetic" to use Kant's term. The presence of large numbers of non-Europeans in London and Amsterdam today seems to support Spengler's argument in the article I cited, but as an overall theory about the decline of Civilizations Toynbee's "Nemesis of Creativity" (control over creativity being in hands not supportive of the civilization)seems more generally appealing than Spengler's biological model. Perhaps they are both right. Or both wrong.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting contrast with our time
Review: There is no doubt about how Spengler defined the West: In terms of race. Not religion or democracy or capitalism or any other sort of philosophy. On the TV and magazines and such of the 21st century "The West" is variously defined in terms of liberalism, democracy, sexual expression, multi-culturalism, fee-market economics--anything except Spengler's definition. In the early 1920s, before Hitler was heard from and after WW I, Spengler wrote a little article in which he stated his definition of The West, gave an appraisal of its then current health and gave a prescription for its survival. He said in this article that the German defeat in the Great War (WW I of course) was the first great step in the decline of the West via its subordination to the "colored world". Spengler stated that the SINGLE hope for the survival of the West was "The Prussian spirit, not only in Germany but in other countries as well." He went on to say that the "next war" would determine whether the West lived or died. It is, looking back, as if Spengler wrote the history of WW II in advance, with the ending he seems to have expected but not wanted, omitted. It is interesting to ask the degree to which Roosevelt, Churchill and Hitler were aware of themselves playing out roles in Spengler's vision, with hopes of saving or destroying the West as Spengler defined it. It is tempting to think so. British and American war policy, the fire-bombing of Dresden as the best bit of evidence, seems specifically bent upon destroying Spengler's West. It seems, on the other hand, that Hitler's extreme rish-taking was driven by a vision that now was the time to save the West, which would be soon destroyed if not now preserved for the years to come. Spengler's race-based view of decline appears to be the rotting away of the "Transendental Aesthetic" to use Kant's term. The presence of large numbers of non-Europeans in London and Amsterdam today seems to support Spengler's argument in the article I cited, but as an overall theory about the decline of Civilizations Toynbee's "Nemesis of Creativity" (control over creativity being in hands not supportive of the civilization)seems more generally appealing than Spengler's biological model. Perhaps they are both right. Or both wrong.
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