Oswald Spengler
Overview
Oswald Manuel Arnold Gottfried Spengler (29 May 1880 – 8 May 1936) was a German
Germans
The Germans are a Germanic ethnic group native to Central Europe. The English term Germans has referred to the German-speaking population of the Holy Roman Empire since the Late Middle Ages....

 historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...

 and philosopher whose interests also included mathematics
Mathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...

, science
Science
Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...

, and art
Art
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....

. He is best known for his book The Decline of the West
The Decline of the West
The Decline of the West , or The Downfall of the Occident, is a two-volume work by Oswald Spengler, the first volume of which was published in the summer of 1918...

(Der Untergang des Abendlandes), published in 1918, which puts forth a cyclical theory
Spengler's civilization model
Oswald Spengler's civilization model appears as three tables, each in a three-page long folded sheet, inserted between pages 68 and 69 of the first volume of his Der Untergang des Abendlandes, in the definitive edition published under the author's care by C. H. Beck in Munich, in 1931...

 of the rise and decline of civilization
Civilization
Civilization is a sometimes controversial term that has been used in several related ways. Primarily, the term has been used to refer to the material and instrumental side of human cultures that are complex in terms of technology, science, and division of labor. Such civilizations are generally...

s. In 1920 Spengler produced Prussiandom and Socialism
Preussentum und Sozialismus
Preußentum und Sozialismus is a book by Oswald Spengler published in 1919 that addressed the connection of the Prussian character with socialism....

(Preußentum und Sozialismus), which argued for an organic, nationalist version of socialism and authoritarianism.
Quotations

There is no proletariat|proletarian, not even a Communism|Communist movement, that has not operated in the interests of money, and for the time being permitted by money – and that without the idealists among its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.

The Decline of the West

One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be — though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain — because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone.

1918, also in The Decline of the West

Long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city|city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country.

The Decline of the West

Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism.

The Hour of Decision, 1933

Marxism is the capitalism of the working class.

Prussianism and Socialism, 1920

This is our purpose: to make as meaningful as possible this life that has been bestowed upon us; to live in such a way that we may be proud of ourselves; to act in such a way that some part of us lives on.

quoted in "Wisdom from World Religions: Pathways Toward Heaven on Earth" - Page 110 by John Templeton, John Marks Templeton - Religion - 2002

 
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