Word: spengler
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...DECLINE OF THE WEST-Vol. II-Perspectives of World History-Oswald Spengler-Translated from the German by Charles Francis Atkinson-Knopf...
...Wells and Bertrand Russell, seeing everywhere harbingers of Western obsolescence, nevertheless resist this unpleasant evidence with faith in the perpetual constructive force of human will & intellect. Oswald Spengler of Munich scorns such precarious optimism as only another instance of the pathetic pride which Romans, Egyptians and Orientals felt at the height of their refulgence...
...Spengler is historian, mathematician, esthete, economist, political scientist, philosopher. With a curious and powerful alternation of Teutonic intellectual despotism and entranced mysticism, he analyzes history by huge analogies. Civilizations he sees as emerging & disappearing in cycles, each one, like a flower, experiencing birth, growth, decay, death. Our own Western civilization he declares to be in the phase of decay, characterized by material expansion, effete spirituality. Collapse is imminent in perhaps 300 years. But by that time another human group will be unwittingly generating a new civilization to flourish and sink in its own long turn. Herein lies the refutation...
...Oswald Spengler...
...salt of the earth," to the American Bar Association committee on citizenship who quite recently formulated a credo: "I believe that we Americans have the best government that has been created" smug pride of nation still persists, but it is steadily and increasingly challenged by Jeremiads such as Spengler's Decline of the West, Einstein's scorn of U. S. intelligence, Siegfried's despair of U. S. materialism. Just how science and the machine have affected civilization; just what the possibilities are of self-destruction, "decline," as compared with perpetuity?these are questions for a modern Aristotle with "all knowledge...