The Decline of the Western World. Essays on the Morphology of World History

The figure of Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) stands out in the history of German and world thought. Spengler attempted to rethink the commonly accepted views on the evolutionary development of humanity on his own: he opposed the linear description of history as an endless and unstoppable progress. Instead, he proposed the concept of cyclical development, according to which new cultures emerge, go through a period of flourishing, and then pass through stages of decline and demise. Each such cycle lasts about a thousand years, each culture has distinctive features that determine the thinking and actions of people. The very title of the work contains a thesis that was substantiated in the book - at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, according to Spengler, Western culture entered a period of decline. The first volume of the book was published in 1918, bringing the author great fame and sparking heated discussions. This work had a significant influence on sociologists Arnold Joseph Toynbee, Pitirim Sorokin, and José Ortega y Gasset.