PERIODS OF UPHEAVAL ALWAYS bring their own prophets, divining doom or salvation for those around them and for the world at large. We have our fair share today, with various tellers of dire fortune warning of imminent environmental apocalypse, technological Armageddon, and the takeover of society by leftism or fascism. Particularly instructive is the German conservative historian and philosopher, Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) in whom there has been a resurgence of interest particularly in the wilds of the online right.
Spengler attempted a “predetermining” of history in his monumental The Decline of the West (1918 and 1922), the first volume of which was published in what proved to be the last months of the First World War. Trying to chart a way forward in the postwar chaos, Spengler published a more directly political work, Prussianism and Socialism (1920), advocating a particular type of authoritarian socialist politics supposedly rooted in Prussian culture. There was then a return to philosophy, and an evolution in his worldview, in his Man and Technics (1931).
Spengler’s final major work was (1934), where he predicted and advocated a German Caesar to grasp the fragmenting
