The Hour of Decision: Germany and World-Historical Evolution

By Oswald Spengler and John David Ebert

In The Hour of Decision, Oswald Spengler portrays a brutally critical image of modern Western civilization. According to Spengler, the West is destined for decay and heading towards its demise, poisoned by excessive rationalism, a lack of functioning hierarchies, and widespread alienation. Spengler's observations are rooted in Germany d

• Language: English
• Publisher: Legend Books Sp. z o.o.
• Release date: Sep 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9788367583435

Oswald Spengler

Oswald Spengler war ein deutscher Philosoph. Er war als Schriftsteller auf geschichtsphilosophischem, kulturhistorischem und kulturphilosophischem.

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Legend Books 2023

© 2023 by Legend Books Sp. z o.o. (www.legendbooks.org)

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978-83-67583-41-1(Softcover)

978-83-67583-42-8 (Hardback)

978-83-67583-43-5 (Ebook)

Edited by Constantin von Hoffmeister

Foreword

By John David Ebert

I

This is a book about form.

Indeed, the central Idea of the work is a morphological description of the dissolution of the Western state as a form. What Oswald Spengler means by the word form is that a Culture, when it is in form, functions exactly like a living organism. Think of an X-ray anatomy of an animal: it has a skeleton with nerve senses at the head end, locomotory limbs in the middle and reproductive / excretory organs at the other end. It has a digestive tract connecting one end to the other, and a circulatory system keeping it alive. That is a form. It is organized. It has a structure.

The West, too—which Spengler terms Faustian civilization—has a form (or used to have one, at least, a while back). It had the three essential estates of the nobility, the priesthood and the bourgeoisie. The rest were the formless masses. It had a hierarchy within which everybody knew their place and, moreover, everyone was proud of their place. The blacksmith took great pleasure in his art, as did the tanner and the baker. The shoemaker and the tailor produced their products by hand, lovingly, and with great pride.

When a Culture is in form, it has a living structural morphology. Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 film Barry Lyndon captures a portrait of the European world at its height in the middle of the eighteenth century, perfectly. This is the age of Frederick the Great and his Austrian nemesis, Maria Theresa. It is the age of the Seven Years’ War, which put Prussia on the map as the great German power. In this society, there is a certain way of dressing. There is a certain way of speaking. There is a certain way of placing silverware. There is even a certain way of walking at a slow, measured, dignified pace. Everything and everyone is elegant, refined and beautiful. In fact, there is beauty everywhere: beautifully landscaped gardens in the shape of mazes; beautifully designed palaces, such as Versailles or Sanssouci. Beautiful clothing. Beautiful wigs. Beautiful paintings. And the entire milieu is saturated with the most highly refined and perfected classical music ever invented. Concerts—that is to say, chamber music—are going on everywhere, all the time. Everyone plays a musical instrument of one sort or another and fills the air with vibrating tones of pure, luminous Platonic beauty.

As Spengler puts it in this book, there is also an aristocracy of dynastic succession across generations, such as the Habsburgs or the Bourbons. Property is owned by people and handed down through families as a matter of course. The family itself has a structure. Men labor at perfecting whatever craft they have found themselves called to do, while women run the entire domestic sphere, organizing the servants, preparing the meals and nurturing the children. In such a society, moreover, it is a matter of course that women produce as many children as possible, for they are essential for continuing the bloodline. There is no talk of limiting the population. Such an idea would be considered absurd. Racial suicide, as Spengler puts it.

That is a society in form. In other words, a living Culture in the grand style.

II

In The Hour of Decision, Spengler’s last book, published in August of 1933, he describes how this Western Faustian Culture is in the process of being dismantled, dissolved and pulled apart by attacks on two fronts: from within, by the rise of the Left, and from without, by non-European peoples.

Firstly, from within.

Starting with the publication in 1762 of Rousseau’s infamous political treatise, The Social Contract, down to the 1848 publication by Marx and Engels of The Communist Manifesto and then onward to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the West and its traditional values have been under assault by liberal nihilism. For Rousseau, civilization is itself a corrupting influence upon the development of that pre-Fallen Adam which he terms the noble savage. With the French Revolution of 1789, the formless urban mob pulls down the aristocracy. Their demagogues even try to get rid of the traditional Western calendar to substitute it for a purely numeric metrical system divorced from Biblical, Scandinavian or Classical iconotypes. It is all based on ressentiment, the ressentiment that Nietzsche articulates in Beyond Good and Evil. A ressentiment that is based upon slave morality, that is to say, a resentment of those who have power, of those who do things well. Master morality, on the other hand, is the morality of power, of the aristocracy, of those who have the power to avenge a wrong with an equal counterthrust. He who has no power is contemptible.

Every high Culture, at about the noon point of its development into the almightiness of Reason, produces what Nietzsche called the Socratic Man, which Spengler borrows from him to signal the first, earliest seeds of self-exterminating nihilism. In India, the Buddha was an example of the Socratic Man, using the reason of his intellect to deny everything. The existence of the atman is denied. The existence of the gods is denied. The existence of Brahman is denied. There is only "nirvana, which means to blow out." The soul is blown out like a candle flame. Thus, with early Hinayana Buddhism (though not with the later Mahayana Buddhism, which Spengler says belongs to India’s Second Religiousness), the soul of Indian Culture begins to analyze itself out of existence. In China, the Socratic man is embodied by Lao-tzu, who denies the state and civilized society with all its forms and traditions of filial piety and ancestor worship, and who goes out into the woods to revive a Neolithic farmer’s way of life. So, likewise, did Socrates represent the beginnings of a Classical self-exterminating nihilism by questioning everything, including wisdom, love, justice, etc. All are brought into question, all are under suspicion, including the existence of the soul (at least in Plato’s Apology, the first of his texts and therefore the most under the influence of Socratic rationalism). Rousseau and Voltaire, in Faustian civilization, signal the beginnings of an equivalent form of nihilism.

For Spengler, Rationalism is a product of late-stage city thinking. By this point in the life course of a Culture, the city has become all-powerful. It has divorced itself from the land and the peasant—there is no such thing as an atheist peasant—with his traditional, conservative values. Rationalism develops within the city and spreads through it like a cancer.

During the late-stage megalopolis, the population is mostly composed of uprooted country folk who have gone streaming into the cities looking for work. The cities become crowded with swarms of displaced people, who, in the case of Rome, crowd into apartment high-rises called "insulae," which frequently collapsed during earthquakes. Crassus made himself rich buying such buildings and exploiting the poor.

In the time of the Gracchi in ancient Rome, these displaced people were mostly soldiers who had returned from fighting wars for the patricians who, meanwhile, had bought their lands cheap while they were away and transformed them into huge, impersonal latifundia. Agrarian slave corporations, in other words. The displaced veterans began to clog the city of Rome, creating the danger of urban mobs and imminent violence.

Atheism, materialism and Rationalism are city-think. The enlightened man of science—a Richard Dawkins or a Stephen Hawking, let’s say—thinks that his thoughts are his own. They are not. The uprooted megalopolis is thinking through him and by means of his brain. He just doesn’t know it. He is a victim of his time and place.

For Spengler, this Rationalism produces all sorts of bad ideas about changing the world around to suit some fantasyland scheme in which everyone is equal to everyone. The Romantic myth of the worker comes into being in order to level all the proud craftsmen down. They must unionize. They must strike. The work day must be shortened from twelve hours to ten hours and then, ultimately, after the First World War, and under the influence of the British Labour Party, to eight hours. More and more schemes are invented for making money without work. The state is obliged to support everyone. The possession of private property is deemed a sin. All social hierarchy is dismantled and leveled down to the status of the talentless, resentful, idiotic mob.

This is what Spengler calls the White World-Revolution, which is to say, the extinction of the Western social morphology into a formless, shapeless, anarchic, disordered mass.

A dead thing, in other words.  

III

Now, the other threat to the West is the threat from without, what Spengler calls the Colored World-Revolution. He does not use the word color in a racist sense, but as a designation of non-white, non-Euro-American peoples. The Red Russians fall into this category. As well as the Yellow Japanese, the brown Arabians, the brown Hindus, the Chinese, the Indonesians, the Somalis, the Turks, etc. etc.

The great British philosopher of history, Arnold Toynbee, termed this the external proletariat of a society, by which he meant for instance the German barbarians against the Romans, or the Xiongnu barbarians against the Chinese, or the Gutian barbarians against the Akkadians. And so forth. They are always the people beyond the pale, who are at a less developed state of social formation than the highly evolved, advanced civilizations that adorn the horizon with glittering amazements: ziggurats lining the dusty pale blue-brown horizon; Chinese temples stacked tier upon tier against the turquoise sky; Gothic cathedrals with flying buttresses piercing the dome of the world ceiling; and skyscrapers, impossibly high, scaling an assault upon the heavens like the Tower of Babel.

Spengler’s internal threat from the Socratic men, on the other hand, would correspond to Toynbee’s internal proletariat, which is a group of people who are within a society but are no longer of it, as they have seceded from the body social out of disgust with the leadership of the creative minority who have degenerated into a dominant minority. The Spartacus slave revolts are an example of this phenomenon, as are the revolts of the Egyptian fellaheen against their Greek Ptolemaic overlords, who are constantly conscripting them into their wars against the Seleucids. The Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 are a contemporary example of this. The Left, generally speaking, with its exterminating nihilism and especially with today’s woke left cancel culture, is another example of Toynbee’s internal proletariat.

In the time of the dying Roman Republic, around the year 100 BC, the threats from external proletariats to its crippled, dying society came in the form of figures like the North African king Jugurtha or the invasions from the East of Mithridates. Or the Celts and the Germans from the north and the west. Rome was at the time in the process of disintegrating into the civil war between Marius and Sulla, the latter of whom was barely able to appease the non-Roman states demanding full citizenship during the Social War of about 80 BC. Rome was, indeed, in trouble. It was surrounded with assaults on all fronts, both from within and from without.

The response, of course, was the disintegration of the party politics of the optimates and the populares into Caesarism. With Julius Caesar, party politics no longer mattered. It was only his private army that mattered and it was they, not the senate, who decided all outcomes. That is the final end, or telos, of the life course of any of the nine great Cultures. (Spengler, in The Decline of the West, enumerates them as the Babylonian, the Egyptian, the Indian, the Chinese, the Mesoamerican, the Magian [i.e. Persian, Judeo-Christian-Islamic and Byzantine], the Apollonian, the Faustian and the Russian). They all end with the rigor mortis of the Caesars.

In China, the Caesar appears as the first great emperor Tsin shi haung di of about 220 BC, who ends the world war period of the contending states by conquering all of China. In India, this takes place at about the same time with Ashoka and the creation of the Mauryan Empire. In Egypt, with Thutmosis III, who—just like Caesar conquering Gaul—conquered and annexed all of Palestine into the imperial New Kingdom. The Seljuk Turks, originally barbarians of the Magian Culture, perform the same task for that society. For the Mesopotamian Culture, the corresponding figure was Hammurabi of Babylon, who, in about 1790 BC, conquered all of Mesopotamia and formed it into what Toynbee calls a universal state.

Should the ultimate fate of the West be any different? Why would it be if it has hitherto followed exactly the same morphological stages of the life cycles of the previous Cultures?

For the first time in his oeuvre, however, Spengler in The Hour of Decision seems not so certain. Because for the first time in history, the setting of the stage in which these historical processes unfold is one degree more complicated than it has ever been.

And the reason for that, of course, is globalization. Because of the rise and exportation through its various colonies around the world, the West has given to the non-whites the power of its own industrial technology, which these people have mastered with great efficiency. Spengler holds up the Japanese as a paradigm case of the mastery of industrial military power, with both air and naval power in supreme control of the Pacific. Indeed, in this book, he doubts that the United States could win a war against them and in this respect, of course, he was wrong. But the point about the globalization of industrial society stands.

As he says, for the first time ever, the external proletariat is now on the inside of the mother body of the dying civilization, since that society has encompassed and united the entire planet, at least on the technological plane, though certainly not on the political or cultural planes. There is no single Great Wall or Roman limes to keep them out. They are already on the inside.

The non-whites are (as of his writing in 1933) beating the whites at their own game. They are willing to work in factories for longer hours with lesser pay (and this remains true to this day in places like the sweatshops of China and Mexico). The Liberal whites, meanwhile, want fewer hours with higher wages and more leisure time in which to do nothing but indulge themselves in panem et circenses.

Spengler knew the Second World War was imminent. We stand, he says in The Hour of Decision, it may be, close before a second world war. And in such a war, he was no longer too certain that Germany would win, since he regarded Hitler as an idiot. In a ninety-minute interview with Hitler on July 25, 1933 at his quarters in Bayreuth, they discussed such issues as Spengler’s conservatism and the importance of the racial question, to which Spengler adamantly objected. ‘‘When one would rather destroy business and scholarship than see Jews in them, one is an ideologue, i.e. a danger for the nation. Idiotic. And he was completely unimpressed with Hitler, as he says, ‘When one sits across from him, one does not have even one single time the feeling that he is significant."’ (John Farrenkopf, The Prophet of Decline, Louisiana State University Press, 2001, p. 237)

Thus, Spengler was no longer certain that Germany would produce the inevitable Faustian Caesarism. Though he thought, correctly, that the British Empire was rotten and would not survive the war, he no longer had the same confidence in Germany’s future that he had had when writing volume 1 of The Decline of the West in 1918.

But he most certainly did not think the imperium would come from the United States, either, which he saw as a corrupt and degenerate nation of dollar trappers with no past and no future. He didn’t even think the United States would survive a war against Japan. He portrays the U.S. as soulless and inorganic. But then, so were the Romans. So were the Ottoman Turks. So were the Aztecs.  

The American imperium, however, has arrived. It has found itself in exactly the same position which Rome was in after the Carthaginian Wars, when from that point on, Rome was in everybody’s business throughout the Mediterranean ecumene. America after the World Wars is in a directly homologous situation vis-à-vis the entire globe. The Caesars have not yet arrived, but America is in everybody’s business. It is, however, just like Rome in the time of the late Republic, rotten from social and civil strife. There are many doubts about whether it could withstand a war against the Russians or the Chinese, who are thoroughly militarily prepared and armed with powerful industrial bases, whereas the United States, during NAFTA, exported its entire industrial manufacturing base to China and Mexico. It has, at this point, no capacity to produce anything in the way of war materiel.

Europe is in no shape to produce the Caesars, either. It is in a state of thermodynamic equilibrium, as the Second World War completely exhausted it. Europe has been occupied by the United States just as Greece was occupied by the Romans after the Punic Wars. As of this writing in 2023, the German economy is crashing and France is burning with racial antagonism against North African migrants that its cultural immune system completely rejects. Germany has been swamped with Syrian refugees. These are the equivalent of a neo Sea Peoples invasion. The waves of refugees that keep flooding into Europe from Syria, North Africa and Ukraine are forcing Europe into a state of emergency regarding its identity, which it does not wish to have eroded. The European cultural immune system has been badly compromised.  

The Hour of Decision for Euro-American civilization is, indeed, at hand and Oswald Spengler was the prophet who saw it coming.

Editor’s Preface by Constantin von Hoffmeister

Revolution and Domination

In the boundless theater of history, a stage where epochs unravel like vast tapestries and empires rise and fall in harmonious accord with the cadence of a tragic symphony, only a few chronicles emerge that blaze with an undying luminescence. Standing tall among these illuminating tales is Oswald Spengler’s prophetic opus The Hour of Decision. With the passion of a phoenix reborn from its ashes, it casts a radiant glow, revealing the labyrinthine corridors of civilization’s many triumphs and sorrows.

Commencing this odyssey that Spengler has masterfully charted requires one to grapple first with the cryptic veil of its title. The original German, Jahre der Entscheidung (Years of Decision), implies a vast tableau of shifting eras — civilizations in their infancy, reaching their zenith, and ultimately fading, surrendering to the inexorable march of time. The English rendition, The Hour of Decision, however, condenses this panorama, narrowing our focus to a defining moment, reminiscent of the charged stillness that permeates the air just before the cataclysmic clash of Cimmerian steel.

Wading through the intricacies of Spengler’s prose is akin to navigating the waters of the Rhine, feeling its powerful currents and undertows that have shaped and reshaped the terrain of German history. Spengler’s writing style is meticulous, detailed, yet sweeping in its scope. He employs metaphors and allegories with the deftness of a seasoned bard, making ancient tales come alive, pulsating with relevance for contemporary times. The German soul, with its vibrant fabric of ancient tribes, stories of unparalleled valor against the might of Roman legions, its decisive orchestration in the Holy Roman Empire, and its ascendancy as a beacon of intellectual and industrial prowess, is delineated with a craftsman’s precision on these pages. Spengler’s unique fusion of poetic lyricism and incisive analysis allows us to witness Germany’s graceful melodies and its dissonant notes, its towering cultural achievements, and the creeping specters of materialism and existential doubt that cast shadows on its glorious legacy.

This tome, however, is not a mere eulogy or a lament sung against the backdrop of a setting sun. It stands as a clarion call, a trumpet blaring a resounding counsel, imploring the Western world, and especially the Germanic heartland, to rise from its introspective lethargy. Spengler’s fervent prose, rich with imagery and wrought with emotion, paints a vivid landscape of the perils of languid acceptance. He ardently beckons Germany to rekindle the flames of its illustrious past, to fend off the chilling embrace of an impersonal technocratic age, and to resolutely uphold the profound ideals and the hardened spirit